Orchestra London has a special concert this Saturday to introduce its new music director – Alain Trudel.  Alain’s appointment is an exciting development for the Orchestra.  Alain brings charisma and leadership and a vision of the Orchestra as a citizen in the community - and his award-winning trombone – to this key role.

This concert features a sampling of the diverse material played by the Orchestra.  If you have not heard the Orchestra recently, its a good opportunity to discover what future concerts you might like to attend.

A concert introducing Orchestra London’s new Music Director, Alain Trudel, and featuring a sampling of the various musical styles Orchestra London performs.

Selections include:  Rossini’s The Barber of Seville Overture, and “Cruda Sorte” from L’italiana in Algeri (Sophie Louise Roland, mezzo-soprano); Haydn’s Symphony No.7; Pryor’s “Thoughts of Love” (Alain Trudel, trombone); Duke Ellington’s Echoes of Harlem; Paul Frehner’s Sarantine Polyphony; The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” (Alain Trudel, trombone); The Rolling Stones “Painted Black” and much more.

Who:  Orchestra London, conductor/trombonist Alain Trudel, mezzo-soprano Sophie Louise Roland, trumpeter Paul Stevenson

(disclosure: I’m on the Orchestra London board)

For the London Free Press – May 30, 2011 - Read this on Canoe

The recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision in R v. Cole establishes that employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the personal use and contents of their work-provided laptop computers.

The case involved a Sudbury high school teacher whose work-provided laptop was investigated by a school board computer technician after a higher than normal amount of network use was noticed. The technician accessed the content on the teacher’s laptop through the school server and found sexually explicit images of a student on the hard drive. The school obtained the laptop and turned it and two discs over to the police who searched both without a warrant and charged the teacher with possession of child pornography and unauthorized use of a computer.

The Court of Appeal ruled that the teacher had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the personal use of his work laptop and in the contents of his personal files on the hard drive. Even though the laptop was owned by the school board and issued for work purposes, the court found that a reasonable expectation of privacy existed.

The Court of Appeal ordered a new trial and that certain of the evidence obtained without a warrant could not be used.

While this decision is regarded by some as a game changer for employee privacy rights, its real impact may be limited by two significant factors. First, the court’s finding of a reasonable expectation of privacy was based on specific facts which may not be typical of all workplace situations. In Cole, the teachers were provided with laptops for use in teaching but they were also explicitly allowed to use the laptops for personal use.

Second, the impact of the decision is tempered by a finding that the teacher did not have an expectation of privacy with respect to access to his hard drive by the school board’s computer technician for the limited purposes of maintaining the technical integrity of the school’s information network and the laptop.

While some commentators are heralding this decision as a significant change in the law, it really doesn’t stray far from conventional wisdom. It may, however, make employers more cautious in how they treat their employees’ personal use of work technology. For those employers who have not implemented a comprehensive technology use policy, this decision should be the impetus for them to do so.

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows:

So after talking about how tablets are a game changing technology, I finally made the plunge. It was a toss up between an Android tablet like the upcoming Samsung models, and an iPad2. There are pros and cons to each – but in the end either would be a good choice.

I’ve had the ipad2 for about a week now, and in many ways it truly is magical. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its frustrations – the biggest of which is how Apple designs it to depend on iTunes to share content. I’m not the only one to dislike iTunes – a lot of time and effort is put into creating apps that avoid its use.

I started off with the easy stuff. Reading newspapers for example on the pressreader app. I have actually cancelled my home delivery of the dead-tree version. Wired magazine has just announced that one can get its ipad version for free if you already have a traditional subscription. Reading those on the ipad is a superior experience to paper.

Flipboard is an excellent way to view things like twitter feeds and Google reader feeds.

But I didn’t get it just for that. My plan is to use it like a laptop outside of my office, taking it to meetings, and using it for note taking.

Dragon dictate works amazingly well, and you can simply email the result to yourself.

I have the wifi only version, with a plan to tether it to an Android phone once I get far enough into my current cell plan later this summer that I can replace my phone. (Unless Rogers is reading this and offers to let me upgrade early at a reasonable price.)

