#cdnpoli

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Toronto city councillors must speak directly with unhoused people before making policy decisions on homelessness, advocates at Toronto city hall said Thursday.

That demand was one of many made by advocates at city hall.

Al, an unhoused person who only gave their first name, said a new group formed in the past year to give unhoused people a voice. That group, the Toronto Underhoused and Homeless Union, represents people who either live outside now or have been homeless before. Al is an executive board member of the group and lived in Allan Gardens in a tent.

"We need councillors to talk to the people who are actually affected by these decisions," Al said.

"We are the people for whom these decisions are life and death. Whatever happens in council, every council member and the mayor goes home to a soft bed and a roof over their heads and gets to sleep soundly. And we do not. We get killed or brutalized or spat on or some horrendous act of violence. And even if it doesn't happen, we're kept awake because we're scared," Al added. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[quasi-normalcy]

If you're considering going to York University in Toronto for your education, go somewhere else. Seriously.

[megafreeman]

Hey so Canada is apparently erasing "Palestine" from people's documents. If you apply for a new document to be issued, you have to say you have no place of birth, with Palestine not being an actual option you can use

[nuclearlemons]

New design because my home province of New Brunswick won't stop trying to incite a trans panic in schools

(free for non-commercial, nonprofit use)

[farcillesbian]

there is a nationwide (Canada fyi) anti "trans ideology" protest being organized on Wednesday Sept 20 at every parliamentary (federal) and legislative (provincial) building in the country and they are also calling for local organizing too so even in non-capital cities and towns you may run into these protests.

please keep yourselves safe on this day and be aware of this. and if you have the means and can do so without putting yourself at risk (or feel comfortable taking such a risk, especially if you're an ally to the community) consider organizing or participating in counter protests. stay safe out there

they're calling it the 1 Million March For Children I believe so keep an eye out for that kind of signage

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Company that makes millions spying on students will get to sue a whistleblower

Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter

It’s been a minute since Linkletter’s case arose, so I’ll give you a little recap here. Proctorio is a massive, wildly profitable ed-tech company that sells a surveillance tool to monitor students while they take high-stakes tests from home. The tool monitors the student’s computer and the student’s face, especially their eye-movements. It also allows instructors and other personnel to watch the students and even take control of their computer. This is called “remote invigilation.”

This is ghastly in just about every way. For starters, Proctorio’s facial monitoring software embeds the usual racist problems with machine-learning stuff, and struggles to recognize Black and brown faces. Black children sitting exams under Proctorio’s gimlet eye have reported that the only way to satisfy Proctorio’s digital phrenology system is to work with multiple high-powered lights shining directly in their faces.

A Proctorio session typically begins with a student being forced to pan a webcam around their test-taking room. During lockdown, this meant that students who shared a room — for example, with a parent who worked night-shifts — would have to invade their family’s privacy, and might be disqualified because they couldn’t afford a place large enough to have private room in which to take their tests.

Proctorio’s tools also punish students for engaging in normal test-taking activity. Do you stare off into space when you’re trying through a problem? Bzzzt. Do you read questions aloud to yourself under your breath when you’re trying to understand their meanings? Bzzzt. Do you have IBS and need to go to the toilet? Bzzzt. The canon of remote invigilation horror stories is filled with accounts of students being forced to defecate themselves, or vomit down their shirts without turning their heads (because looking away is an automatically flagged offense).

The tragedy is that all of this is in service to the pedagogically bankrupt practice of high-stakes testing. Few pedagogists believe that the kind of exam that Proctorio seeks to recreate in students’ homes has real assessment merit. As the old saying goes, “Tests measure your ability to take tests.” But Proctorio doesn’t even measure your ability to take a test — it measures your ability to take a test with three bright lights shining directly on your face. Or while you are covered in your own feces and vomit. While you stare rigidly at a screen. While your tired mother who just worked 16 hours in a covid ward stands outside the door to your apartment.

The lockdown could have been an opportunity to improve educational assessment. There is a rich panoply of techniques that educators can adopt that deliver a far better picture of students’ learning, and work well for remote as well as in-person education. Instead, companies like Proctorio made vast fortunes, most of it from publicly funded institutions, by encouraging a worse-than-useless, discriminatory practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/24/proctor-ology/#miseducation

Proctorio clearly knows that its racket is brittle. Like any disaster profiteer, Proctorio will struggle to survive after the crisis passes and we awaken from our collective nightmare and ask ourselves why we were stampeded into using its terrible products. The company went to war against its critics.

