Twitter's Jack Dorsey brings Square mobile pay system to Canada

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is diving into Canada's fast-moving mobile payment market, bringing his vision of making "commerce easy for everyone" to a country he sees as ripe for his latest technology startup.

Today's launch of Square, a free mobile credit card reader Dorsey's San Francisco company first made available in the U.S. in 2010, is the latest move in a Canadian mobile payment world that already resembles a Wild West. A number of major players — telecoms, credit card companies, banks and others — are already jockeying for position and for the big prizes of revenue and access to customer information.

Square, which the company says is already processing more than $8 billion in annualized payments in the U.S., gives small businesses and anyone selling anything — from piano lessons to cappuccinos — the ability to accept credit card payments by attaching a tiny white peripheral to an iPhone, iPad or Android device.

Square gives small business owners and anyone selling anything the ability to accept credit card payments by attaching a tiny white peripheral to an iPhone, iPad or Android device. (Square)

A free Square Register app works with the peripheral and runs on the mobile device. The transaction rate is set at 2.75 per cent, lower than traditional credit card transaction processing fees.

Dorsey, the company's co-founder and CEO, says there were a number of reasons to make Canada Square's first foray outside the United States, including relationships with banking partners that made it easier to get up and running here quickly.

"We are seeing something that we saw early on in the United States, which is there is a lot of small business activity. There's a lot of entrepreneurial spirit."

Customers could range from someone who wants to sell vegetables at a farmers' market, to a personal trainer or golf coach, to a babysitter. They are the type of sellers who traditionally wouldn't have accepted credit cards, mainly due to the high cost of terminals for processing the payments.

"It was actually locking people out of the economy and locking people out of commerce," says Dorsey.

Square is just one of the new players eyeing opportunities in Canada's growing mobile payment market. Today's launch announcement in Vancouver comes just two days after Research in Motion said it had struck an agreement to help manage security technology that will make it possible for many Canadians to pay for goods and services with their smartphones though "mobile wallets."

The BlackBerry maker has been chosen by EnStream, a company set up by Canada's three largest wireless networks, to provide the security infrastructure that would make the substitute for debit and credit cards at checkouts work.

"We think that the Canadian market is uniquely situated to probably be one of the early adopting markets for cashless or contactless payment solutions," RIM's Canadian managing director, Andrew MacLeod, said in an interview.

"We think this is the perfect opportunity for this type of technology to really get a footprint and get traction."

Traction is key

And in the highly competitive mobile payment market, finding that traction is key.

For Dorsey, the traction comes most significantly not through the technology, but by offering a way of "making commerce easy for everyone."

Square is "providing the simplest and cheapest tools" to allow people to "immediately provide the best customer experience in whatever they do," he says.

"We think that's what builds natural loyalty and we think that's what really the mainstream wants to see and what people want to use on a daily basis."

For Dorsey, the technology should not be front and centre in the transaction.

"Technology is only good if it really fades away and it does something that humans actually want to do and it makes a commodity experience more personal. We believe that Square does that extremely well and we haven't seen anyone else in the market do anything close to it."

No burden

To begin with, the Square reader will accept credit card payments from Canadian customers. The free Square Register app will also offer merchants a point-of-sale system for accepting payments and tracking inventory, something Dorsey touts for its ability to help owners make decisions around their business's growth.

In time, Dorsey says the company may add a service available to U.S. merchants that creates what he describes as a "really unique VIP experience."

In the U.S., through localization technology, a regular customer at a business such as a coffee shop can walk in carrying a mobile device and be recognized because his or her picture pops up on the merchant's screen. The merchant could then have the customer's regular cappuccino or latte waiting on the counter.

"I then walk out. I don't bring out my wallet, I don't bring out my phone. It's all taken care of. So that's how we believe payment should be, should feel ... it shouldn't feel like a burden at all," says Dorsey.

The launch plan for Canada involves getting merchants on board, so they can accept the cards people already have en masse in their pockets — Visa and MasterCard — "and then bringing more of this [VIP experience] as quickly as we can," says Dorsey.

New payment network

Dorsey is under no illusion about the realm entered by Square, which was born after co-founder and glass artist Jim McKelvey was unable to sell one of his works because he couldn't accept a credit card. Dorsey calls it the "most competitive and heavily defended industry in the world."

But Square's approach to mobile payments in the U.S. has garnered attention. Rick Oglesby, a senior analyst with Aite Group, a market research firm specializing in financial services, says Square has had "really explosive" growth and a lot of success so far.

"They're a very high-potential company, very disruptive influence, so I think that they make the payments world a little bit better, a little bit stronger," he said in an interview from Las Vegas.

While the company is relatively small, Oglesby sees the chance for it to grow.

"They signed a deal to process all of Starbucks payments, so I think they have the potential to become really a new payment network."

