BC Ferries Looking Out For Your Safety

Something to think about the next time you are taking a ferry ride: The BC Ferries union is fighting to get two of the people that helped sink the Queen of the North reinstated.

The BC Ferry and Marine Workers' Union wants the Courts to review the suspension of two bridge officers on the sunken Queen of the North. The Union has filed a petition in BC Supreme Court

In July 2006, BC Ferries suspended Karl Lilgert and Kevin Hilton, two bridge officers on board the Queen of the North the night it struck Gil Island and sank. The Union grieved the suspensions but Arbitrator Brian Foley upheld them.

Foley said the two refused to testify in person at a BC Ferries Divisional Inquiry about the critical time from when the vessel neared Gil Island to when it sank, unless their testimony was protected by privilege. Foley called that a serious and continuing act of insubordination.

The Union applied to the Labour Relations Board for a review of Foley's ruling, but it was dismissed. Now, the Union wants the Court to set aside both Foley and the LRB's rulings.

I hate that organizations like this tend to have no threshold at which point they will stop fighting for their members... you see the same thing with bad cops all the time.

The Hidden Risks of Prosecuting Digital Piracy

File sharing, theft of intellectual property, piracy, you name it. Some people do it because they are cheap, some people do it to stick it to the man, and many people do it because it is easier than legitimately buying the music/software/movie/whatever. Until big media companies bring their distribution practices into the 21st century, there is going to be rampant piracy.

And since big media companies seem very reluctant to switch business models, that means they will settle for fighting the tide with lawsuits.

OK, whatever. This is all old news.

The interesting part is this: The only reason these lawsuits have been even somewhat successful is because the dominant file sharing applications are built to favor speed and convenience over anonymity. If the lawsuits make using standard P2P too risky, people will migrate to relatively secure networks, like Freenet or Tor. And by "relatively secure", I mean "not worth cracking unless you are looking for terrorists with doomsday devices".

And this is bad!

Not because it massively increases the bandwidth usage of P2P apps, negatively impacting the rest of the internet (although it does). Not because piracy with will grow in leaps and bounds now that users feel there are no potential consequences (and it will).

The bad comes from the fact that these networks provide anonymity by storing data on all member nodes, as well as passing it through random nodes. So by being a piracy-loving member of these communities you are:

1. Providing camouflage for people doing actual evil things. Think signal-to-noise ratios for FBI agents looking for child porn producers or Osama bin Laden (or something that really offends you).
   
2. actually helping those people by storing their data and anonymizing their traffic.

Now, if I was living in a some fascist dictatorship, I would be totally willing to help out global evil in order to thwart local evil. But to do that for free movies? Unacceptable!

But this will be the result of driving end-user pirates further underground. They won't have any idea what they are indirectly supporting, and the risks they are taking on.

Queen of the North Incident Report

The TSB has released an incident report on the sinking of the Queen of the North. As usual, lots of relatively small mistakes had to be made for this tragedy to occur.

3.1 Findings as to Causes and Contributing Factors

1. The fourth officer (4/O) did not order the required course change at the Sainty Point waypoint.

2. Various distractions likely contributed to the 4/O's failure to order the course change. Furthermore, believing that the course change had been made, the next course change was not expected for approximately 27 minutes.

3. For the 14 minutes after the missed course change, the 4/O did not adhere to sound watchkeeping practices and failed to detect the vessel's improper course.

4. When the 4/O became aware that the vessel was off course, the action taken was too little too late to prevent the vessel from striking Gil Island.

5. The navigation equipment was not set up to take full advantage of the available safety features and was therefore ineffective in providing a warning of the developing dangerous situation.

6. The composition of the bridge watch lacked an appropriately certified third person. This reduced the defences and made it more likely that the missed course change would go undetected.

7. The working environment on the bridge of the Queen of the North was less than formal, and the accepted principles of navigation safety were not consistently or rigorously applied. Unsafe navigation practices persisted which, in this occurrence, contributed to the loss of situational awareness by the bridge team.

8. No accurate head count of passengers and crew was taken before abandoning the vessel, thus precluding a focused search for missing persons at that time.

While the evacuation was fairly successful, the ship was operating around a fifth of its official capacity. A full load of passengers would have been really bad news.

Incident reports like this, while morbid, are phenomenally educational. One of the few things I consider worth paying tax for.

If you want to learn almost everything about a field, read the incident reports. The report for the aircraft collision over Switzerland a few years back is also very good.

Only the Government...

Nothing quite like witnessing first-hand your tax dollars at work!

I had the misfortune of visiting a Vancouver Service Canada location this week, to get a SIN for my infant son.

First you go through the triage desk, which is actually pretty reasonable except for the fact there are five clerks there but only three of them helping anyone in line. Your details get taken, and you are told to sit down and wait for your name to be called. The place is nearly empty, so it's looking to be a quick visit.

Maybe not so quick... it seems to be about ten minutes between each customer being called up. Oh well, that gives me time to observe the following amusing things:

• They store a "secret" key on the top of the entrance door frame. Buddy was quick, but not very stealthy about retrieving it. Not sure where he took it though.
• The combination for the blast door that protects the clerks from us is pretty simple. One lady in particular was pretty sloppy about shielding it from my prying eyes.
• My amusement about knowing the code was cut short when I realized that right next to the blast door is a sub-waist-high desk that you could just hop over instead. I hope that door didn't cost too much!
  

So now is about when it becomes clear that there are actually multiple secret queues, because people that got there after me are getting served first. Great! So now I have absolutely no way to measure how much longer the wait is going to be. Much to my surprise, they do have a clock up but it is an hour off, adding to the disorientation. Did I mention that I was reasonably sick too? Good times. At least I can watch the triage staff chat and drink coffee! Bastards.

So I ended up waiting an hour for a five minute process could just as easily have been handled by on online form. It seems that employees of the Government of Canada are not able to handle even two types of responsibilities, so you have to wait for the single guy in charge of your category of business.

Red Even By Portland Standards

And here I thought that the Minutemen guarding the US from Canadians were out to lunch...

Turns out there are undesirable Canadians sneaking into the US to live illegally. Doesn't want his last name published, but apparently has no problem with the 18 or so pictures featured in the article.

Good riddance, eh!