In 2020, Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen doxed a child who complained about his company’s software in a Reddit forum:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar

In 2021, the reviews for Proctorio’s Chrome plugin all mysteriously vanished. Needless to say, these reviews — from students forced to use Proctorio’s spyware — were brutal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

Proctorio claims that it protects “educational integrity,” but its actions suggest a company far more concerned about the integrity of its own profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

One of the critics that Proctorio attacked is Ian Linkletter. In 2020, Linkletter was a Learning Technology Specialist at UBC’s Faculty of Education. His job was to assess and support ed-tech tools, including Proctorio. In the course of that work, Linkletter reviewed Proctorio’s training material for educators, which are a bonanza of mask-off materials that are palpably contemptuous of students, who are presumed to be cheaters.

At the time, a debate over remote invigilation tools was raging through Canadian education circles, with students, teachers and parents fiercely arguing the merits and downsides of making surveillance the linchpin of assessment. Linkletter waded into this debate, tweeting a series of sharp criticisms of Proctorio. In these tweets, Linkletter linked to Proctorio’s unlisted, but publicly available, Youtube videos.

A note of explanation: Youtube videos can be flagged as “unlisted,” which means they don’t show up in searches. They can also be flagged as “private,” which means you have to be on a list of authorized users to see them. Proctorio made its training videos unlisted, but they weren’t private — they were visible to anyone who had a link to them.

Proctorio sued Linkletter for this. They argued that he had breached a duty of confidentiality, and that linking to these videos was a copyright violation:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

This is a classic SLAPP — a “strategic litigation against public participation.” That’s when a deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bully, like Proctorio, uses the threat of a long court battle to force their critics into silence. They know they can’t win their case, but that’s not the victory they’re seeking. They don’t want to win the case, they want to win the argument, by silencing a critic who would otherwise be bankrupted by legal fees.

Getting SLAPPed is no fun. I’ve been there. Just this year, a billionaire financier tried to force me into silence by threatening me with a lawsuit. Thankfully, Ken “Popehat” White was on the case, and he reminded this billionaire’s counsel that California has a strong anti-SLAPP law, and if Ken had to defend me in court, he could get a fortune in fees from the bully after he prevailed:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1531684572479377409

British Columbia also has an anti-SLAPP law, but unlike California’s anti-SLAPP, the law is relatively new and untested. Still, Proctorio’s suit against Linkletter was such an obvious SLAPP that for many of us, it seemed likely that Linkletter would be able to defend himself from this American bully and its attempt to use Canada’s courts to silence a Canadian educator.

For Linkletter to use BC’s anti-SLAPP law, he would have to prove that he was weighing in on a matter of public interest, and that Proctorio’s copyright and confidentiality claims were nonsense, unlikely to prevail on their merits. If he could do that, he’d be able to get the case thrown out, without having to go through a lengthy, brutally expensive trial.

Incredibly, though, the lower court found against Linkletter. Naturally, Linkletter appealed. His “factotum” is a crystal clear document that sets out the serious errors of law and fact the lower court made:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aB1ztWDFr3MU6BsAMt6rWXOiXJ8sT3MY/view

But yesterday, the Court of Appeal upheld the lower court, repeating all of these gross errors and finding for Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

This judgment is grotesque. It makes a mockery of BC’s anti-SLAPP statute, to say nothing of Canadian copyright and confidentiality law. For starters, it finds that publishing a link can be a “performance” of a copyrighted work, which meant that when Linkletter linked to the world-viewable Youtube files that Proctorio had posted, he infringed on copyright.

This is a perverse, even surreal take on copyright. The court rejects Linkletter’s argument that even Youtube’s terms of service warned Proctorio that publishing world-viewable material on its site constituted permission for people to link to and watch that material.

But what about “fair dealing” (similar to fair use)? Linkletter argued that linking to a video that shows that Proctorio’s assurances to parents and students about its products’ benign nature were contradicted by the way it talked to educators was fair dealing. Fair dealing is a broad suite of limitations and exceptions to copyright for the purposes of commentary, criticism, study, satire, etc.

So even if linking is a copyright infringement (ugh, seriously?!), surely it’s fair dealing in this case. Proctorio was selling millions of dollars in software to public institutions, inflicting it on kids whose parents weren’t getting the whole story. Linkletter used Proctorio’s own words to rebut its assurances. What could be more fair dealing than that?

Not so fast, the appeals panel says: they say that Linkletter could have made his case just as well without linking to Proctorio’s materials. This is…bad. I mean, it’s also wrong, but it’s very bad, too. It’s wrong because an argument about what a company intends necessarily has to draw upon the company’s own statements. It’s absurd to say that Linkletter’s point would have been made equally well if he said “I disbelieve Proctorio’s public assurances because I’ve seen seekrit documents” as it was when he was able to link to those documents so that people could see them for themselves.