But Square's competitors aren't sitting idle. Online payment giant PayPal, for example, launched a trial of its own free thumb-sized card reader, PayPal Here, in Canada in March and offered it to select merchants, with a wider release expected later this year.

Oglesby says changes in the payment world are inevitable in Canada because of mobile technology, particularly since businesses would like to see customers make payments on phones due to the extra communication channel it provides with consumers.

"Mobile technology is going to drive that whether it's through Square or somebody else, because the opportunity is so big," he says.

"At the same time, Square's been one of the leaders in the space in the U.S. and I would expect them to be so in Canada."

Lessons from Twitter

Some of Dorsey's inspiration and guidance for Square has come from his experience with Twitter, the microblogging service that Forbes recently reported is on target to hit revenue of $290 million. (Forbes puts a value of $845 million on the 26.4 per cent share of Square Dorsey owns.)

"I learned a lot from what we did right and also what we did wrong at Twitter that immediately went into how we built Square," says Dorsey, "and I'm proud that Square's making its own new unique mistakes rather than repeat mistakes from the past and definitely moving faster than we were able to in the early days of Twitter."

Dorsey says at Square and Twitter, there's been a similar mindset at work.

"We're going to build something that we want to use and that we love and would love to see in the world. And we're making a bet that other people would love the same and so that's proven to be the case in both cases."

Still, the question remains: How do you know when to take that bet?

Dorsey says it's just a feeling, like the feeling when Twitter sent its first tweet, and 20 phones buzzed around the office.

"It was magical," he recalls. "For me, any technology that makes you feel superhuman, like you have a special ability that no one else has, is something to make a big bet on."

With files from The Canadian Press

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Google cameras map popular Grand Canyon trails

Google and its street-view cameras already have taken users to narrow cobblestone alleys in Spain using a tricycle, inside the Smithsonian with a push cart and to British Columbia's snow-covered slopes by snowmobile.

The search giant now has brought its all-seeing eyes — mounted for the first time on a backpack — down into the Grand Canyon, showcasing the attraction's most popular hiking trails on the South Rim and other walkways.

It's the latest evolution in mapping technology for the Mountain View, Calif., company, which has used a rosette of cameras to photograph thousands of cities and towns in dozens of countries for its Street View feature. With a click of the mouse, Internet users are transported virtually for a 360-degree view of locales they may have read about only in tourist books and seen in flat, 2-D images.

"Any of these sort of iconic, cultural, historical locations that are not accessible by road is where we want to go," said Ryan Falor, product manager at Google.

Google announced the trekker earlier this year but made its first official collection of data this week at the Grand Canyon.

The backpacks aren't ready for volunteer use, but Google has said it wants to deploy them at national forests, to the narrow streets of Venice, Mount Everest and to ancient ruins and castles.

The move to capture the Grand Canyon comes after Apple chose to drop Google Maps from its mobile operating systems and opted to use its own mapping program that was derided for, among other things, poor directions and missing towns.

Steve Silverman, operations manager for Google didn't directly address the competition in saying: "Just trying to document a trail, it's going to be hard to beat this."

Google launched its Street View feature in 2007 and has expanded from 5 U.S. cities to more than 3,000 in 43 countries. Google teams and volunteers have covered more than 5 million miles with the Street View vehicles on a scale that other companies haven't approached, said Mike Dobson, president of Telemapics, a company that monitors mapping efforts.

"You could safely say that it's a standout, well-used application and they don't really have any competition," he said.

As the sun rose Monday, Luc Vincent, Google engineering director, strapped on one of the 18-kilogram backpacks and set down the Bright Angel Trail to the Colorado River — a nearly 16-kilometre hike that goes from 2,103 metres in elevation to 732 metres. He hiked back up from Phantom Ranch, which can be 30 degrees warmer than at the rim, through the South Kaibab Trail and also gathered data on other trails.

Google's Trekker is about 1.2 metres in height when set on the ground, and when worn, the camera system extends about 60 centimetres above the operator's shoulders. (Rick Bowmer/Associated Press)

The so-called trekker captures images every 2.5 seconds with 15 cameras that are 5 megapixels each, from the rest areas, the steep switchbacks, the change from juniper trees to scrub brush and the traffic that moves aside as a courtesy to mule riders.

The GPS data is limited, so Google must compensate with sensors that record temperature, vibrations and the orientation of the device as it changes, before it stiches the images together and makes them available to users in a few months, Falor said.

Hikers that were on the trail when the data was gathered will have their faces blurred — an attempt by Google to ensure privacy. Street View has run into problems in places like Europe and Australia for scooping up information transmitted over unsecured wireless networks.

A removable hard drive on the trekker stores the data gathered at the Grand Canyon. Tourists looked at the trekker strangely this week, as if it was something from outer space.

