Your private life on your ID card

The news that the new ID cards will contain sensitive personal medical information is a very nasty prospect. Why on earth should I have such private and sensitive data on a card that has to be produced in a variety of situations and can easily be lost? Why should the bank have access to my health information? If I go to see an eye doctor, why should he have my banking details?

Keep in mind that every encryption technology has limitations, but these cards will be there for a long time and cannot be replaced overnight. All it takes is for a simple secret code to be leaked or stolen, and all of a sudden your local video rental store can know your bank accounts, your visits to the GP or sexual health clinic, your card transactions and who knows what else. And once the ID cards are used in every general practitioner's clinic, in all hospitals, in all bank branches and so on, it becomes only a matter of time before one of the keys is secretly stolen. You won't know it happened. Your card will be read like it is normally read, but it gives up far more information than you'd be willing to divulge if you knew about it.

I would expect that the powers that be have plans for some good security in place, but in the report I linked there are no mentions of what these might be, or whether people will even have the right to NOT have their medical information on the card. Does this mean, for instance, that our constitutional right to vote will become conditional on having our medical information on the ID card?

The ID card is a document that we are legally obliged to posses. It should therefore have nothing on it beyond the absolute minimum of information required to identify the individual - which is what the ID card is for anyway.

I think it's high time that we started being more aware and concerned about the importance of defending our privacy. In a world where a 500Gb hard disk costs less than €100, you could store all the personal details of every person in Malta for a few cents each. There are companies to whom this would be a useful asset - they might want to market their new herbal remedies to anyone who visited a dermatological clinic in the past year, or invite people with a low bank balance to take out a no-questions-asked loan and mortgage from their online bank. They are ready to pay good money to posses a slice of the private life of everyone in the country. The new ID cards could be exactly what they're looking for.

We need to defend our privacy if we want to remain in control of who to trust with our personal details.

The Cinema Experience

I remember that when I was a young boy, going to the cinema was an exhilarating experience. TV in those days was a black-and-white affair with one Maltese station and a handful of Italian ones. Video recorders had still not made their début. Going to the cinema was a family treat. We could see feature films in full colour and in much better clarity than the grainy TV we had at home.

Fast forward to the present day and the home TV situation has improved dramatically. We've got stereo colour TVs at an entry level, and if you really like your home entertainment you can get flat TVs with crisp pictures, surround sound systems and even home projectors so you can enjoy the images in a large format. DVDs and a large number of video rental stores provide your choice of movie, at a time of your convenience, with all the comforts of your home. Oh, and microwave popcorn of course.

Yet compared to all these impressive changes that have taken place in the home entertainment field, cinemas have barely moved ahead for all these years. Probably the biggest improvements locally have been the cleanliness of the venue and banning smoking indoors. That's all? In over 30 years? Cinema owners as well as the production companies are complaining about the constantly dropping sales from cinemas, blaming it on everything and everyone but themselves. When was the last bit of really impressive innovation taking place in a cinema? Where has the cinema experience gone? Where are the queues of people standing in actual awe of what they are about to experience?

Going to a cinema, especially for a family, is an expensive undertaking. First one has to travel to the cinema and hopefully park somewhere reasonably near to the theatre. Then, apart from the cost of the tickets themselves, one has to buy drinks and snacks from the exorbitantly-priced "bar" - which only sells salty, thirst-provoking snacks or sweets. Once inside, one often has to deal with the rest of the audience, and there are few things as annoying as having someone running a continuous commentary on the film to a companion just behind your right ear. Except perhaps trying to catch the actors' words through the rustling crisp packets, ringing mobile phones, and people getting up to take a leak or coming in after the movie has started. Why would anyone want to pay through the nose for that?

If the cinema is to remain a profitable business, new ways need to be found to once again make the cinema experience something to look forward to. There have been a few attempts to do this, like 3D films, but these tend to be relatively short, documentary-style films. When will we be able to see something like the Lord of the Rings in full 3D with shaking ground, or projections on the front, side and above to fully immerse oneself in the experience? Or maybe some new-fangled environmental cinema where you can actually feel the heat of the desert sun or the cold of the Antarctic tundra. Now that would be something to look forward to. If cinemas do not try to recapture the experience that they lost, they are a dying breed.

