Many people are suggesting that Fordo’s apology on this past weekend’s RoFoDoFo Show installment didn’t go far enough. I agree, but I’m not so amorphous about it.

Sarah and I tuned in yesterday afternoon and we were surprised to hear what sounded like real remorse in Rob’s voice. If he was faking it, he did a great job. And I accept it — as far as it went — because Robbie was very specific about what he was apologizing for: being plastered at Taste of Danforth this year, and being even more off-the-hook at an earlier St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

More than once, Rob re-iterated that this is specifically what he was apologizing for — make no mistake.

So first off, thank you, Mayor Ford, for what I perceived as genuine contrition and a recognition that being publicly intoxicated is unseemly. Your Freudian but refreshingly honest slip that this “hopefully” won’t happen again was good to hear.  And you know what? Although I don’t recall going to the extent that you did, I admit to having some crazy fun party nights myself so I’m not going to be a dick and hold you to to what your brother calls “lily-white holier-than-thou” standards. It’s true, very few of us are innocent on that end.

I hope that a search through TCL’s archives will reveal that your partying or drug use were never really the issue, though you have to admit that some drugs really do affect the mind more than others, and as someone charged with the health and welfare of millions, I don’t think it’s unrealistic that such things should be considered while holding the office of Mayor.

The real issue  is that you have been and continue to tip-toe around your truthlessness.

Remember the last time people asked you about your drug use back when you were running for mayor?

[Ford] adamantly denied having been charged when first approached by the Sun.

“No to answer your question,” Ford said.

“I’m dead serious. When I say no, I mean never. No question. Now I’m getting offended. No means no.”

But after Ford was provided with details from a Florida state criminal history record obtained by the Sun, he admitted the incident.

“I completely forgot about it until you mentioned it right now,” he said.

I mean, that’s it in a nutshell. Someone challenges you with something, and your first response is to attack them. I’m sure it’d be physical if only it was legal. Often you resort to insults that both you and your brother hurl in equal measure. It’s not inaccurate to say that denial, anger, deflection, and many things un-mayorly — and moreover uncivil — are the product of your natural demeanour.

It isn’t until confronted with irrefutable proof that you finally admit to not being “perfect” and claim to show some contrition which ends up being false.

So in the end, you’re not sorry at all, your apology is a lie, and your original statement is a lie. Liar McLiarPants.

And don’t try to blame the drugs — they might make you feel invincible, carefree, etc., but there are no substances that I’m aware of that make you an incessant liar.

If you recognized these things, the voice acting you do on the air would be genuinely convincing — sounding like you’re sorry, and saying things that indicate the same would really be something.

Actually saying something would also be helpful, because currently you’ve got your brother on LeDrew’s program filling your void and suggesting that you were probably just taking an innocent hour-long stroll from your place to the infamous crack video location and just happened to be accosted by some friendly fellows with whom you posed for one of the “tens of thousands” of photos that you pose for every year.

Or, maybe the other explanation that Councillor Ford is putting forth is that you just happened to be driving in that neighbourhood (or were being driven), and simply popped out for an impromptu, sweatshirted photo op with a bunch of strangers, all of which incidentally happened in front of a famous crack house.

All of the substantiated evidence points to something more and something very obvious, yet here you are still not being terribly forthright. You won’t address anything until, once again, the evidence is too obvious and stark. And then you’ll probably chalk it up to yet another misunderstanding.

Only thing is, we’d all have to be awfully dumb to keep misunderstanding what you’re really doing, Mayor Ford.

Just when you thought that the deluge of crap around CETA had stopped, it turns out that the agreement may be stalled, if at least for a while. But for reasons more troubling than I could’ve ever imagined:

Canada is balking at the inclusion of language in a final text that would refer to the importance of affirming human rights and non-proliferation efforts. The EU insists that all major agreements it negotiates contain language that promotes human rights and fights the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — and it doesn’t want to make an exception for Canada.

In case you didn’t catch that, Harper’s government is throwing a hissy fit because CETA has a few clauses about human rights and dignity, non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other such bullshit. Thankfully, some sanity prevails here at home and heroes like Dick Cheney are safe to walk Canadian streets again. Yay!

We recently found out that the lengthy Union Station revitalization project is going to cost more than expected (with additional “future risks” looming).

But it wasn’t really that unexpected. Even back in 2009 when TCL was in its infancy and I hadn’t yet donned my politico cap I already knew that this would happen, as is the case with pretty much anything and everything government does (so, really, a no-brainer deduction there).