Sharon Kerfoot, a first-time visitor from Alberta, said being able to view the terrain ahead of time, gauge the difficulty of the hike and know just how wide the path is would benefit those considering a trip to the Grand Canyon. She and a group of friends headed down the same path as Vincent but on mules, not foot.

"I think it's an excellent idea to give people a broader perspective on what they're getting into," she said.

What the images won't tell visitors is how much water they should carry down the trails, how to prepare for temperature changes, what type of food to bring and how much, and how best to protect the natural resources, park spokeswoman Maureen Oltrogge said.

"Stitched together with other information out there, the technology could be valuable," she said.

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Italian quake ruling rattles global science community

Earthquake experts say an Italian court's decision to convict a group of scientists of manslaughter in relation to a 2009 earthquake is likely to send a chill through the global scientific community.

"It's a travesty," says Canadian earthquake expert Gail Atkinson. "I think that, unfortunately, what it will result in is seismologists and other scientists being afraid to say anything at all."

The court ruled on Monday that six scientists and one ex-government official were guilty of manslaughter for failing to adequately warn Italians about a deadly 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo region. Each defendant was sentenced to six years in prison.

The decision aroused rancour in the scientific community.

On Tuesday, an editorial in the esteemed journal Nature stated that the "verdict is perverse and the sentence ludicrous."

'It's a travesty... what it will result in is seismologists and other scientists being afraid to say anything at all."'— Gail Atkinson, Canada Research Chair in Earthquake Hazards and Ground Motions

On the same day, four top Italian disaster experts quit their jobs, saying the ruling will make it impossible for them to perform their duties.

Chill in science community

That feeling of reticence extended beyond Italy's borders.

"I just think scientists are going to be reluctant to deal with the problem, particularly government scientists," says John Clague, a professor in the department of earth sciences at Simon Fraser University and a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

"Academics like myself, we're going to be very guarded about the words we use" to talk about seismic activity in any particular geographical region.

The 6.3-magnitude quake on April 6, 2009, killed 309 people, injured about 1,500 others and laid waste to most of the buildings in the medieval town of L'Aquila.

Since the beginning of the 13-month trial, seismologists around the world have stressed that given current technology, there is no way to accurately forecast an earthquake.

In an interview with Nature at the outset of the trial last September, Italian prosecutor Fabio Picuti acknowledged this fact, saying, "I'm not crazy. I know they can't predict earthquakes."

When the trial started, Judge Giuseppe Romano Gargarella said that the defendants "gave inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" about whether a series of small tremors in the six months prior to the 2009 disaster were significant enough to issue a quake warning.

'Risk communication'

But others said the crux of the trial was not earthquake prediction, but risk communication.

In a blog post for Scientific American, journalist David Ropeik wrote that none of the scientists on the Great Risks commission, the national government body that evaluates the potential for natural disasters, actually spoke with the public about the possibility of an earthquake.

A firefighter assesses the damage after a 6.0 magnitude earthquake in Finale Emilia on May 20, 2012. It was the strongest quake to hit Italy in three years. (Giorgio Benvenuti/Reuters)

That task fell to Bernardo De Bernardinis, a government official who was not a seismologist, and who tried to assuage public concern by glibly suggesting they relax with a glass of wine. De Bernardinis was among the defendants in the case.

Other defendants included Franco Barberi, head of the Great Risks Commission and Enzo Boschi, the head of the national Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology at the time.

While there is no way to accurately predict a quake, Ropeik writes that "the scientists did a horrible job of communicating."

Facing the public

In the months preceding the 2009 earthquake, the area had experienced a so-called "swarm" of seismological events, the biggest of which hit a magnitude of 4.3 on the Richter scale. This swarm increased the probability that a larger quake could follow, but the actual chance of it happening had only marginally increased.

Atkinson, a University of Western Ontario earth sciences professor and Canada Research Chair on earthquake hazards, says that scientists aren't really cut out for public relations.

"I think that the difficulty is that when scientists speak, they like to equivocate," says Atkinson.

"They say things like, 'There's a two per cent chance that there could be a large earthquake, but a 98 per cent chance that there won't be,' " said Atkinson. "And that's not really what the public wants to hear.

"The public wants the scientists to say there will be one or there won't be one. And I think it's hard for the public to understand that a scientist can't say that."

Michael Bostock, a University of British Columbia professor of seismology, says that there needs to be a clearer definition of roles for scientists.

He says that the role of scientists should be "to provide objective information about natural hazards" to civic officials, whose role in turn should be "to weigh the benefits of protective actions against the costs of sending out alarms," as well as conveying the information to the public.

Clague concedes the Italian scientists did a weak job of communicating the seismic peril, but wonders whether a more ominous warning would have altered people's behavior.

