(London) Heinz Co. said viewer complaints prompted it to pull a British television advertisement for mayonnaise that showed two men kissing.

British gay rights group Stonewall said it was shocked that Heinz had yanked what it called an “innocuous” ad and urged gay consumers to boycott the company.

The ad, which was launched on British television just over a week ago and was meant to run for five weeks, was taken off the air Friday, Heinz said in a statement released Monday.

Time to boycott Heinz? Or maybe we should give them credit for trying, even though they have no backbone.

-Rashid

Michael Geist is heavily combating serious issues in Canadian Society.Are you doing your part? Are you fighting for your freedoms?

Net Neutrality greatly threatens Canadian society, as some companies want to pay Internet service providers money to ensure their websites are faster and get priority over other websites, which could in turn lead to a tiered Internet service as cable is today…

Bill-C61 is the reformed to-be Canadian Copyright bill, which vows to be revolutionary and help consumers. This bill is in fact dangerous as it takes away rights. Many explain it using vague terms while ignoring the fact that the bill actually takes away our fundamental rights.

Here’s some stuff to love about the new bill, C-61::

• $500 per downloaded song
• No Fair Use rights for remix culture
• $20,000 for uploading content (youtube anyone?)

ACTA is an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement proposed by the Governments of Canada, the United States, Korea, Japan, Austrialia, New Zealand, Mexico, and the European Commission. This agreement would let border guards search your electronic devices without warning. If you have a single mp3 that you did not buy, your ipod or even entire computer can be confiscated without warning, with no chance of appeal. Sounds to me like way too much power, and huge privacy concerns.

Enjoying your freedoms? Not for long, probably. It’s time to fight back. Spread the word, join the facebook groups, send a letter to your MP or even better, phone them or pay them a visit. I have been emailing mine a multitude of times.

-Rashid

Tired of waiting for rashid(me) to approve your comments? Well, fear no more. RashidVille is now OpenID-enabled!

OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using little more than your blog URL. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites.

Many companies including google, microsoft, and others are implementing the new OpenID standard. If you do not already have one, you can get an OpenID here, or here.

If you decide to use OpenID on rashidville, please notify me of any problems you may be having with OpenID. I have been waiting a long time for the wordpress OpenID plugin to become stable, and I think it it has reached maturity, but I may be wrong.

I have been a large advocate for OpenID for much time, and I beleive that it will be the future of logins. Just imagine, one username and password for ALL your websites!

Those who are woried about security should not. Some OpenID providers even offer to call your phone and require voice approval for any OpenID login!

-Rashid

I have completed my german history course, its 500pages/week in reading and 20 page essay of death. I am quite happy now, as I will have much more time to relax, and program computer applications for my computer science course.

Anyway, just a small update

-r

Alright, so maybe I over reacted just a little bit in the last post! But then again, writing an essay on the holocaust does put things into perspective. But still, the world is returning to the days where privacy and freedom are becomming a major issue. As a Canadian, I refuse to give up, I demand freedoms and liberties.

The Open Source Initiative I think is a big part in all this; it is one way to tell the governments and corporations: We won’t stand up for bull shit anymore. We want interoperatibility, freedom, security, stability, and liberty.

These are issues that we are losing or are perhaps already lost in The Americas, but we must fight the corportation.

We must stand true to out beliefs, or we will truely become restricted pawns who can only move back and forth. But remember, we can attack diagonally, and get back the queen. [now, what did THAT mean?]

-Rashid