Since we are a Microsoft shop, like most law firms, one needs apps that can deal with Office documents, and handle file movement to and from the desktop so they can be dealt with within typical document management procedures. Dropbox is the tool that most use to synch files, but I’d like to try Microsoft Skydrive instead. That’s in part because of the recent issues with Dropbox about their ability to decrypt, and the challenges of using ones’ own encryption in an iPad/Dropbox/PC environment.

For privacy and confidentiality reasons, I don’t think its wise to keep a lot of sensitive information on a portable device, so the easy ability to move documents in and out is important.

In a future post I’ll comment on my eventual solution.

And for those wondering, yes, I did download Angry Birds, and it is addictive.

Michael Geist has written a good article in the Ottawa Citizen disucssing why the proposed “lawful access” internet surveillance law should not be passed.

From teh article:

Lawful access raises genuine privacy and free speech concerns, particularly given the fact the government has never provided adequate evidence on the need for it, it has never been subject to committee review, and it would cost millions to implement yet there has been no disclosure on who would actually pay for it. Given this, it is not surprising that every privacy commissioner in Canada has signed a joint letter expressing their concerns.

Like David Fraser and Michael, I have ranted on this before.   I have a real problem with legislation that erodes privacy and requires ISP’s or others to retain information for the sole purpose of government access to it. And when that access is not tempered by the need for a warrant.

Issues include erosion of privacy, the potential for misuse of the information (intentionally, accidentally, or creeping uses) the costs of ISP’s to comply, and whether the measures will actually have any meaningful impact on crime.

The X-Prize Foundation has announced their latest competition to be launched in 2012.   The competion is essentially to create a Star-trek like medical tricorder.   From the press release:

The X PRIZE Foundation, the leading nonprofit organization solving the world’s Grand Challenges of our time by creating and managing large-scale, global incentivized competitions, today announced a collaboration with Qualcomm Incorporated to design the Tricorder X PRIZE, a $10 million prize to develop a mobile solution that can diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians. The X PRIZE Foundation and Qualcomm seeks to achieve this by combining advancements in expert systems and medical point of care data such as wireless sensors, advancements in medical imaging and microfluidics.

The Tricorder X PRIZE aims to incentivize consumer empowerment in healthcare by extending the reach of health information and services to more people. This prize will bring understandable, easily accessible health information and metrics to consumers on their mobile devices, pointing them to earlier actions for care.

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today. It reads as follows.

PBS has a new 13 minute video called High Fiber that looks at broadband in the Netherlands and Britain, and compares it to the US. The differences are striking.

In Canada, we have controversies over usage based billing, and the costs of both basic internet services and fees for going over the monthly limit. And various surveys put us on a downward path in international rankings for various broadband metrics. This recent OECD survey, for example.

The video shows that in the Netherlands and Britain more fiber is being installed (including to the home), competition is increasing, speeds are increasing, and costs are decreasing.

Affordable high speed internet access is crucial to our future economy. We somehow need to reverse the downward trend.

Mitch Joel has a post entitled The Other Side of Privacy that is worth a read as he has a practical and sobering approach to online privacy. 

He starts off by saying:

You can’t throw a rock and not hit a concern about privacy and the use of our data online.

This is a huge concern because us Marketers have screwed it up so royally over the years. From a lack of permission and abuse to security breaches and scams. It’s so bad that government plays an active role in deciding what can and can’t be done (yes, lawmakers). Still, we keep botching it. From newer media initiatives (think Facebook Beacon) to cyber-attacks (see what Sony has been dealing with), not a week goes by that some sort of privacy breach or plans for a corporation to do something funky with consumer’s data isn’t in the news.

Mitch basically says that it is up to users to read and understand the terms of service of online sites – and if you don’t understand it, or its not to your liking, don’t use the service.  And that we should just assume at the outset that nothing we do online is private or the data won’t be used in some way.

A newsletter from CIPO (Canadian Intellectual Property Office) says that industrial design applications are increasing.  Registered industrial designs are not as well known as trade-marks, copyrights, or patents, but can give valuable protection to product designs in the right circumstances. 