"What if they had said that, within a week, there might be a devastating earthquake? Would it have changed public behaviour? I doubt it, because you can't predict these things with any certainty at all," says Clague.

"That would have just put people in a more anxious state."

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Canada slow switching to next-generation internet

Canada is making moves toward the next generation of the internet, as real estate on the World Wide Web runs out, but some experts warn the country is falling behind.

The Canadian government has recently outlined its plan to upgrade all of its websites, and more Canadian portals have moved to the new system, called Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6).

These moves are part of a push to move away from the current protocol, Version 4, which is running out of IP addresses — the unique number that every device that connects to the internet must have.

Jacques Latour, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority's director of information technology, says Canada has made progress, but it is moving "way too slow."

'There's a big train, with a little light, and it's coming sooner than you think.'—Jacques Latour, of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority

He cautions that within a few years, some Canadian users still on outdated infrastructure may find they can't connect to new websites or to users who have switched to the new system, which is not fully compatible with the old one.

"There's going to be more than three billion internet users on the planet that are going to join the internet," Mr. Latour told CBC News.

"There's not going to be enough [on the old version] to support that … there's a big train, with a little light, and it's coming sooner than you think."

Warnings of 'IP exhaustion'

The challenge of this transition to a new internet structure was one of many issues facing the World Wide Web that were discussed last week at a Toronto meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the key oversight agency for internet addresses.

Experts have been warning for years that the internet has been heading for "IP exhaustion," meaning the internet is running out of IP addresses.

When the internet was conceived in the 1980s, it was set up under Internet Protocol Version 4, which could accommodate roughly 4.3 billion IP addresses.

At the time, that seemed like plenty. But in February 2011, the last blocks of available IP addresses globally were handed out to the internet registrar for the Asia-Pacific region.

Canada still has access to a block of available IP addresses from the internet registry for North America, which called is the American Registry for Internet Numbers, or ARIN. It currently has about 47 million still available, said Paul Andersen, one of the members of the board of trustees of ARIN.

The registry does not predict how long that will last, but "it's definitely not a lot of address space," said Andersen.

IP addresses could run out in 12-18 months

IPv6 resolves this problem by expanding internet real estate from roughly 4 billion to 340 undecillion IP addresses. That's 340 with 36 zeroes after it.

The issue, however, is getting everyone to switch.

Ed Juskevicius, Industry Canada's manager for infrastructure security, estimates ARIN's block of addresses will last anywhere between a year or 18 months before running out.

'There's very little content in the world's websites that anyone might want to reach today that can't be reached by IPv4. That will change.'— Ed Juskevicius of Industry Canada

Still, he doesn't think it's time to sound the alarm bells for a few years.

"There's very little content in the world's websites that anyone might want to reach today that can't be reached by IPv4. That will change. But today it's not a big problem. I don't think it will be a problem for a little while yet."

The average internet user has no idea what IPv6 is, or even how an IP address works, for that matter. But there has been a push in recent years to educate them.

Government websites in planning phase

On World IPv6 Day, June 8, 2011, some of the world's internet giants — including Google, Facebook and Yahoo — enabled their support for IPv6, in the first large scale "test" of the next-generation addressing system. And a year later, these same large companies permanently enabled IPv6.

It helped. After the launch, the number of .ca websites reachable on the new protocol spiked from about 1,000 to 12,000 today, said Latour. It's a big step, but the momentum has tapered off, he said.

Also in June, the Canadian government laid out its plan on how it plans to switch over its websites to the new protocol.

Federal organizations are in the first phase of planning, and have until the end of september next year to get ready, said Juskevicius.

Then, by March of 2015, all citizen and public facing websites should be IPV6 accessible, he added.

"The government is moving along as best as it can," he said.

Canada can't legislate the country's internet service providers and the rest of the industry to make the switch, he said, but they should get moving faster.

"Time is certainly now to get started," said Juskevicius. "Because … it's not as simple as flipping on a switch and suddenly we have it. There's some new things you have to buy, and new ways to run your network."

Most consumers unaware

Still, about 58 per cent of the big service providers or content creators who regularly come to ARIN for IP addresses have not asked for their block of next-generation addresses yet, said Andersen.

"That's a bit of a concern," he said.

But the average customer doesn't ask for anything beyond faster speeds, or wifi, said Victor Kuarsing, the architect of IP Networks for Rogers Communications.

"The majority of customers don't specifically ask for V6 today," he said during a panel last week. "We would like that to change."

And consumers don't realize that when they are buying computer equipment, such as routers, they may be buying something that will not work with newer versions of the internet, said Owen DeLong, IPv6 evangelist with Hurricane Electric internet services in the U.S.

"Consumers need to be made aware of this fact … they could be buying equipment that may get obsoleted quite quickly," said Owen Delong, IPv6 evangelist.

Canada is too late to be the leader in IPv6 adoption, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, said Juskevicius.