Ford did the usual — feign ignorance:

“Everything is on time, everything is on budget, until they run out of time and they run out of budget, and they come with their cap in hand,” said Mr. Ford. “We got to change something on preliminary planning, someone is dropping the ball. You just can’t ask for $80-million without someone dropping the ball.”

Yet others at City Hall assured us that no new taxes will be needed to make up for the $80 mill shortfall:

The staff report predicts that the city will be able to rake in more money than expected, mainly by hiking commercial rents in the retail area. That extra $98-million is more than enough to pay off the debt taken on for the additional costs, the report states. The city will, however, have to draw $20-million from reserves. The report recommends referring consideration of the new financial plan to the 2014 budget debate, and also asks for permission to amend certain contracts and retainers.

“It’s not going to cost taxpayers more money, which is the important thing,” said Councillor David Shiner, who chairs the government management committee. He noted that the rent revenue stream is expected to result in a $115-million contribution to a Union Station reserve fund once the debt is paid off, in 30 years.

Ah, the old we’ll-just-raise-the-rent-after-they’ve-moved-in routine — clever marketing! But, and I will gladly put this on the record again, it won’t turn out that way. More cost over-runs and “complications” are going to come, more “outraged” politicians will vow to “get to the bottom of things” without any real choice except to keep forking over the cash until the job is done, and so on.

We’ll see where we are in another four years, but I know where I’m placing my bets.

An excerpt from a recent Cracked magazine:

Robbie talking to Norm Kelly during this year’s TIFF:

Robbie answering questions directly and honestly:

A clip that never gets old:

Honest signage:

On oldie-but-a-goodie:

An uncanny likeness:

…and another portrayal by artist Mike Geiger:

Finally, just so it’s not all the disturbingly laughable Rob Ford, a random street altercation on Spadina:

This, Scarberians, is the brilliant Rob Fod who you allowed to get a hold of your money in order to build his vision of “subways”. Based on the video above, that will probably consist of some species of affordable unicorn covered in some manner of budget-conscious fairy dust that delivers crack cocaine to your front door, all paid for with magical gypsy gold and children’s dreams (that’s tax / fee / rent paying children, of course). This is the guy you handed the decision process to, allowing him to waste and squander what is now approaching a hundred million dollars while repeatedly “explaining” (Ford speak for “lie”), about how he’s actually saving a billion “dollars”.

The best part is how, throughout the entire process, Rob Ford kept all of his promises. Like his constantly-“guaranteed” no tax hikes, or the fact that he has managed to do everything he said he would with no service cuts, just as he promised. And above all that, I admire how honest and forthright Rob Ford and his brother have been with everyone about everything.

Then I recall how this man has given all of Toronto a heartwarming 30-year gift, his carefree attitude to anything and everything else having to do with transit, and his ability to maximize the time and money spent on a project while minimizing its value, and I am left in utter awe and amazement.

Boy, Scarborough, you really done good!

If, for some bizarre reason, you happen to read this blog and you’re a Ford supporter, first off, kudos for making it this far without losing your shit (or at least keeping it out of my face). Second, I’m going to propose that we have something in common.

I’m totally serious.

Assuming that the Ontario Press Council had ruled against the Toronto Star, and the Globe and Mail, etc., would you agree that the Council should have some real teeth to go after infractions? Maybe monetary penalties? Maybe something tougher? Well me too.

Oh, I think the ruling was right on, and I would’ve been surprised at anything else. But I would want these oversight agencies, while being diligently transparent, to have the power to affect and mandate some actual change. Change like holding Ford to account, for starters.

We don’t have to get all medieval on anyone’s ass, just get a little closer to what they do in the private sector, as Ford and friends so wisely suggest.

The sieve that is Rob Ford’s administration continues to leak the vital fluids of the municipal body of City Hall consisting of staff and fellow councillors. Yes, the analogy is as lousy as Ford’s retention rate.

I’ve lost count as to how many people have decided to stand up against Ford’s petty tyranny, but this time around it’s councillor Paul Ainslie jumping ship from Ford’s executive committee, saying that the blubbery one bullied him and other councillors into making ass-backwards, idiotic decisions based on fantasy, bluster, and lies (a.k.a. Ford “logic”).

The back-breaking final straw came with Ford’s bull-headed insistence on subways for Scarborough, now enacted and thereby sealing the fate of that whole part of the city for decades.

“I think it’s irresponsible of me to go to taxpayers and say ‘here’s a basically free LRT being given to you’ or ‘you can spend a billion plus dollars on a subway that’s going to take 10 or 20 years to build,’” he said. “I don’t think there’s enough planning from the mayor’s office on how to ease gridlock in this city, or public transportation, or just getting people to work.”

