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The Massey Lectures are revered in Canada as being a focal point for sharing some of the most forward thinking insights into socioeconomic issues. The speaker for the 2005 Massey Lectures was Stephen Lewis, UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Throughout these lectures, Lewis discusses AIDS, women, children, and education in Africa; and challenges the traditional mindset that has gone into policy making. These are not simple libertarian claims, but well founded thoughts into the realities of modern Africa. No matter what your background, if you have any interest in the global world, you owe it to yourself to listen to last year’s lecture.

Fortunately, for this month of November, the CBC is giving free access to those lectures in the form of MP3 downloads. Otherwise, they are only accessible through direct purchase here. You may download the lectures from here:

2005 Massey Lectures – Part 1 (51MB)
2005 Massey Lectures – Part 2 (47MB)
2005 Massey Lectures – Part 3 (24MB)
2005 Massey Lectures – Part 4 (24MB)
2005 Massey Lectures – Part 5 (23MB)

At the very least, listen to the first lecture. I could nearly guarantee that you will feel compelled to listen further.

Intellectual property is a funny thing. The way I interpret it, it is there as a mechanism to protect profits from its rightful owners. I see corporations as using it to protect their revenue stream/interests. Therefore, I was somewhat surprised when I got wind that Linen ‘n Things had sent a “cease and desist” letter to Black Friday Ads. Under what pretext? For hosting copies of Linen’s flyer on its website.

Naturally, Linen ‘n Things are fully entitled to such actions. But the way I see it: FREE ADVERTISING! I mean, it’s not like actual content was hosted, but advertisements for content. Though they were in the right to have sent that desist letter, I just consider it stupid business conduct. Sort of like the lawyers that sue for reasons no other than to simply justify their existence.

Why turn down free advertising? Let’s think of all the pros of letting this go unfettered: more advertising. Now let’s think of all the cons: …. can’t think of anything huh? Thought so.

You can download the PDF here. For the meeting, we will have a presentation on XSS vulnerabilities. BTW, St3v3, could you email me? I was having trouble getting to your website.

Maclean’s, a popular weekly magazine in Canada, recently had an article called “The Internet Sucks.” It even made the front cover for that week. In essence, this was a piece that loosely tied up all the negative aspects of the Internet to ultimately suggest that it was a waste of money. I sent them back a letter.

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And so I was checking my mail over at Yahoo today, when I noticed that I had received an email from YouTube. It was to confirm that my account with them had been created.

The problem is that I did no such thing. As it turns out, this is a new technique employed by spammers. An individual had written a script to have spambots register with YouTube, using for its email address those that had been harvested by the spammer. Once registered, these bots then fill YouTube up with as much spam as they can get away with before the account is disabled.

All of this happens at the expense of the legitimate owner of the email address. The reason this scheme works is that YouTube does not verify the legitimacy of the email addresses of its members. This is unlike most online services, which will send a confirmation email to the listed address to make sure that the account is indeed valid.

Needless to say, I used the account name the spambot registered under to request to have my “lost” password emailed to me. I then logged on the spambot’s YouTube account, changed the email address, and set the password to be a random string of alphanumeric digits. This will thus prevent that spambot to log on again.

I worry of the consequences of this use of legitimate email addresses. I mean what if these addresses were used somewhere other than YouTube; somewhere where the owner of the email address could face repercussions because of the acts of the spammer?

This is yet another reason why I despise any willing participant of the spam business. Thank you spammer, for having attempted to send thousands of unwanted junk under my name.