"We're too late to be the leader in IPV6 adoption. But being a leader can be painful, time consuming, you're going where nobody has gone before," he said.

"You're learning things the hard way. Being a fast follower is a very valid approach to deploying new technology, and I think we're in a not-bad position to do that."

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Auditor general's report to scrutinize national security

Auditor General Michael Ferguson will table a report today on how well governments are protecting critical infrastructure against cyber threats. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

Canada's national security will be the focus of two reports due to be released today.

The auditor general will table a report on how well governments are protecting critical infrastructure against cyber threats, and the security intelligence review committee is set to table its annual report on the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the country's spy agency.

Auditor General Michael Ferguson will release his audit of Canada's cyber security strategy at 10 a.m. ET. Ferguson has been examining how well federal organizations are working with provinces and the private sector to protect infrastructure and key government information systems against cyber threats.

NDP MP Randall Garrison, the Opposition's public safety critic, told CBC News that recent moves suggest the government is trying to get out ahead of the reports.

"They've been scrambling to make funding announcements and all kinds of other announcements ahead of this report, so there must be something rather bad in this report, so that's what I'm expecting to see," he said.

Last week, the Conservative government announced $155 million to improve how Canada detects and responds to cyberattacks.

It's been almost two years since the Treasury Board, the Department of Finance and a defence research agency were compromised in a cyberattack that was traced back to servers in China.

CSIS has a role in investigating cyber threats, but in its last annual report, the security intelligence review committee said the spy agency's mandate prevents it from doing more.

"I think the complexities of cyber [security] may compel us to rethink what the mandate of CSIS is and whether or not they should be doing more direct work in helping mitigate the threat of cyber [attacks]," Ray Boisvert, a former assistant director of intelligence for CSIS, told CBC News.

The NDP says the government must make it clear who takes the lead on Canada's cyber security — CSIS, the RCMP or the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC).

The CSEC, Canada's national cryptologic agency, provides the government with foreign signals intelligence and helps protect electronic information and communications. The agency also provides technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies.

Ferguson's report will also include audits of the use of professional service contractors by Public Works and other government departments, the transition of ill and injured military personnel to civilian life, how the Department of National Defence manages its properties and how the Department of Finance analyzes and reports on Canada's long-term fiscal sustainability.

With files from Alison Crawford

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Apple's smaller iPad expected today

Apple's new, smaller iPad, positioned between the iPhone and the iPad, is forecast to be aimed directly at competition from Amazon's Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus machines, with a price to match.

The new iPad Mini is expected to be shown for the first time today at a 1 p.m. ET media event in California.

The device has been widely predicted to have a 7.85-inch screen (measured diagonally), which is smaller than the conventional iPad's 9.7-inch display and bigger than the iPhone's four-inch screen. It will be slightly larger than the seven-inch display offered by its main competitors.

The mystery until today was the price, variously forecast to be between $249 and $299 U.S. The Kindle Fire starts at $159, and the Nexus 7 at $199. Meanwhile, Apple sells the iPad 2 for $399 and the 4-inch iPod Touch for $199. Company watchers are pegging the price of the smaller iPad somewhere in between.

One blogger on Monday forecasted an ambitious price of $329.

Analysts such as Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets believe that Apple will also sell a step-up version of the iPad Mini, one with the ability to access 4G cellular networks for an additional monthly fee. That's a feature that the cheaper, seven-inch tablets don't have.

Apple is holding Tuesday's presentation at a theatre in San Jose. The company typically starts selling a new phone or iPad a week or two after announcing it, but it could treat the new iPad as a minor product update, in which case it could start sales right after the announcement.

Steve Jobs was skeptical

Apple has sold 84 million iPads since the tablet's debut in April 2010. One of the first competitors to appear was a Samsung tablet with a seven-inch screen. Apple's late founder, Steve Jobs, made a rare appearance at an October 2010 conference call with analysts — his last — to deride the concept.

"The reason we wouldn't make a seven-inch tablet isn't because we don't want to hit a price point. It's because we don't think you can make a great tablet with a seven-inch screen," Jobs said. "The seven-inch tablets are tweeners, too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad."

Jobs, who died last October, had strong opinions, but he also changed his mind frequently. The production of a smaller iPad would not be the first time that Apple has made a product that Jobs initially dismissed as ridiculous.

In an internal email sent in January 2011, Apple senior vice-president Eddy Cue said that a seven-inch tablet would work well and that Jobs was starting to come around to the idea. The email surfaced as part of Apple's patent trial against Samsung Electronics Co. this year.

Apart from the smaller iPad, Apple is also expected to refresh some other products. There was speculation that the MacBook will come in a version with a 13-inch, high-resolution "Retina" screen. The 15-inch MacBook got an option for a Retina screen this summer.