Complete lack of planning, entirely made-up facts and arguments, lies, name-calling, law breaking, denigration and attacks and finger-pointing: all in a typical day for Rob Ford and his brother.

Ensuring that his ignorance was on full display, Robbie followed up the vote by saying that downtowners have enough subways and there’s just no reason why anything needs to be done to accommodate an influx of extra commuters (you know, with these new subway lines that he pushed through), into an already at-capacity system.

But Rob Ford, being justifiably emboldened, decided to take it one step further, once again breaching a bunch of laws in the process (he’s already been openly and illegally campaigning for over a year), and following his buddy Stephen Harper’s cue in placing automated calls (a.k.a. robocalls) to Scarborough residents specifically to rat out Ainslie as the only person to vote against subways (and for LRTs).

Of course, the bloated one didn’t bother to mention how he personally voted to increase Scarberians’ property taxes to pay for his bullheaded project, after years of screaming about the evils of any new tax hikes, etc. etc. — directly contrary to his campaign promise, and everything he’s claimed up until very recently. Ford is so dishonest that he managed to flip flop four times on a single motion — actually voting against himself!

This comes shortly on the heels of more political hypocrisy (laced with heaping dollops of ignorance), from the Fords as they rejected a Toronto memorial for Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Asked about why he supported honouring late NDP leader Jack Layton with a statue on the waterfront, Ford said, “Mr. Layton did a tremendous amount for the city. Pierre Trudeau did not.”

That’s the hypocrisy part…

Contrary to Ford’s assertion, Councillor Peter Milczyn, who seconded the motion, said Trudeau made a significant contribution to Toronto with the creation of Harbourfront Corp. in 1972, which “started opening up the water’s edge.”

“He is one of the great prime ministers the country had; the father of our Constitution and Charter of Rights,” Milczyn said. “He is a person that a lot of people look up to and admire. So I think it’s reasonable that in Canada’s biggest city we would have some kind of commemoration of him.”

He was not surprised that the Ford brothers reject the idea.

“If people want to be hyperpartisan here, they can answer for it,” he said.

For his part, Doug Ford chided Milczyn as he passed him on press row, joking that “he would name his ward after Trudeau if he could.”

Speaking to reporters at a gas station around the corner from his house today, a visibly shaken Rob Ford addressed the news that his occasional driver / bodyguard / advisor / confidant / BFF  Allesandro Lisi has been arrested by the Toronto Police on drug trafficking charges.

In the unusual scrum, Ford fought back tears and repeatedly choked on words as he implored on the police chief to release Lisi.

“He’s a friend, he’s a good guy … he’s straight and narrow, never once seen the guy drink, never seen him once do drugs. I just want him back. I just want my little buddy back. He’s not a bad guy! He’s just … too fragile for jail. Please, Chief Blair, just let him go. Please let him go.”

You can tell that this post isn’t entirely accurate because I suggested that Rob Ford had an emotion other than anger directed at his usual target – the damned media. C’mon.

You may have heard the term “paywall” — it’s when a web site limits the amount of content that you can see unless you sign up with them for a fee. This typically happens after you’ve viewed a predetermined number of articles, and that number is reset on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis (depending on their setup).

All of Toronto’s major daily newspapers have put up paywalls, including the Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Globe and Mail, and National Post.

And they’re all just awful.

Much hooplah was made about a developer that bypassed the New York Times paywall a couple of years ago, yet little (if anything), has changed since. David Hayes, the developer who cracked the NYT paywall, claims it took him a lunch hour to write the bookmarklet that bypasses the newspaper’s paywall.

A couple of days ago when Sarah was hitting the Star’s paywall I decided to take a quick look at what would be involved in getting around it. Twenty minuted later I had bypassed the paywalls of all of the above papers, including the New York Times (before I’d read anything on the topic, I should add). It took another 30 minutes to produce a small, generic site script that makes the dewalling process just a little easier and faster.

I’m not blowing my own horn here. I’m no super genius and this “hack” could be accomplished by anyone with rudimentary web development experience. In fact, both Hayes’ code and my own are almost unnecessary; with a few extra steps, you can bypass these paywalls with no extra software or crazy hacking skills. Chances are good that you already know how to do it.

I can see some extra benefit to a utility that would assist in automatically navigating the paywall beyond the first article — so that you could click on the web page links instead of having to load article by article — but this was more of a proof-of-concept thing, and the proven concept is that paywalls are unfortunately simple to defeat.

I’m not currently posting my dewalling code publicly. However, I will detail why this problem exists, and what the papers can do to fix it (if you’re from any of the aforementioned newspapers, feel free to give me a shout).

So Why Are Developers So Dumb?