But it’s bad because it rips the heart out of the fair dealing exception for criticism. Publishing a link to a copyrighted work is the most minimal way to quote from it in a debate — Linkletter literally didn’t reproduce a single word, not a single letter, from Proctorio’s copyrighted works. If the court says, “Sure, you can quote from a work to criticize it, but only so much as you need to make your argument,” and then says, “But also, simply referencing a work without quoting it at all is taking too much,” then what reasonable person would ever try to rely on a fair dealing exemption for criticism?

Then there’s the confidentiality claim: in his submissions to the lower court and the appeals court, Linkletter pointed out that the “confidential” materials he’d linked to were available in many places online, and could be easily located with a Google search. Proctorio had uploaded these “confidential” materials to many sites — without flagging them as “unlisted” or “private.”

What’s more, the videos that Linkletter linked to were in found a “Help Center” that didn’t even have a terms-of-service condition that required confidentiality. How on Earth can materials that are publicly available all over the web be “confidential?”

Here, the court takes yet another bizarre turn in logic. They find that because a member of the public would have to “gather” the videos from “many sources,” that the collection of links was confidential, even if none of the links in the collection were confidential. Again, this is both wrong and bad.

Every investigator, every journalist, every critic, starts by looking in different places for information that can be combined to paint a coherent picture of what’s going on. This is the heart of “open source intelligence,” combing different sources for data points that shed light on one another.

The idea that “gathering” public information can breach confidentiality strikes directly at all investigative activity. Every day, every newspaper and news broadcast in Canada engages in this conduct. The appeals court has put them all in jeopardy with this terrible finding.

Finally, there’s the question of Proctorio’s security. Proctorio argued that by publishing links to its educator materials, Linkletter weakened the security of its products. That is, they claim that if students know how the invigilation tool works, it stops working. This is the very definition of “security through obscurity,” and it’s a practice that every serious infosec professional rejects. If Proctorio is telling the truth when it says that describing how its products work makes them stop working, then they make bad products that no one should pay money for.

The court absolutely flubs this one, too, accepting the claim of security through obscurity at face value. That’s a finding that flies in the face of all security research.

So what happens now? Well, Linkletter has lost his SLAPP claim, so nominally the case can proceed. Linkletter could appeal his case to Canada’s Supreme Court (about 7% of Supreme Court appeals of BC appeals court judgments get heard). Or Proctorio could drop the case. Or it could go to a full trial, where these outlandish ideas about copyright, confidentiality and information security would get a thorough — and blisteringly expensive — examination.

In Linkletter’s statement, he remains defiant and unwilling to give in to bullying, but says he’ll have to “carefully consider” his next step. That’s fair enough: there’s a lot on the line here:

https://linkletter.opened.ca/stand-against-proctorios-slapp-update-30/

Linkletter answers his supporters’ questions about how they can help with some excellent advice: “What I ask is for you to do what you can to protect students. Academic surveillance technology companies would like nothing more but for us all to shut up. Don’t let them silence you. Don’t let anyone or anything take away your human right to freedom of expression.”

Today (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: A girl working on a laptop. Her mouth has been taped shut. Glaring out of the laptop screen is the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Behind them is a tattered, filthy, burned Canadian flag.]

Image: Ingo Bernhardt https://www.flickr.com/photos/spree2010/4930763550/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Eleanor Vladinsky (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canadian_flag_against_grey_sky.jpg

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[beyond-a-name]

I think the greatest political victory of anti-maskers here in Canada was shifting the focus of covid precautions from public responsibility to personal risk.

It's no longer about "My mask protects you; your mask protects me," or about keeping your neighbours or loved ones safe. Now it's only about "I'll wear it if it's crowded, otherwise I'm not that worried," and how much of a risk it is *to you*.

You see a lot of people who previously called anti-maskers idiots and would heap blame upon them, but now those same people all stopped wearing masks or taking precautions because "Vaccines are so effective now!" or "There's hardly any [reported] cases!" or "I'm tired of being scared," or "Well it's not going anywhere, and I'm tired of putting my life on pause." And it just becomes very clear that it wasn't ever actually about protecting those around you, (or if it was that it isn't now), but instead it was that everyone was just waiting until they could "start living again" or get back to "normal", and those people were angry because they thought someone was preventing them from living.

I thini that's the real root of it, is simply that most people never knew how to be alive in times of stress, that no matter how shit things get, you're alive and your life is right here and now.

