Pie Palace

I’ve put together a Gnome applet that checks the balance of an online bank account at predetermined times and emails the balances to a selected email address. It’s unimaginatively titled “balancer“.

It’s (1) useful, and (2) scares the crap out of me.

The useful part is pretty self evident. I want to know my current balance so I can reign in my spending if I’m going overboard.

The scary part is equally self evident. balancer keeps bank credentials on the user’s computer. That’s a terrible idea. An attacker who wants to make some cash just has to trawl the secrets stored in the GnomeKeyring to get access to the user’s life savings. In theory, GnomeKeyring could be secure-ish, if it kept all of its secrets on a portion of the disk hidden from users and blocked access on too many failed access attempts. But it doesn’t seem to. It looks like it keeps secrets in ~/.gnome2/keyrings. If an attacker can subvert an app owned by the user, then they can read ~/.gnome2/keyrings/balancer.credentials.keyring and pass the file offsite for an offline dictionary attack. Eep!

On top of that, GnomeKeyring differentiates between apps based on the path to the app binary. I guess this works for native applications, but it breaks when the app runs in a virtual machine. My app, balancer, is written in Python. After I run it, other Python apps are able to dig into the GnomeKeyring without the user being prompted for a password. Noes!

It’s funny. I tried Wesabe, and had no problem putting myself at the same risk balancer would inflict on me. Even though the Wesabe client has the same security problems, I put them out of my head because someone else wrote the code. But I’m having a hard time doing that with something I wrote.

On Monday I went to the City’s open house on the Lansdowne Live plan. It was a zoo. Concerned Glebe-ites singing protest songs; people asking passersby to sign petitions against the “sole-sourcing” of the plan; and people handing out leaflets telling the truth about the deal.

Inside, it didn’t get much better. Tiny posters in small font, replicating the text of the City’s Lansdowne Live website. Each poster was surrounded by a crowd three or four people deep trying to read what was on display. There were officials from the city and/or the developer, but they were too inundated with people for me to get close to them.

It was insanity.

I went there to find out what was proposed, and ended up with more questions than answers:

What happens if the CFL team folds? The Ottawa Renegades lasted only four seasons. Aside from the $300k in annual rent[1], where would the team’s failure leave the city? According to the business plan, the CFL team is supposed to contribute $42 million dollars back to the city and developers.[2] That seems like an awfully large risk in a $200 million plan.

How will people get there? The transit portion of the slides seems optimistic. Lansdowne is far from the transit way, far from the planned LRT, and far from the nearest highway on-ramp. During peak use, the plan suggests that people will park and ride from the burbs to get to Lansdowne. That seems optimistic. Bank street becomes terribly congested for anything larger than a 67s game (eg, the Ex). Without a change in infrastructure, that seems unlikely to improve.

What about public use? The City of Ottawa is short on centrally located sports fields. There doesn’t appear to be an allocation of land for amateur sports such as soccer and ultimate. The plan would see a “front yard” that would serve as parking for large events. There’s no mention of use for amateur sports.[3] It sounds like they’d keep the winter bubble over the field at Frank Clair stadium, but that’s about it. Even though the pictures show fountains and a plaza, but I couldn’t find any mention of those in the posters or business plans.

What about the extras? The first phase of the plan is replacing the stadium and asphalt parking lot with something a little nicer and adding retail to the site. Phase 2 is the development of hotel, residential, and office components. The plan doesn’t describe what those developments will be. How large will each retail space be? What is the 41,000 square foot “unique food store“? Since the site is far from major arteries, it seems unlikely that a big box store would move in there. What will happen if the space can’t be rented out?

Aside from these questions, I have to say that the event didn’t feel like a consultation. It felt like something verging on a coronation, or perhaps a revolt. The vocal members of the crowd clearly didn’t like what they saw. The city and the promoters did little to answer visitor’s questions – although there was a Q&A session at Wednesday night’s consultation.

After reading the City/promoter’s docs I’m left with the simple conclusion: even though the Lansdowne Live proposal is no worse than what’s currently at the site, it doesn’t have much going for it. The proposal envisions Lansdowne as an attraction, but without the necessary transit to get visitors to the site. It lacks public space: no statuary, no gardens, no playing fields, no plazas, no skate parks, no amphitheater. Nothing.

[1] – Business plan, page 20.
[2] – Business plan, page 23.
[3] – Take a look at the stadium page and search for “winter”.

I occasionally get emails regarding the Asperger test hosted here on PiePalace. Some of them are heartbreaking:

I am trying to find information on how to test my son for Asperger’s. [... he has a hard time socializing... has difficulties with kids his own age...] Our insurance does not provide for testing and I can not afford to have him tested.

I know Canada’s health care system has problems, but at least anyone can get their kid in front of a doctor.

Years ago, I contributed policy to the Green Party of Canada on media. In it, I stated (words to the effect of) “media is a business like no other, it has a responsibility to be profitable, but more importantly, it has the responsibility to hold our public offices to account.” The policy items were my rough attempt to discourage the rise of large media conglomerates, and to support regional media outlets.