With files from The Associated Press

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Canadian Space Agency unveils prototype fleet of rovers

Move over Canadarm: the rovers are coming! the rovers are coming!

At its headquarters in Longueuil, Que. Friday, the Canadian Space Agency rolled out a fleet of about a half-dozen prototype rovers that are the forerunners of vehicles that may one day explore the moon or Mars.

The agency said the terrestrial rovers bring it one step closer to developing the next generation for space exploration.

Some are knee-high mini-rovers that can work side-by-side, helping astronauts to dig or scout out small spaces like caves.

Then there are larger rovers, like a six-wheeled lunar exploration version, which can be upgraded to transport astronauts around the moon.

Gilles Leclerc, the agency's director-general of space exploration, said it could be at least eight years before the final versions of the robotic workhorses head for distant destinations.

"The horizon we're looking at in terms of taking the technologies on these terrestrial prototypes and transferring them into a real space mission to the moon or Mars is about 2020," he said.

Leclerc said the lunar and Martian space rovers now in development put Canada in a good position and he pointed out that NASA is already knocking at the door.

"In fact, we have an invitation right now from NASA to start working on advancing these technologies and taking them to flight for eventually a mission," he said.

Leclerc said Canada has a long legacy of developing technologies for the mining industry and that those technologies would be useful in space exploration.

"A large chunk of the activities we are going to do on the moon and Mars are related to geology and mining," he noted.

Leclerc said "Artemis," a lightweight four-wheeled rover, and the larger six-wheeled "Lunar Exploration Light Rover" are good candidates for the moon.

Iain Christie, president of Neptec, the prime contractor for Artemis, said Canada is "as far advanced as anybody certainly for the next round of lunar exploration."

"NASA has an experiment that they have been considering...that involves digging up lunar soil and making hydrogen and oxygen out of the soil," he said in an interview.

Industry Minister Christian Paradis, who attended the news conference along with space agency president Steve MacLean, said the technology being developed creates economic spinoffs.

One example is an electric all-terrain vehicle developed by Bombardier Recreational Products.

"We were able to transfer that technology and create a new vehicle completely electric and we are now distributing and manufacturing it in Sherbrooke," spokesman Pierre Pichette said.

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) and Neptec Design Group are the prime contractors on several of the rovers.

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Online vigilantes: Is 'doxing' a neighbourhood watch or dangerous witch hunt?

When the internet hacking group Anonymous claimed — wrongly, it seems — to have found the main anonymous online tormentor of B.C. teen Amanda Todd, before she took her own life, it was relying on information it found by what's called doxing.

Hackers and others who "dox" — or poke through internet documents to try to reveal real-life names behind anonymous identities — have been rooting around on the internet for a while.

'At its worst, it could be a kind of vigilantism.'—David Murakami Wood

In the real world, though, this kind of online sleuthing has created something of a conundrum for police forces and others.

The main concern being: are these actions the internet equivalent of a helpful Neighbourhood Watch, or do they run the risk of becoming an online witch hunt, with the particularly worrying potential of causing harm if they turn out to be wrong?

"At its worst, it could be a kind of vigilantism," says David Murakami Wood, associate professor in surveillance studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.

"It could be the return of the posse and those kinds of things, and you can imagine there are very bad versions of this."

But what if doxing could provide a helpful tip in a police investigation, or shed light on the identity of someone whose online actions, behind the cloak of anonymity, seem quite abhorrent?

"In some cases," says Murakami Wood, "you or I would approve of what's being done."

Range of sources

In the Amanda Todd case, internet data gathered by Anonymous was posted on a social media clipboard. Under a title "Amanda Todd's Punisher," viewers could find a name, an online user name, a location in New Westminster, B.C., and a year of birth.

Only trouble was the man the data pointed to had nothing to do with the Todd case, police said later.

Clues doxers can use lie in all sorts of online sources, ranging from Facebook pages to comment boards. Sometimes something in one place can be linked to something somewhere else. For those who are into it, it can be like an online treasure hunt.

People "may not reveal something on the one particular forum but on the other one they may reveal something that can be triangulated with other information they've given in another identity," says Murakami Wood.

"So those kinds of clues can be put together. It's like any other kind of detective work or forensic work in a way."

And it's really not that hard. In fact, most of what can be gleaned can be achieved with a minimum amount of technical knowledge, people in the field say.

The RCMP declined a request for an interview about doxing, pointing instead to its website in B.C., where a news release addressed the thousands of tips they were reviewing in the Todd case, and noted that online rumours were causing delays in the investigation.

'Everything we can'

"We are doing everything we can as quickly as we can. And we want to acknowledge the role of the public in submitting information," said Sgt. Peter Thiessen.

"But we want to urge everyone who has been touched by Amanda's story to respect Amanda's memory by being a responsible citizen of the internet and thinking critically about information received online before passing it along."

