In case you haven’t already heard, blogger Charles LeBlanc was arrested and charged with libel. Many people have questioned the validity and applicability of the charges. This blog post isn’t going to do that, instead, we will be discussing the seizure of computer equipment for “evidence”.

During the raid, they took his computer, monitor, speakers and cable modem. None of these were actually required as evidence, not even the computer.

Charles’ blog is hosted on blogspot.com, a Google service. His computer has nothing to do with serving web pages. During a normal investigation, the police would subpoena Google to get the IP address of the poster, then subpoena the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to get the owner of the IP address’s account. That is all that is needed as proof. Even with the PC, there is no way they can get any more proof that it was actually Charles sitting in that chair typing those words. In fact, assuming he used the online post editor, there would likely be no trace at all on his computer. Even if they needed to access the computer, there are forensic tools available that will make an image of the hard drive on-site, without the need for a complete seizure.

This is clear evidence that our court system does not understand technology at all. This will be abused. We now know that someone can have IT equipment removed at the mere accusation of libel. How often will we see this being used as an intimidation tactic?

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Dear Brunswick News,

How’s that paywall working for you? How does it feel to have put yourselves on the wrong side of the digital divide?

In case you haven’t figured it out, people are laughing at you. You seem to have forgotten that most of your product is available elsewhere on the Internet, for free. The only thing that isn’t available is the local news. Is that worth $20/month? Most people don’t seem to think so. Yes, the NY Times is also $20/month, however, you are not the NY Times. They don’t have nearly the same number of mistakes in their articles as you guys do.

For some reason, you think that I’ll be very interested in the goings-on of every town in the province. Does the Kings County Record still publish a list of everyone who hit a deer that week? Maybe, but it’s not worth $20 for me to find out.

Some might try to read into this a little further and try to come up with some kind of conspiracy theory. Are you trying to kill it so you can get more money from the government? Are you forcing the bundling to raise overall subscription numbers? Are you using your media monopoly to gouge us? Are you just dumb?

If you don’t take the paywall down, or make it $5/month, you’ll be in worse shape from now on. You had a monopoly on local news on the Internet. Now, you’ve taken it away. What will happen next? Will other media sources take over to fill the void? Probably. And when they do, we won’t need you any more.

Interesting to note that the obituary section is the only thing that still hasn’t been paywalled. You’ll soon be writing articles for your newspapers in there.

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Fredericton Transit just released a bus-tracker mobile app for Android. (or did they, as a recently printed Gleaner article implied it was CGI’s idea). It’s still in beta, and completely unfit for general use as they don’t have GPS tracking available for every bus in the fleet. However, it’s a great example of how open data can be used.

All of the screenshots below were copied from the Android Market page as Android phones don’t have the ability to take screenshots (unless they are rooted).

The opening screen implies that this app won’t just be for bus tracking. Hopefully we’ll see some more services on there soon.

Here we have the main menu. The bus tracker is the important part of the app, the route planner just takes you to your phone’s built-in Google Maps Transit navigation service, the schedule just goes to the city’s web site.

Here, we can choose which route to track. For a really good test, you can click “all routes”

And here’s the main screen. The first issue that jumps out is that we see the fleet numbers in the bus icons. This is because they are getting their data from the dispatch system. The fleet numbers are very useful for dispatchers, but not that good for the general public. If you click on one of the icons (like you see above), you’ll see the route numbers listed. Trouble is, as in the example above, you see two route numbers and no direction (N or S). If you’re waiting for a specific bus, you won’t actually know which one is yours until it is close enough for you to see the destination sign.

Great start, but needs some work.

Future plans?

At this time, nothing has been divulged. One hopes that they are able to fix some of the issues above before they go out of beta. For that to happen, they would have to have access to the dispatch schedules to determine which actual run the bus is doing. From there, they could determine how long you have to wait for the next bus at any particular location. That would allow for a phone (text or IVR) interface as well as other innovations such as display signs.

It would also be nice if they indicated the accessibility level of the bus. They could display an icon for a low-floor bus.

Once that is complete, the next step would be to open the data so it could be used by anyone. Don’t want to support an obsolete phone platform? No problem, let someone else do it instead. Want to let a business make their own transit info sign? No problem!

It’s a great start, hopefully the momentum continues and allows the app to get better.

Update: iOS version now on iTunes

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