Yesterday, one of CTV shut down evening newscasts in Ottawa, and did similar things in Barrie, London, and Victoria. In doing so, they have cost Ottawa yet another media outlet, and yet another avenue for paid journalists to keep our politicians, bureaucrats, and corporations honest. Coincidentally, kottke.org has linked to a story describing how the cuts to Baltimore’s daily newspaper has made the police force less accountable:

Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit — these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department’s officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.

And this isn’t just an American problem. As the Dziekanski enquiry is proving, Canadian police reports can sometimes differ dramatically from reality. Without an engaged, and well funded press, there will be no one to hold these officers to account.

What solutions do we have? A CRTC-mandated carriage fee for cable broadcasters? Preferential tax treatment for smaller news organization? Increased funding to public broadcasters? There are solutions, but we, as an electorate have to wake up to the fact these cuts don’t just cost jobs, they are a danger to our public institutions.

Telephone poles know the truth. This one, seen on Bank street, provides the 411 on who Jesus hates. The list is pretty long, but here are a few of the highlights:

- Christian rock, rap, techno (then again, who doesn’t?)
- catholics
- yoga and martial arts
- lotteries
- tolerence
- “dirty human rights commissions/tribunals”
- Canwest Media
- buddhists, scientologists, hindus, muslims, wiccans, etc.

(There’s the usual rants as well. We hear those often enough that I won’t bother repeating them)

It sounds like heaven is a pretty lonely place.

Four hours, dear reader. Four hours. That’s how much time is devoted to policy discussion at the upcoming Green Party convention. Doesn’t seem worth the effort of dragging myself 1400(ish) kilometers to Pictou.

I just got a pushy call from a telemarketer telling me that I was getting a “second notice” of my car’s warranty expiring, and that I should re-register it through them. I’ve never owned a car. They refused to tell me where they got my phone number, anything about the car in question, or the company they are working for. It sounds like a scam (and the RCMP thinks so too).

The call was from 1.916.219.8163¹. It comes about five days after I moved the number to Rogers’ wireless service. I hadn’t received any phone spam in my 2.5 years with Virgin Wireless.

Anyone else gotten these calls?

1. Heh. There’s an online service for tracking “complaints” about phone numbers. check it. (back)

I’m about a week late in saying this, but better late than never: Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza is immoral at best, and a war crime at worst.¹

The thing I find depressing about Israel’s assault on Gaza is that it has no apparent exit strategy. If Israel gets its way and wipes out the entire Hamas leadership, what will happen? Another crop of angry youth will rise up to replace them; Israel will respond to their posturing violently; and the cycle will begin again.

It’s sad to say, but about the only good thing that I can realistically expect to come out of this is an improvement in the level of agitprop software being published. Playing Raid Gaza! gives me the same feeling of discomfort as reading news reports of the casualties.

Let’s hope that when this foray into mass murder ends, Palestinians and Israelis will find a way to forge some sort of peace.²

1. We can say the same thing of Hamas firing rockets into Israel. Israel gets headline billing because it has killed and injured so many more civilians in the past few days. (back)
2. I apologize for the lower than usual signal-to-platitude ratio, but (a) I’ve got the flu, and (b) I’m trying to word this in a way that doesn’t have me branded as a C list bigot. (back)

I’ve always voted for hope. Every time I’ve walked into a polling both, I’ve said to myself: “what do I want the future to look like?” I have a soft spot for sustainability and social justice, so I’ve usually given my vote to the Green Party. But thanks to yesterday’s fiasco at Governor General’s, I don’t want to play nice anymore. I want to punish Stephen Harper.

I feel like voting strategically for the first time in my life. I just want to see Stephen Harper fail.

Democracy can only thrive under the rule of law. In the case of a parliamentary democracy, such as Canada’s, the “rule of law” is a set of polite conventions that every parliamentarian is expected to follow. A party cannot govern without the tacit support of 50%+1 of the sitting MPs. If a party loses that support, the Governor General may either choose to trigger an election, or allow a coalition of other parties to take the reigns of power. This week we’ve seen Harper running scared. Instead of losing his minority government he first delayed a non-confidence vote that would have toppled him, then prorogued the House of Commons.

This is not how our Parliament is intended to work. When a politician knows their time is at an end, they should gracefully step aside, regroup, and attempt a come-back. Not take their ball and go home.

From my perspective, it looks like Harper values power more than anything else. He’s hoping that a two month break will be long enough for him to gather enough popular support (by demonizing Quebec) that he will get a majority in a mid-winter election.

In the background, our economy is slowly grinding to a halt as the Canadian dollar falls, tens of thousands of jobs are lost, and the government hemorrhages money due to fiscal mismanagement.

Photo credit: harperdictatorship.ca.

So far I’ve heard John Baird and Pierre Poilievre parroting the same lines about the upcoming non-confidence vote: non-confidence votes are back-room deals; nobody voted for a coalition; the opposition parties just care about the subsidies. And now, thanks to a leaked set of talking points (scroll down to the bottom of the story), we can the original source. Just for once I’d like to hear a politician speak and hear something that they had thought of. I’d like to hear them make a coherent and reasoned argument that wasn’t spin.