In that comment, police acknowledge a significant fact about policing: the need for help from the public in solving crime, whether in the real or online world

"Very much like the internet, the public police are not capable of singlehandedly producing order, preventing crime or even responding to crime without citizen input in the real world," says Michael Kempa, associate professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa and a Munk fellow of global journalism.

There are some specific reasons for that.

"The biggest one is a lot of space in which crime and inappropriate conduct takes place in the real world is not openly accessible to the police," says Kempa.

It's happening on private property, and police can't just go in willy-nilly, just as they can't gain automatic entry to a person's private online activities.

"Police need a reason to access your information just as they need a reason to enter your house, but also technically it's very difficult for police to penetrate a lot of internet space," says Kempa.

So what is acceptable?

So police are dependent on everyone from citizens to ISP providers to victims when they're trying to deal with anything nefarious online.

"It's impossible [for police] to keep up an unremitting watch over collective goings-on on the internet. If you can't do it in a city, you certainly can't do it on the internet," says Kempa, adding, "The trick will be that the public has to put pressure on itself to make sure the input is the right kind, [that] it doesn't slip into vigilantism."

In some ways, the online world has already started to evolve its own methods for determining what is generally acceptable.

Gawker, a media gossip blog, recently revealed the real-life name of a man known on the link-sharing community of Reddit as "Violentacrez." Among the sexually suggestive content he seemed to favour, Violentacrez liked to post pictures of underage girls or have people upload pictures of women taken without their knowledge.

In that case, says Murakami Wood, it's difficult to argue that Violentacrez, who has now given interviews under his real name, Michael Brutsch, a 49-year-old Texan, was actually having his free speech impinged by being identified.

"What these cases are showing is there is a limit, and it's not just a question of completely unbridled freedom of speech or unbridled privacy, that there are limits and these limits, if you like, are being created right now through these cases."

But what if it's wrong?

But in Violentacrez's case, the identification was right. What if, like in the Todd case, the identification is wrong?

"One of the problems with sort of vigilante action or actions taken by organizations that aren't accountable to anybody else is that there's no method of holding those organizations to account," says Murakami Wood.

Kempa says it's going to be up to society "to keep a lid on the appropriate assistance" that flows to police and others acting in the public interest.

"This is a debate that's going to come a lot more in society," he says. And it's unlikely to find an easy answer any time soon.

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Canada slow switching to next-generation internet

Canada is making moves toward the next generation of the internet, as real estate on the World Wide Web runs out, but some experts warn the country is falling behind.

The Canadian government has recently outlined its plan to upgrade all of its websites, and more Canadian portals have moved to the new system, called Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6).

These moves are part of a push to move away from the current protocol, Version 4, which is running out of IP addresses — the unique number that every device that connects to the internet must have.

Jacques Latour, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority's director of information technology, says Canada has made progress, but it is moving "way too slow."

'There's a big train, with a little light, and it's coming sooner than you think.'—Jacques Latour, of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority

He cautions that within a few years, some Canadian users still on outdated infrastructure may find they can't connect to new websites or or to users who have switched to the new system, which is not fully compatible with the old one.

"There's going to be more than three billion internet users on the planet that are going to join the internet," Mr. Latour told CBC News.

"There's not going to be enough [on the old version] to support that … there's a big train, with a little light, and it's coming sooner than you think."

Warnings of 'IP exhaustion'

The challenge of this transition to a new internet structure was one of many issues facing the World Wide Web that were discussed last week at a Toronto meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the key oversight agency for internet addresses.

Experts have been warning for years that the internet has been heading for "IP exhaustion," meaning the internet is running out of IP addresses.

When the internet was conceived in the 1980s, it was set up under Internet Protocol Version 4, which could accomodate roughly 4.3 billion IP addresses.

At the time, that seemed like plenty. But in February 2011, the last blocks of available IP addresses globally were handed out to the internet registrar for the Asia-Pacific region.

Canada still has access to a block of available IP addresses from the internet registry for North America, which called is the American Registry for Internet Numbers, or ARIN. It currently has about 47 million still available, said Paul Andersen, one of the members of the board of trustees of ARIN.

The registry does not predict how long that will last, but "it's definitely not a lot of address space," said Andersen.

IP addresses could run out in 12-18 months

IPv6 resolves this problem by expanding internet real estate from roughly 4 billion to 340 undecillion IP addresses. That's 340 with 36 zeroes after it.

The issue, however, is getting everyone to switch.

Ed Juskevicius, Industry Canada's manager for infrastructure security, estimates ARIN's block of addresses will last anywhere between a year or 18 months before running out.

'There's very little content in the world's websites that anyone might want to reach today that can't be reached by IPv4. That will change.'— Ed Juskevicius of Industry Canada

Still, he doesn't think it's time to sound the alarm bells for a few years.