What War on Christmas?

Every year about this time we read countless letters in newspapers complaining about how some unidentified "secularists" are trying to turn Christmas into a secular event, taking Christ out of Christmas, and generally behaving in a Grinch-like manner towards all things Christmassy. They rile against people who use terms like "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". But does this modern "war on Christmas" really exist or is it a figment of the imagination?

For as long as I can remember people have been wishing each other well using a wide variety of expressions, including Merry Christmas, Season's Greetings, Happy Holidays, Il-Milied it-Tajjeb or Il-Festi t-Tajba. There you go - some mention Christmas and some do not, just as they have always done. Why has it become an issue now? Why is it that all of a sudden, if one sends out a card which says "Season's Greetings" one gets frowned upon, or if said card shows a robin in the snow or a candle, it's a faux pas? There have been Christmas Trees, Christmas Logs, turkey dinners, tinsel and fairy lights - none of which have any Christian significance that I can determine - since long before I was born. They shared the space with cribs and nativity scenes quite happily for decades if not centuries. Yet all of a sudden, they're seen as a threat. Over the last few years, songs like Jingle Bells, Rudolph the red-nosed Reindeer or White Christmas are being seen as out of place in Christmas - just because they're not religious and they don't mention Jesus. Various personalities complain that these are removing us from the "true meaning" of Christmas. The fundamentalists who try to promote this idea of a secular war on Christmas rarely go to the trouble of confirming the validity of their claims. On the very day before Christmas last year, The Times' columnist "Roamer" regaled us with the story that in 1998, Birmingham Council replaced Christmas with a festivity called Winterval. Birmingham Council, their offices bedecked in a large banner proclaiming "Merry Christmas" to everyone and busy sending out cards with nativity scenes and the words Merry Christmas on them, were rather surprised to hear the news when it first broke. There was in fact an activity called Winterval. It was an attempt by Birmingham Council to drive more business into their renovated city centre, in 1997 and 1998, and certainly did not replace Christmas in that city. Of course like most rumours, it's easier to start one than to set the record straight, and despite almost a decade going by, Birmingham Council still have to respond to countless complaints each year about their anti-Christmas stance. Similarly, Luton Council has to deal with the annual controversy about the event called "Luminos". In vain they repeatedly explain that Luminos was a single event held one weekend in November 2001, and which had nothing to do with Christmas, let alone replace it. People still call to complain and ask why they were trying to replace Christmas with something called Luminos. A Scottish bank which instructed its employees not to place Christmas decorations too close to computer screens due to a possible fire hazard had to deal with complaints that they were attacking Christmas.

Take a deep breath everyone. Nobody is attacking Christmas. Nobody is trying to ban it, arrest it or deport it. Nobody's knocking on your door to make you remove the 150 kilowatt light display in your upstairs window. You won't receive a court injunction to take down your crib, or your tree for that matter. Christmas is this year what it has been since time immemorial - a time of happiness, having fun, meeting up with relatives, letting your hair down at an office party, exchanging gifts, and many other things. People will again this year celebrate it in different ways. So who's the one acting against the Christmas spirit of merrymaking? Seems to me that the only Scrooge characters around are those who spend these days grumbling about the fact that they received a card with Season's Greetings, and not the ones who sent it.

Min se jgħasses lill-għassiesa?