I don’t think they are :) And to be honest, I totally get why things were done this way.

When a typical web browser grabs the web page you request, it sends out some limited information for the listening web server on the other end. This includes listing the browser’s capabilities (what kinds of content it can handle), specifying what it’s looking for (usually the URL of the web page), and cookies.

The receiving web server has that, plus an IP address, to identify an individual reader over the internet.

The IP isn’t unique to you, it’s unique to your internet connection which may be shared by many devices (like the the internet box thing, a.k.a. residential router, in your home). Browser capabilities can’t be assumed to be unique, again, because of that shared internet connection thing. And cookies can be cleared with the click of a button.

Given these limitations, how are web developers supposed to identify unique readers while ensuring that other legitimate readers can still access the site?

Better to err on the side of caution and just use cookies, sometimes along with IP, rather than accidentally block readers. Paywalls are necessarily leaky.

So What Should They Do?

This is a tough one.

It’s tough because it puts the limitations of technology up against corporate culture and profits.

What this does is really call up the need for reflection on how the papers profit from their content, and to me it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.

One option is for the papers go all-in and make certain articles, sections, features, etc. fully pay-only. That means having to log in to access them, otherwise it’s an excerpt, or some sort of teaser, to the general hoi poloi.

Another, more Zuckerbergian option is to offer access in exchange for personal information. I’m not necessarily averse to this, but it also requires a content lock-down of some sort.

The current paywall solution is somewhere just above both of these, being easily circumventable but still acting as a deterrent to the average web user.

I would gravitate towards the nothing end of the scale with a nag solution where on every X views of an article, the non-subscribed reader receives a temporary pop-over message suggesting that they subscribe. IP address on the server could be used to determine how often to do this — it seems unlikely that shared connections would all be connecting to the same content source, and even so, all it would produce is a nagging reminder that people really do like the content. It’d be sort of like a local rating system with an option to subscribe.

Beyond that, there could be a mild nag every time, for non-subscribed users. This starts to get close to being just plain old fashioned inline advertising, which would be the next solution before nothing at all (full, free access to everything).

Of course, since the papers have full control over their sites, there’s theoretically no limit on how inline advertising could be accomplished. There’s the always classy Toronto Sun wall-to-wall background…

…but if that’s not the newspaper’s style, I’m sure there are other and more elegant approaches.

Ultimately, the decision is whether or not to lock away content. Logins are reliable, which is why they’re so popular. Identifying users without them is inherently unreliable. Either content can be locked away completely, or it should be assumed to be open to everyone. The seemingly in-between paywall solution is actually in the second family by reasons which I’ve explained earlier.

Astute web developers will point out that other mechanisms are available to bypass some of these limitations: Flash shared objects, or persistent browser databases. While these are a step beyond simple cookies, both are easily deleted as part of most modern browers’ cache management. In other words, they’re not much better than anything mentioned so far.

Browsers impose these limits to provide a level of privacy protection, and without requiring readers to manually enter additional information like a username and password, it’s tough if not impossible to pinpoint an individual human being. Without this exactness, any paywall or content blocking system is bound to be flimsy. The solution, at least at the present time, won’t involve technology; it’ll require high-level decisions about what will be locked away from the general public and what won’t.

Rob Ford is basking in the knowledge that he has personally wrestled Toronto’s unemployment rate down to the ground where he beat it senseless and left it soaking in a pool of its own blood.

Unemployment, it seems, is down – that’s true.

But people are having trouble making the connection between this news and Ford’s efforts:

Pressed by reporters to explain how, exactly, he had managed to slay the beast of unemployment, Mr. Ford said he has been cutting red tape, making the city safer and cleaner, fighting gridlock and campaigning to build subways. The last, obviously, is a work in progress; the others, pretty hard to quantify. “We’ve made it a business-friendly atmosphere,” the mayor said, “and you have to have business experience to do that, and obviously I do.”

Others too are having trouble with is on a conceptual level:

Councillor John Parker, who represents Don Valley West, said, “I frankly think that the case [the mayor] is making is a bit of a stretch. As the Canadian economy grows, Toronto’s economy grows with it.”

Mr. Ford said in his speech that, “we have adopted a very aggressive plan to fight gridlock.”

Mr. Parker, who sits on the works committee and the Toronto Transit Commission, said he is unaware of such a plan.

I’m not insinuating that good news is unwelcome, just that taking the credit for something you didn’t really do is pretty weak sauce.

And even if I were of the opinion that I’m just, like, #1 top business guy in Canada and when I snap my fingers jobs fly out of my ass, I still think I’d have the tact to say something to the effect that I’d contributed to the unemployment rate.

Oh, Fordo.