Mike Brock: Forward and Onward

Give Them An Inch...

on August 13, 2008 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It's gotten to the point, where we hear about the almost daily harassment, detainment and other egregious actions against the press reporting on the Olympics by Chinese authorities. From a South American journalist who's internet privileges were revoked, and questioned for searching for "forbidden" terms on the internet, to the roughing up of a British ITV journalist attempting to report on a protest in Beijing.

The International Olympic Committee, for it's part, is repeating it's demand that China respect press freedom. Thanks, but I've heard enough from the IOC.

This is the same IOC which told the world that they had reached a deal with China to have internet censorship lifted during the games, only to be told of the real secret deal weeks before the games began.

People inside and out of China have viewed the Olympics as a chance to open China up to the world. But all it has done, is result in much of the progress, that has been achieved in China in recent years, being clawed back. This is retrograde progress.

Land was outright expropriated without compensation to build Olympic venues, thirty to forty-thousand internet monitoring censors have been hired, journalists are being physically harassed, and human rights activists beaten and deported.

I've heard the arguments that boycotting the Olympics would "only hurt the athletes". I think that recent events might actually prove the contrary. By not doing so, we've allowed China to walk all over it's promises, all over us. They promised us progress in exchange for their big "coming-out ceremony". We gave it to them. Then they turned around and spit in our face. And we gave it to them anyways.

If anything, I think the IOC, by backpedaling on all of these agreements with China, has hurt many people, from journalists to Chinese citizens.

This is what happens when you try and deal with bullies. This is what happens when you play the "diplomacy at all costs" game. Sometimes it backfires.

I wish at least some country had the gusto to pick up their cards and go home. I won't hold out hope though.

Al & Mike Show Episode 27

Mike Brock

on June 12, 2008 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From the left of the issue: John Baglow, aka Dr. Dawg (drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com) joins us for the hour to offer a dissenting view. Al is off tonight, with Jay Currie (http://jaycurrie.info-syn.com) filling in as my co-host.

In this episode we try and hash out the differences between our position (against limits on free speech) and the opposition position (for some limits).

Overall a great debate.

Listen Now

Subscribe to RSS: Click here for podcast RSS feed.

Subscribe in iTunes for your iPod: Click here (Must have iTunes installed)

The Big Business Problem

Mike Brock

on June 7, 2008 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I am a right-wing libertarian. Something which probably isn't hard for many people to deduce from reading my writings, or listening to my podcast.

I'm a capitalist. I believe in free markets. I believe in small government. But there's a catch.

When corporations use either lobbyists or their employment footprint to influence or blackmail governments into adopting legislation which benefits their industry, at the expense of fairness to individuals, I have a serious problem.

Enter the case of Media Defender; a U.S.-based company, focused on disrupting piracy activities on the internet. Sounds like a well-intentioned business concept, until you look at how they go about doing what they do.

Over the Memorial Day weekend in the United States, a legitimate internet television site, known as Revision3, which produces original tech-centric programming, was knocked clean off the internet in a Denial of Service attack launched by Media Defender.

The reason?

Unbeknown to Revision3, their servers were being exploited by users of BitTorrent to seed links to online copyrighted material.

Now, understand, that Revision3's servers never actually contained any illegal, pirated materials. Their tracking servers were only being used as online compasses—if you will— which tell BitTorrent applications where to find pieces of the files that make up, say a movie or music file.

Having discovered this, Media Defender began a concerted campaign to flood Revision3's servers with bogus information, intended to corrupt the downloads of BitTorrent users.

On Friday, before the Memorial Day weekend, Revision3's staff was alerted to the misuse of their servers and immediately moved to close the security hole. While one would think this would bring an end to Media Defender's disruptive activities, they instead stepped up their attacks on Revision3 in response to closing the security hole.

You see, because Revision3 uses BitTorrent to distribute their own content, in order to reduce operating costs, which is completely legal and legitimate, they are forced to run what's known as a BitTorrent Tracking Server, in order to seed their content onto the internet.

