Christopher Mackay's Blog

Mac OS X first to fall: “In the first attempted attack in the PWN2OWN contest, a security analyst breached the defenses of Apple’s Mac OS X using a bug in the Safari browser and won $10,000 as well as the computer that he compromised.”

(Via SecurityFocus.com.)

Apple – Trailers – WALL•E: Another trailer has been released; this is going to be a really fun flick. Can’t wait.

CBC News | “Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90″

Clarke will be best-remembered for 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on his short-story The Sentinel, but he wasn’t just a writer of science fiction; he also wrote many science articles and invented something called the satellite. Yes, the geo-stationary orbiting kind that makes television and modern meteorology possible. Not too shabby. He was also an early adopter of technology, using something called electronic mail to correspond from Sri Lanka with 2010: Odyssey Two director Peter Hyams in the early 1980s.

CBC News | “English Patient director Anthony Minghella dies after surgery”

Minghella, director of Cold Mountain, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller and, of course, The English Patient, was 54.

Two eras come to a close.

As if Ireland getting the iPhone ahead of Canada wasn’t bad enough, now Austria has them. Austria!

Austrian iPhone Launch – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): “the Austrian iPhone launch is due to kick off tomorrow”

Maybe if we had electricity in Canada, we could get iPhones, too. Or movies on iTunes. Or TV shows that weren’t aimed at the monster truck demographic.

Then again, Rogers will probably want $10 a byte for data, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

Far from only censoring extreme graphic or suggestive content, this article in The Independent outlines some of the mundane things that were censored in Ireland in years past:

Confessions of an Irish censor: why Clark Gable, ‘Casablanca’ and Cliff got the chop – Europe, News – Independent.co.uk: “Such seemingly inoffensive titles as Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Brief Encounter, The Quiet Man and On the Waterfront were also banned or heavily censored. In all, about 11,000 films were cut and about 2,500 completely banned.”

The article cites some of the earlier censors’ preoccupations, which included:

• dancing (special mention for the Rumba)
• kissing (an ‘unsanitary salute’!), and
• “the antics of Elvis Presley with his most suggestive abdominal dancing”

Fortunately, this kind of censorship is coming to an end in Ireland, but it clearly shows what ridiculous lengths people will go to control what other people think.

Hardly seems like the time to begin censorship in Canada.

globeandmail.com:

Evangelist takes credit for film crackdown: “A well-known evangelical crusader is claiming credit for the federal government’s move to deny tax credits to TV and film productions that contain graphic sex and violence or other offensive content.”

Televangelists like Charles McVety qualify as offensive content, don’t they? I wouldn’t dream of censoring them, though: they have every right to be offensive.

This is more nonsense from the people that brought us moral indignation and outrage as their best response to jazz in the 1930s, Elvis’ pelvic gyrations in the 1950s, and purple Teletubbies in the 1990s.

McVety goes on to say:

It’s fitting with conservative values, and I think that’s why Canadians voted for a Conservative government.

Please. If Canadians had voted for a Conservative government, Liberals, NDP and Bloq members wouldn’t out-number Tories in Parliament, would they? In fact, more than 63% of Canadians didn’t vote for the Conservatives in 2006, so it might be more accurate to say that most Canadians don’t value Conservatives…

What the federal election results from 2006 showed was that Canadians didn’t want a repeat of the Chrétien government’s Québec-referendum advertising scandal (and, by extension, Paul Martin).

If McVety’s radical evangelical agenda actually reflected Canadians’ wishes we wouldn’t have Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson going to such lengths to distance themselves from McVety, who represents exactly what so many Canadians expected from the Reform Alliance Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.

Parents are more than smart enough decide for themselves when to turn off their TVs, or whether to bring their children to see films like Young People Fucking. They certainly don’t need self-appointed moral authorities like McVety and their delicate sensibilities to tell them what they should — and what they shouldn’t be allowed — to think.

Update: March 4, 2008

As a follow-up, this appeared on Canada.com today:

No censorship threat in Bill C-10: Verner: “‘We are far from censorship here. We are just putting forward an intention from our government and (from) the former Liberal government just to make sure that we will take fiscal measure to make sure that the Canadian taxpayers’ money won’t fund extreme violence, child pornography or something like that,’ Verner said at a press conference.”

Of course, there’s no need to address these issues with Bill C-10; there’s existing legislation for that. So why do we need the changes to the tax rebate structure introduced by C-10?

Further, when asked if C-10 was influenced by McVety, Minister Verner issued the following non-denial:

I never met with that guy and there’s no meeting scheduled in my agenda…

which says precisely nothing about McVety’s influence.