But it's really hard to not read it as betrayal, as a childish selfishness, when someone doesn't wear a mask or do the bare minimum; because well, it's just very clear that it's not about the other people they're hurting, or pushing to the side, they can go back to stores and dance class and bars!!! There's even less people in wheelchairs clogging up the halls, or less people to serve their drinks or staff their business. It's all back to *normal!*

I've been in an abusive or tumultuous home basically all my life. If I decided that my life "started" when I wasn't stressed, I would discount my entire existence, it all just would have been "on pause". I still wear a mask. Everyone else is "back to normal".

It's just very clear that their idea of "normal" doesn't include you, or the people we lost, or the people now being pushed aside.

"Those at-risk will protect themselves," because the disabled and the old and children historically never need help, right? Get a grip. But don't worry, I know you don't feel too afraid to wear that mask that protects me and them, so I'm sure it's fine.

[osmanthusoolong]

“A right to information response received by a University of New Brunswick professor shows that from 2020 to May 25, 2023, the Department of Education received no written complaints from parents alleging the school was keeping them in the dark about their children's preferred pronouns.

Education Minister Bill Hogan cited "hundreds" of complaints when he announced in May that he was reviewing an education policy designed to ensure the safety of LGBTQ students.

But when education professor and former teacher Melissa Dockrill Garrett sought details through a right to information request, she was told the Education Department had no records of any complaints.”

Unsurprisingly, it was an entirely manufactured controversy from the beginning, as evidenced by nobody whatsoever caring until he started with this lie.

@allthecanadianpolitics

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Canada's failure to provide First Nations with clean drinking water constitutes a flagrant human rights violation, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to water and sanitation says. 

The official, following a whirlwind formal Canadian tour, expressed a litany of concerns in a preliminary report delivered verbally on Friday in Ottawa. 

"I finish this almost two-week visit with mixed feelings: admiration but also frustration and even indignation," Pedro Arrojo-Agudo told reporters at the Lord Elgin hotel.

"I have witnessed the marginalization of First Nations on reserves, where in many cases the human rights to drinking water and sanitation are not respected."

Arrojo-Agudo's brisk tour of Canada included stops in Ontario, Nunavut, British Columbia and Alberta. He met with government officials, civil society groups, Indigenous people and others in Ottawa, Iqaluit, Toronto, Fort McMurray, Alta., Vancouver and Smithers, B.C.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @vague-humanoid, @newsfromstolenland, @palipunk

[quasi-normalcy]

Being on Tumblr really does make you forget how much of an extremist you are vis a vis the rest of the population. Case in point, yesterday someone I was having dinner with told me that they liked to read the National Post *AND* the Globe and Mail so that they could get "both sides of the story"

[newsfromstolenland]

Did you know that people on the Ontario Disability Support Program can only leave the province for a maximum of 30 days?

Excerpt from an email I got: "Ontario Disability Support Program is for people living in Ontario. You can be out of Ontario for up to 30 days in a row when you are on the Ontario Disability Support Program. If you are out of Ontario for more than 30 days in a row your trip must be pre-approved to maintain your eligibility for the Ontario Disability Support Program. Your monthly declaration will help keep your file updated."

"And ODSP can give you income support even if you're away more than 30 days.

They do this if they agree that you need to be away:

for health reasons,

to attend a college or university, or

for what ODSP calls "exceptional circumstances""

But only with their approval.

If anyone on Ontario disability support leaves the province for more than 30 days without government approval, we risk losing our benefits.

This is ableism. This is restricting our rights and forcing us to go through ODSP (which is notoriously slow) in order to leave not just the country, but the province, for 30 days of more.

[despazito]

Absolute joke of a party

[hassibah]

Kevin Walby, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Winnipeg and an expert on police tactics, said he’s “never seen” a large police raid and a hate crime investigation like this for postering or splashing paint on private property.

“This kind of raid is more typical for a high-risk warrant where you have one or two suspects who have guns or drugs,” Walby said. “Or it’s what you’d expect for an intervention against an organized hate group that was planning to imminently attack another group with weaponry.”

Walby said that an operation of this size would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions. It would require the sign-off of many people, including superintendents and possibly even the chief of police.

“Police are not acting like blind Lady Justice, in an unbiased manner,” he said. “They are influenced by a climate in which Palestinian solidarity protests are being delegitimized by the media and by politicians.”

[sciencetynan]

Pro Palestine posters in a bus shelter: Courtenay, BC, Canada.

October 31st, 2023.

[handweavers]

note that they changed the headline between an hour ago (2pm) and now (3pm) because the original headline as shown when i sent a friend the article on whatsapp was "air canada accused of holding up british mp 'because his name is mohammad'" and now the article title is "rules were followed in alleged islamophobic incident" extremely pathetic state-run racial profiling that is just rehashed 9/11 era islamophobia

[article dated oct 25 2023]

[denizcanp]

😍