The problem is, that Media Defender has decided they are against BitTorrent in all it's forms, and as such, took it upon themselves to launch a massive attack on Revision3 as a response to restricting access to their servers.

For the sum of the Memorial Day long weekend, due to a concerted assault of bandwidth from Media Defender, Revision3's entire computer network was brought to it's knees and crashed.

As a result, Revision3 lost upwards of $150,000 in revenue due to lost advertising and viewership.

Of course, this sounds like a criminal act, doesn't it? Well, not anymore.

You see, due to changes in U.S. law favoring copyright holders to enforce their copyrights by increasingly clandestine means, the FBI has informed Revision3 that what Media Defender did was only a "legal grey area".

Think about that for a second. A grey area.

If I took it upon myself, to attack Media Defender in a massive online attack, and take their servers off the internet, I would be arrested, pay a massive fine, and potentially go to jail.

But because Media Defender made a mistake, in the name of protecting copyright, US law is on their side.

Essentially, the RIAA and MPAA in the United States are licensed cyber terrorists, granted the legal authority to violate people's privacy rights, commit acts of cyber vandalism, deny consumers domain over their purchased property (such as the backing up of legally purchased CDs and DVDs), and so on and so forth.

When fairness of the application of law, and civil liberties come face-to-face with corporate interests, as a libertarian, civil liberties should always win.

A free market does not imply that a government exists in partnership with corporate interests. That is cronyism. Not capitalism.

A free market is about the right of the individual to spend their resources in the way which best represents their interest. Property rights solidify this principle.

While control over intellectual property in the information age presents many challenges for the producers of content, it is not acceptable for us to bend over backwards and sacrifice basic fairness in law on the mantle of preventing piracy.

In fact, if the Stephen Harper-led Conservative government implements it's treaty obligation to enact the Canadian version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act here in Canada, we will begin start to see incidents similar to the Media Defender-Revision3 case happening here.

That is not acceptable. Because, as this case demonstrates: even if you aren't doing anything wrong, you still have something to worry about.

I have no problem with the MPAA taking people to court for violating their copyrights as long as the MPAA and the individual or individuals accused are equal before the law. But this is not what such laws do. They give big businesses extraneous power to violate privacy, and commit acts of electronic sabotage and vandalism, such as with DRM solutions like AACS used on Blu-Ray discs (yes, they can remotely sabotage your Blu-Ray player if it doesn't meet their standards--preventing it from playing movies).

Why are governments leaning over backwards to allow for this?

If the Harper government proceeds with their plans to allow for this type of activity, then not only will I not vote for the Conservative Party (as is my current plan), but the party will be dead to me, as a cronyist, Liberal Party redux.

Al & Mike Show Episode 26 - Mark Steyn

Mike Brock

on June 5, 2008 7:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Mark Steyn (www.marksteyn.com) joins us for the whole program to talk to us about the goings on at the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.

Listen Now

Subscribe to RSS: Click here for podcast RSS feed.

Subscribe in iTunes for your iPod: Click here (Must have iTunes installed)

Al & Mike Show w/Mark Steyn Tonight

Mike Brock

on June 5, 2008 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a reminder to all: Mark Steyn will be joining us on the Al & Mike Show at 8pm EDT / 5pm PDT for a full hour.

There are a multitude of different ways to listen. The live stream will go active 30 minutes before the show, and will be posted over at the Western Standard.

I'll post the stream here.

And of course, it will be available at the main Al & Mike Show website.

If you can't listen live, we certainly will have the podcast up 20 minutes after the show, as always:

Subscribe to RSS: Click here for podcast RSS feed.

Subscribe in iTunes for your iPod: Click here (Must have iTunes installed)

The Lying Jackal's Friend is a Liar. Who Would Have Thought?

Mike Brock

on June 3, 2008 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

When Warren Kinsella lied and intentionally left blog readers with the impression that I personally defended David Ahenakew's re-instatement in the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (among others) it re-inforced my impression that Warren Kinsella is nothing more than a lying jackal.