A registered industrial design protects unique features of shape, configuration, pattern or ornament applied to an article. For example, automakers often obtain industrial design registrations for things like the shape of a grille or taillight. A furniture maker might apply for the design of a chair. 

More detail is in this article I wrote a while back.

CIPO’s newsletter states:

“… in fiscal year 2010-2011 the Industrial Design Office has had its second best year in history in terms of growth. Highlights of the year included 5 138 new applications received and conformed – only 36 applications short of our record year in 2007 and approximately 5% more than 2009′s results.

Internationally, industrial designs are on an upswing, increasingly being recognized as an accessible form of IP protection and as an integral part of an IP strategy.” 

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows.

We use a lot of technology today that is – to borrow a term from Steve Jobs – magical. Consider tablet computing, cars that respond to voice commands or even drive themselves. Calling an ipad2 or an Android Tablet or a Playbook magic is not a huge exaggeration in historical terms. An iPad2 would have been on a list of supercomputers rivalling a Cray as recent as 1996.

But we don’t get to this level of technology without experimentation and failures along the way. The important thing is to use those failures to lead to new insight and better products. Failure may be a result of many factors, including: flawed design, being ahead of its time, our tendency to stick to “good enough” solutions we are comfortable with rather than the possibility of something better, solutions in search of a problem, being too expensive, poor execution of a good idea, poor marketing, being user unfriendly, and simply not as good as other solutions to name a few.

Slashdot points to a vintage gadget collection just published by a Microsoft researcher. From the site:

Over the past 30 years, designer, writer, and researcher Bill Buxton has been collecting input and interactive devices whose design struck him as interesting, useful, or important. In the process, he has assembled a good collection of the history of pen computing, pointing devices, touch technologies, as well as an illustration of the nature of how new technologies emerge.

Part of the collection was first shown publicly at the Vancouver Art Gallery as part of the Massive Change Exhibition, curated by Bruce Mau, in 2004. Since then the collection has grown significantly, largely through the generous support of Microsoft Research.

The point of the site is not to focus on failures – it includes many successful products – but the history is interesting. Try the PivotViewer version – its a great way to navigate through the images.

For the London Free Press – May 9, 2011

Read this on Canoe

Recent outages at Amazon and Sony’s PlayStation Network have left businesses and consumers without service for lengthy periods of time.

The tech press is full of articles suggesting the bloom is off the rose for cloud services and cloud providers are in denial about risks. These articles call on online providers to take financial responsibility and offer more than token services credits.

These outages have done more than just prevented gamers from playing. Services provided by Foursquare, Hootsuite, Discovr, the New York Times and others were affected by the “Amazonpocalypse”. Other businesses using Amazon were barely affected, as they designed their use with disaster prevention in mind.

One reason cloud services are inexpensive is that they come with no guarantees, and no liability on the part of the provider. That’s not meant to suggest online providers aren’t motivated to keep their services running. It’s bad for business if they don’t. But some are better than others, and problems can occur despite provider efforts.

If users expect financial responsibility and compensation for their losses in a failure, they can expect to pay more.

Online service provider user agreements contain limitation clauses that deny liability if the services don’t work. At most, there might be a refund for the cost of their services proportionate to the amount of downtime. If users want more, they can expect to pay for the provider’s insurance to back up the liability. And in practice. most users opt not to pay more for liability protection.

Anyone using online or cloud services needs to first consider how crucial the services are to them. What will the effect be if the service is disrupted for a short or long period of time, or if their online data is lost?

If such disruptions would have serious effects, then the user must take steps to control those risks.

For the risk of losing data, it might be as simple as keeping local backups, or keeping a mirrored copy at a different service provider at a different location.

To keep the service operating continuously, users should take a close look at how the service is provided, and plan their use in a way designed to survive failure.

In other words, assume things will fail, plan around that, and test to ensure the plan works.

Amazon, for example, has several “availability zones”. Amazon customers who were able to switch between them suffered only minor issues.

Another approach is to use multiple service providers based in different locations.