Min se jgħasses lill-għassiesa? (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) Kieku kelli mmur f'għassa tal-pulizija u nakkuża lil xi ħadd b'reat li fil-fatt ma jkunx seħħ, il-pulizija tieħu passi legali kontrija talli għamilt rapport falz - kif għandu jkun. Kemm huwa iżjed serju meta tkun il-pulizija stess li tressaq nies quddiem il-qorti u tixlihom b'sensiela ta' atti kriminali li l-pulizija stess jafu li kienu foloz? Nhar l-14 ta' Frar, il-maġistrat Antonio Mizzi illibera lil 31 mara li kienu ġew imressqa mill-pulizija mixlija bi prostituzzjoni u li mexxew burdell - fost akkużi oħra. Il-pulizija kollha li ttellgħu jixhdu ammettew li imkien ma raw indikazzjoni ta' prostituzzjoni, u ma kien hemm ebda indikazzjoni li l-persuni mixlija kellhom xi sehem fit-tmexxija tal-post - li ovvjament ma kienx burdell. Il-maġistrat ikkritika lill-prosekuzzjoni (il-pulizija) talli xlew lil dawn in-nies b'dawn l-akkużi. Kritika oħra kienet dwar il-mod kif ġew trattati - uħud min-nisa ġew imġegħla joħorġu barra fit-triq bl-istess ilbies imqaċċat li kienu libsin ġewwa l-istabbiliment "biex kulħadd jara x'intom". Dan x'raġunament hu? Aġir bħal dan imur kontra d-drittijiet fundamentali tal-bniedem, li jipprojbixxu trattament degradanti saħansitra lil min jinsab ħati, aħseb u ara xi ħadd li anqas għadu tressaq il-qorti. Xogħol il-pulizija mhux li jiddeċiedu min hu ħati u jaqtgħu is-sentenza huma. Filwaqt li nifraħ lill-maġistrat ta' dak li qal bla tlaqliq, il-mistoqsija li għandna nistaqsu hi, x'passi se jittieħdu kontra dawk responsabbli? Il-pulizija għamlu akkużi foloz lill-qorti, u ttrattaw lill-akkużati - li fil-fatt kienu innoċenti - b'mod abbużiv. Jien nikkunsidra dawn l-azzjonijiet bħala atti kriminali - u l-pulizija għandha l-obbligu li tieħu passi kontra dawk responsabbli. Kien hawn żmien - m'ilux ħafna - fejn ħafna Maltin kienu saru jibżgħu mill-pulizija. Jekk int tkun akkanit ta' partit flok ieħor, tista' tħabbat wiċċek ma' xi membru tal-korp li għalih il-liġijiet ma jgħoddux. Għalkemm iż-żminijiet inbidlu, din l-azzjoni tal-pulizija tfakkar f'dawk iż-żminijiet ta' l-imgħoddi, jew inkella l-"morality police" ta' l-Iran, li jekk jaraw tnejn iżommu idejn xulxin jiċċekkjaw jekk humiex miżżewġa. Din id-darba, xi proxxmu qabad u ddeċieda li kull persuna liebsa "indeċenti" fi stabbiliment strettament għall-adulti għandha tiġi arrestata, degradata u mixlija b'akkużi falsifikati. Barra minn hekk, għandna naraw jekk dan it-tip ta' kontroll morali għadx hemm loku. Fl-istabbiliment konċernat setgħu jidħlu biss adulti minn 21 sena 'il fuq, u kull min jidħol jaf x'tip ta' "shows" isiru. Jekk persuna adulta tixtieq tidħol fi stabbiliment bħal dan m'għandu jkun hemm ebda restrizzjoni. Anzi, dan jista' jimla' niċċa fil-prodott turistiku tagħna.

The Decline in Christianity

The recent census by Discern has just confirmed what everybody knew all along - church attendance has continued falling, just as it has been doing for the past few decades, though perhaps at an accelerated rate. This will, of course, be followed by various opinions about what's causing it, suggestions on how to "bring the people back", as well as peeved and patronising arguments about how really important the church is to our lives.

The fall in church attendance can be attributed to two main factors - people losing their faith or interest in the Church and Mass, and people losing their faith in gods. The first is not hard to explain in today's world. Mass, like most prayers, is a rote recital. There's the same priest every week, intoning the same tired lines in the same bored voice, making the same gestures, asking the congregation to sit, or kneel, or stand in all the right places. And the flock responds in turn, repeating the same phrases as last week, and the week before, and the week before that... Is it any surprise then that people are feeling that this charade is meaningless in their lives, when we have become so accustomed to a fast, colourful and interesting life? I suppose that back before TV was invented, or when it consisted of only a few channels transmitting in the evening in black and white, when Paceville and Buġibba were quiet little backwater places, going to mass was a big and interesting event, practically a family outing. Today it's often viewed as just a waste of time, and even Catholics who doggedly attend mass each week show a marked preference for that priest who manages to compress mass into as short a time as possible. Some try to make mass a bit interesting, adding music of different kinds, or even brightening up the venue a little, but few would choose a cake for its icing if the inside is dry.