So I guess it comes as no surprise that Warren would hold in high regard, another lying jackal, Khurrum Awan, as evidenced by his strong character defense of him and his sock puppet compatriots on his blog a little more than a month ago.

I mean, I've known that Khurrum Awan was a liar from the moment I challenged him personally, and questioned him from behind a microphone at a "town hall" meeting that the sock puppet three, and the Ryerson University Students Union put on in early January.

He and his sidekick, Muneeza Sheik strongly proclaimed that nothing they were doing was, or had anything to do with censorship. They only wanted "to be heard", they affirmed.

Before the panelists and the audience, I read aloud Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, only to be told by Khurrum that I "don't know what I'm talking about."

I thought to myself: how can this scumbag look at me with a straight face and tell me he had no desire to censor Maclean's and Mark Steyn, whilst knowing that upon successful prosecution of his complaint, that the result would be exactly that?

He did so without flinching.

A scumbag, I thought. Not anymore than some other lawyers who've struck me as scumbags. But a scumbag nonetheless.

He didn't care to address my concerns about the implications of censorship, because it wasn't his intent to censor. He just wanted "fairness".

The problem is that looking into his eyes, I knew that he understood clearly that what he wanted was exactly that: censorship. Simply because, his concept of "fairness" in the media requires censorship; the displacement of wordspace for one viewpoint, for the printing of another. The invariable implication of which can be arrived at simply by considering that a publishers free right to publish as they wish will be infringed upon through the application of a bureaucratic "fairness doctrine" which Awan wants the Human Rights Commission to install in order to oversee the media and expunge all the purported islamaphobia for which he decries. Censorship called "fairness". Sounds like lawyerly scumbaggery to me.

Today's hearing of the British Columbia Human Rights Commission reaffirms my scumbag label.

He now says that he never was asking for a "mutually acceptable author" to publish the response in Macleans. He says, that the attribution of this position to him is a lie. Of course, it's not a lie. And anybody who watched his bald head grace their TV or computer screens on TVO's The Agenda, knows it's a lie. In fact, he called Mark Steyn the liar for pushing the very story—which today—he now claims was his story all along.

No, you lying scumbag—As Ezra points out—you don't get off that easy.

In TV interviews, all he wants is a "mutually agreed upon" response, and under oath and threat of perjuring himself, he claims the opposite. He now claims that it was always his position that Maclean's should accept whatever author the Canadian Islamic Congress sent them.

That certainly changes the whole story doesn't it, Khurrum? You willfully told a lie, repeatedly, to a plethora of TV cameras and reporters, in order to cast Maclean's management in the worst possible light.

It's important for every reader of this to realize, that Awan has essentially corroborated Maclean's side of the story, and taken a giant proverbial shit on the story he's been telling over and over again to Canadians through the media.

He's even admitted, under oath, that he was seeking a shakedown of cash from Macleans in the order of $10,000. Which is, once again, completely contrary to the story and bullshit he's been selling.

When assholes like Awan are the ones calling for limits on free speech, it reaffirms just how important free speech is. It protects us from the fascism that his likes would unleash on society, given power of the state to enforce his viewpoint to the peril of all others.

Awan lied to my face, in a room filled with people. He belittled my "simplistic" view of free speech. He commands no respect with me. In fact, he can kiss my ass.

Canada is Not Part of the Global Economy

Mike Brock

on May 21, 2008 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Canada is a protectionist country. At least in every way that counts. Sure, when it comes to consumer goods and raw materials we believe in "free trade". But when it comes to brick and mortar services and operations, we love to impose foreign ownership rules.

This is ostensibly to protect us against foreign dominance in our economy. But one has to ask, who is this policy really protecting?

I contest that it does almost nothing to protect the average consumer. From our chartered bank system, to foreign ownership rules on telecom companies, media companies, and aerospace companies, the Canadian consumer is often the most disadvantaged consumer in the developed world.

Political parties like the NDP want to solve the problem through more regulation. In the case of banks, they want to legislate away the banks right to nickel-and-dime us with service fees.