"There's very little content in the world's websites that anyone might want to reach today that can't be reached by IPv4. That will change. But today it's not a big problem. I don't think it will be a problem for a little while yet."

The average internet user has no idea what IPv6 is, or even how an IP address works, for that matter. But there has been a push in recent years to educate them.

Government websites in planning phase

On World IPv6 Day, June 8, 2011, some of the world's internet giants — including Google, Facebook and Yahoo — enabled their support for IPv6, in the first large scale "test" of the next-generation addressing system. And a year later, these same large companies permanently enabled IPv6.

It helped. After the launch, the number of .ca websites reachable on the new protocol spiked from about 1,000 to 12,000 today, said Latour. It's a big step, but the momentum has tapered off, he said.

Also in June, the Canadian government laid out its plan on how it plans to switch over its websites to the new protocol.

Federal organizations are in the first phase of planning, and have until the end of september next year to get ready, said Juskevicius.

Then, by March of 2015, all citizen and public facing websites should be IPV6 accessible, he added.

"The government is moving along as best as it can," he said.

Canada can't legislate the country's internet service providers and the rest of the industry to make the switch, he said, but they should get moving faster.

"Time is certainly now to get started," said Juskevicius. "Because … it's not as simple as flipping on a switch and suddenly we have it. There's some new things you have to buy, and new ways to run your network."

Most consumers unaware

Still, about 58 per cent of the big service providers or content creators who regularly come to ARIN for IP addresses have not asked for their block of next-generation addresses yet, said Andersen.

"That's a bit of a concern," he said.

But the average customer doesn't ask for anything beyond faster speeds, or wifi, said Victor Kuarsing, the architect of IP Networks for Rogers Communications.

"The majority of customers don't specifically ask for V6 today," he said during a panel last week. "We would like that to change."

And consumers don't realize that when they are buying computer equipment, such as routers, they may be buying something that will not work with newer versions of the internet, said Owen DeLong, IPv6 evangelist with Hurricane Electric internet services in the U.S.

"Consumers need to be made aware of this fact … they could be buying equipment that may get obsoleted quite quickly," said Owen Delong, IPv6 evangelist.

Canada is too late to be the leader in IPv6 adoption, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, said Juskevicius.

"We're too late to be the leader in IPV6 adoption. But being a leader can be painful, time consuming, you're going where nobody has gone before," he said.

"You're learning things the hard way. Being a fast follower is a very valid approach to deploying new technology, and I think we're in a not-bad position to do that."

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Canadian Space Agency unveils prototype fleet of rovers

Move over Canadarm: the rovers are coming! the rovers are coming!

At its headquarters in Longueuil, Que. Friday, the Canadian Space Agency rolled out a fleet of about a half-dozen prototype rovers that are the forerunners of vehicles that may one day explore the moon or Mars.

The agency said the terrestrial rovers bring it one step closer to developing the next generation for space exploration.

Some are knee-high mini-rovers that can work side-by-side, helping astronauts to dig or scout out small spaces like caves.

Then there are larger rovers, like a six-wheeled lunar exploration version, which can be upgraded to transport astronauts around the moon.

Gilles Leclerc, the agency's director-general of space exploration, said it could be at least eight years before the final versions of the robotic workhorses head for distant destinations.

"The horizon we're looking at in terms of taking the technologies on these terrestrial prototypes and transferring them into a real space mission to the moon or Mars is about 2020," he said.

Leclerc said the lunar and Martian space rovers now in development put Canada in a good position and he pointed out that NASA is already knocking at the door.

"In fact, we have an invitation right now from NASA to start working on advancing these technologies and taking them to flight for eventually a mission," he said.

Leclerc said Canada has a long legacy of developing technologies for the mining industry and that those technologies would be useful in space exploration.

"A large chunk of the activities we are going to do on the moon and Mars are related to geology and mining," he noted.

Leclerc said "Artemis," a lightweight four-wheeled rover, and the larger six-wheeled "Lunar Exploration Light Rover" are good candidates for the moon.

Iain Christie, president of Neptec, the prime contractor for Artemis, said Canada is "as far advanced as anybody certainly for the next round of lunar exploration."

"NASA has an experiment that they have been considering...that involves digging up lunar soil and making hydrogen and oxygen out of the soil," he said in an interview.

Industry Minister Christian Paradis, who attended the news conference along with space agency president Steve MacLean, said the technology being developed creates economic spinoffs.

One example is an electric all-terrain vehicle developed by Bombardier Recreational Products.

"We were able to transfer that technology and create a new vehicle completely electric and we are now distributing and manufacturing it in Sherbrooke," spokesman Pierre Pichette said.

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associated (MDA) and Neptec Design Group are the prime contractors on several of the rovers.

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