So what else is the Church good for? Its private schools? There is no doubt that the Church does run some good (and expensive) schools, but that is not specifically a religious matter. There are also very good non-religious private and public schools. Is it the occasional tirades issued by the Vatican or Curia? People are growing increasingly tired and skeptical about them. Despite the church's insistence that divorce is a terrible evil, one look at the statistics will show that in our divorce-free country, all is not rosy in the marriage business. Separated couples and single parents are on the increase, despite the fact that there still is a piece of paper somewhere that declares them to be "married", and people are not so convinced that insisting that marriage is for life when it so obviously is not always so, is the solution. Fewer still think that annulment is anything other than divorce with a different name, and a nice cash cow for the church. Similar invectives aimed at gay people or gay marriage are likewise losing their lustre. The church hasn't convinced people how gay marriage is supposed to undermine "traditional" marriage, especially in view of the countries which have legalised it without affecting existing marriages and their success rate. Of course there are also the village festas - those remain quite popular, but then again it's not really the religious aspect which draws the crowds most. It's the band marches, the festive air, the hot dogs and candy floss, maybe the traditional running and dancing around with the titular statue hoisted on the shoulders of the highest bidders. And of course, the fireworks - especially if one resides a good distance away from where they are being let off.

To make matters worse, some of the church's actions have been seen as quite cruel. I know of more than one case where the church refused to baptise a child because its parents were "living in sin" (that is, their church marriage broke up irrevocably and eventually they started afresh). Considering that the same church teaches that these children will not enter heaven until and unless baptised, that's a rather cruel bit of blackmail from the church - one which does little to endear it to its followers.

All of this leads to quite a few people losing their faith in the church. Some will seek other denominations, while others will retain their faith in God without the religious trappings of an organised religion. Some will go the whole hog and abandon faith in gods altogether. In the past, gods were created to provide an explanation for phenomena we didn't quite understand. Volcanoes everywhere were believed to be gods, lightning was a fearsome weapon wielded by Zeus, and storms were a sign of the gods' anger. Over time, through a better understanding of the world around us, we learned about magma and tectonic plates, about static electricity in clouds, and about the sun's warmth causing the movement of large air masses. In a relatively short period, the ancient gods of volcanoes, lightning and storms were abandoned, roadkill on the highway to knowledge. Of course some remained, since by that time these deities had been fleshed out with other attributes besides their bad tempers. The deity of Christianity was no exception, and has gone through some major makeovers in the Bible. From a quick-tempered deity who got very directly involved in matters such as floods, plagues, the outcome of wars, punishing entire peoples for the most minor of infractions and yet happily going along with things like slavery and genocide, he gradually mellowed into the benign god of love and forgiveness described in the gospels, allowing him to survive in belief where other, less fortunate deities were made redundant or even became an embarassment.

But one thing did change. From providing explanations to phenomena we did not understand, these remaining deities required far more explanations for their own existence and the stories attributed to them. Many are the Christians who have a hard time justifying the idea that someone ought to be punished for the sins of their ancestors, or why God would repeatedly punish the Pharaoh and all Egyptians when it was the very same God who repeatedly hardened Pharaoh's heart. Some may read words like "If you ask anything in my name, I will do it" (John 14:14) and wonder why Jesus seems to have forgotten that when their prayers go unanswered. Of course, one look at any other religion and similar problems will crop up everywhere. In fact, if the prayer-granting rate is any indication of authenticity of the deity in question, it would seem to make little difference whether you pray to any god or to the fairy queen for all the good it will do.

I will, of course, not be making any suggestions about "bringing people back" to an activity which, in my view, serves no purpose. I have no doubt that religions will remain for a long while yet, kept alive partly by a combination of fear of retribution or hope of reward, and unwillingness to change something familiar. I have little doubt however that the downward trend in popularity will continue. The gods have served their purpose, and now deserve a nice, peaceful retirement.