You can always count on a lefty for more regulation. But this is really about the fact we have too much regulation as is. In fact, the regulation we have today is the problem. It doesn't need to be fixed with more regulation.

Anyways, I digress.

The whole theory behind the chartered bank system is that it provides "stability". Big nanny protects us consumers from making bad decisions, and depositing our money in all but the largest, most stable institutions.

The result? A handful of financial institutions have a collective monopoly, without any incentive to provide better customer service, and with every incentive to collusively charge monthly fees for chequing accounts and, in some cases, even balance checking transactions. Ridiculous.

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with rich people. I'm a capitalist after all. But who's the government really protecting with the chartered bank system? The big rich banks and their massive profits? Or the consumer?

In fact, they shouldn't really be protecting either. They should be allowing more choice and competition, and by extension, giving the consumer more power.

The story is not much different with cellular phones in this country. As most Canadians know by now, we currently have the most expensive cell phone service in the developed world, and one of the most expensive in the entire world.

In fact, Canada is the only major nation in the world, where wireless penetration (the per capita number of people who have cellphones) has declined in the past 5 years, while wireless data rates have skyrocketed. The increase in rates has more than made up for the loss of customers, as an increasing number of Canadians cannot function without their mobile phones in our modern economy.

It might be different. But we have foreign ownership requirements when it comes to telecom companies.

While German mobile carrier T-Mobile operates in most Western European countries (and even the United States), and Vodaphone operates throughout Europe, parts of Asia, and Australia, they would not be allowed to setup a wireless service in Canada, unless they had a majority Canadian stakeholder. Translation: no external competition. Just big Canadian conglomerates.

Almost no other country in developed world stonewalls external entrants into their domestic markets. We do. We hold economic protectionism near and dear to our heart.

Does the average Canadian consumer benefit in any way? Only if you consider higher prices, and less choice beneficial.

It's not going to change anytime soon, either.

The Conservative government wholly supports foreign ownership requirements as demonstrated in blocking of the sale of MDA to a US company. And while they reserved 30% of the new wireless spectrum for new entrants into the wireless market, they precluded foreign companies from participating.

The Liberal's once mocked Stephen Harper for saying that "when he's through with Canada, we won't recognize it". Well the truth is, I still recognize it, and I don't like it.

I am a heavy wireless data user in Canada, and I'm sick of my $500 cellphone bills from Telus, while my American and European counterparts laugh at me with their unlimited $50 data plans. I am stuck with, well... no tenable choice as a consumer.

I am sick of paying $12 for a chequing account, without a minimum balance of $10,000, when I used to have free chequing accounts with my US bank when I lived there.

Canadian banks, cellphone companies and media companies are rackets. And the government is an avid participator in maintaining them.

The rich really are getting richer in Canada, and mainly because your government is giving you no choice but to give a select few more of your money. How is your government standing up for Canadians? I'm sorry, the Conservatives are "standing up for Canada" which is really code-word for "standing up for the status quo".

Don't even get me started on Human Rights Commissions.

Al & Mike Show Episode 24

Mike Brock

on May 15, 2008 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Gerry Nicholls (www.gerrynicholls.com) joins us again to talk about the importance of the conservative-liberatarian movement, and the increasing disregard the Conservative Party of Canada is showing for the movement. We also talk a little bit about the debate between Mark Steyn and the three Osgoode law students who helped author human rights complaints against Macleans Magazine.

Listen Now

Subscribe to RSS: Click here for podcast RSS feed.

Subscribe in iTunes for your iPod: Click here (Must have iTunes installed)

Blogging Will Return!

Mike Brock

on May 15, 2008 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some people want me to start regular blogging again, and I will! It's just that I've been traveling a lot, I have a baby on the way, and I'm starting a major new project at work which is consuming lots of my time. When I can manage to regularize my schedule over the next few weeks, I will do some more blogging.

Family first, work second, blogging third. But make no mistake, I'm still paying attention to all the commotion from afar.