Absolutely Relative

In recent times several religious and lay figures have spoken out against a “wave of moral relativism”, as if this were something new or something that the church is opposed to. Actually all morality is relative and that the only moral relativism the church opposes is that outside its control. In fact, Christianity itself is an excellent model of moral relativism.

We’re all aware of the darker periods of the church’s history – the inquisitions, the burning of “heretics”, the wars between Catholics and Protestants, the antisemitism and so on. Yet these were all things which were perceived to be good at the time. If morality were absolute we’d still believe they were good today, since an absolute morality does not change over time. It is because morality is relative that we form our own different opinions, while it is our arrogance that leads us to believe that whichever idea we have of morality is the only right one, and thus absolute. Today we perceive that these past events were evil. I have no doubt that future generations will look back at us today and determine that some of our current actions are evil too, even if we don’t see it that way right now.

Probably the best known opponents of moral absolutism is, of course, Jesus. Much of his story as reported in the gospels deals with his efforts to change some of the deeply-entrenched concepts of morality in his time and place, often clashing with other religious figures. The basic message of St.Paul was that we are no longer bound by the laws of Moses, but are saved through God’s grace. The very foundations of morality for the followers of the Bible were replaced overnight. Why is it that Christians freely eat pork or oysters today despite the strong prohibitions against them among the Bible’s 613 religious laws? Why are most Christians not even aware of these laws? Because morality changes. They used to be the very foundation of morality, believed to be established by God himself. Today they are barely of historical interest to Christians.

Even the personality of God changes completely in the course of the Bible story. From a cruel and vindictive god who thought nothing of slaughtering the entire human and animal population of the world except for the contents of one large boat, he turned into a loving and forgiving god who sacrificed his own life for the benefit of humanity. Today we are debating the precise instant in which a “person” is created in order to determine whether a fertilised egg has the same rights as a person. Quite a difference from the accounts of the slaughter of many different people or tribes (babies and children included) for no good reason at God’s behest.

Moral relativism is so real that it leads devout people to question and disagree with the actions of their god. In recounting the story of Exodus (in "The Ten Commandments"), filmmaker Cecil B.DeMille was so uncomfortable with the injustice of God hardening pharaoh’s heart repeatedly and punishing him and his people each time, that he invented a woman, “Nefertiri”, in order to let her take the blame for hardening Pharaoh’s heart. Many are the Christians who have a hard time accepting the story that their God killed every first-born of Egypt even though they were guilty of nothing, or that – acting on God’s orders – all Midianite men, women and boys were slaughtered, and all their girls taken for a lifetime of sexual slavery.

Morality is unavoidably relative because our concepts of good or bad are a product of our society, culture, education, and experiences – and those change. Maybe if God were to pop over in person and set the record straight, we’d have an absolute and unchanging code of morality. Unfortunately God stubbornly refuses to prove his existence or tell us his wishes, so all we are left with are a multitude of religions or churches each creating a different God in their own image, and insisting that theirs is the real one and that he wants everyone to obey the said church’s leaders.

Many Christians are familiar with one particular argument of moral relativism – that for something to be a sin, the person doing it must do it intentionally and knowingly. In other words, it depends on the circumstances. If morality were absolute, then a sin would remain a sin irrespective of circumstances. By comparison, the laws of a country are binding whether or not one knows about them, which is why one must not confuse what is illegal and what is immoral.

Moral relativism is in itself neither good nor bad – it just describes what morality is. Of course we have history to teach us that people who believe in an absolute source of morality are not necessarily good – hence we have people who get the idea that God (as an absolute source of morality) wants them to plant a bomb in front of such and such a clinic, or kill someone who looks Jewish, or to hijack a plane and fly it straight into a skyscraper.

Since there is no absolute standard by which to measure morality, such topics will remain subject to debate.

Software Patents – the threat to IT

“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can ... A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose.”

Bill Gates, “Challenges and Strategy” memo, 16^th May 1991

It says much about the above statement that it was written in 1991, before Microsoft built up its own massive repertiore of patents and became one of the very same giants that Bill Gates was referring to, before he became the world’s richest person.

Software patents are rather different from patents granted in just about any other industry, partly because software is itself unlike other products. Very often, little research or capital investment is required to come up with an idea on which a patent is subsequently granted. Patents have already been granted by the European Patent Office (EPO) for concepts as simple as selling items over the internet, tabbed interfaces, paying using a credit card over a network, sending gifts to third parties, or showing related items that might interest a customer based on their previous purchases.¹ If the patents granted so far by the EPO are anything to go by, I see no reason to be happy about such a policy becoming a pan-European law.

There are an estimated 20-30,000 software patents granted by the EPO. It has become virtually impossible to write any software whatsoever without infringing on several of these without the authors being aware of it. Any software which uses a patented technology is open to lawsuits demanding royalty payments or damages. The legal process itself is long and expensive, and many companies have either decided to pay up to avoid the legal battles, or were bankrupted in the process of defending themselves.

It is worth noting that just over three quarters of all software patents granted in Europe did not go to European countries at all – the USA and Japan alone account for almost three quarters of all European patents². There are no two ways of looking at this – software patents work against the European software industry.

One reason that the IT industry is different from other areas is that it is essential for different systems to have universal standards to which all parties subscribe, in order for the industry to thrive. Imagine how it would be if every ISP adopted its own, mutually incompatible protocol for sending and receiving email. These standards can only exist as long as they are not controlled by any single party. Many a company has tried to get rich quick by gaining control of these standards through patents. Some companies actually do nothing else – they buy or register as many patents as they can and sit on them quietly until they see a large, rich company developing something that falls under the patent’s description, then pounce. One recent case which made the news was when a small, previously-unnoticed company called Eolas successfully sued Microsoft for half a billion dollars for permitting the use of plugin-based technology in their browsers. This technology is behind products like Macromedia Flash and Java applets. While this patent was later nullified after a review, if successful it could have meant a massive redesign of many web pages and sites. One should note that Eolas did not actually produce any product – both the browsers and the applications that display Flash or Java applets were created by other companies, and the technology used was quite run-of-the-mill. Eolas merely managed to get a patent on a description on paper.

In a similar way, Microsoft frequently takes out patents on simple concepts such as double-clicking a mouse, or on data formats such as their FAT file system or their new Office document formats. The latter are a way for Microsoft to try to prevent any competing products from being able to read the documents that customers produce using their products, thus effectively tying customers to their products indefinitely.

One good example of how a patent-free industry favours the world as a whole is the web itself. Many people browsing the web freely today are unaware that the world wide web was invented, in 1989, by Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN in Switzerland. Berners-Lee also wrote the first web browser, the first web server and the first website. Perhaps his greatest contribution however was his decision, supported by CERN, to make his invention freely available with no royalties and no patents. It was the decision that would make the web into the incredible medium it is today.

What would have happened if CERN or Berners-Lee had decided to take out patents on every new aspect of the web? Would consumers have to pay a small fee for every website they visit, or every search query? Would the web even exist today?

The United States is currently facing a nightmare of trying to sort out its patent tangle. The Federal Trade Commission has urged the Patent and Trademark Office to revise its modus operandi, making it more difficult to acquire patents and easier to challenge them³. The last thing we need in Europe is to repeat the mistakes made across the Atlantic all over again.

While software patents are a general threat and stumbling block to all software development, it is especially harmful to the free/open source model, in which the authors write and distribute their software freely, and thus have no direct revenue from which to either pay off litigating companies or engage them in expensive legal battles.

This is the situation being faced by the various institutions in Europe at the moment. While the European Parliament has repeatedly rejected a proposal for a US-style patent law throughout Europe, the council of ministers and the EU commission has been strongly promoting it. Large corporations, especially American ones, have also been lobbying strongly to have their patent repertoire recognised in all EU countries, allowing them to sue European companies.

Having a common European policy and mutual recognition as regards patents is a good thing. Allowing patents on software, algorithms, business methods or formats is not. What happens in the future depends on the outcome of the current disagreement between the European Parliament and the Council and Commission.

1 See http://webshop.ffii.org/
2 See http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/stats/index.en.html#appland
3 See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/30/ftc_calls_for_us_patent/