Stephanie at Healthy Simplicity has written an insightful post about why it doesn’t necessarily make sense to ban allergens in schools. In my reply to her post, I talked about how banning something often gives people a false sense of security — and is, in reality, a security that doesn’t usually exist.

This post made me think about something else that often gets banned. Organizations are often fond of banning technologies — giving various reasons such as exposure to risk (whether that risk is leaked information, inappropriate comments by employees, or viruses or other malware).

The usual targets for technology bans are things like peer-to-peer downloading software and instant messaging applications, as well as web sites, which can be banned through an organization’s site filtering software.

There are several arguments as to why software or sites should be banned within an organization, and they basically go like this. Employees don’t really understand copyright, often misjudge what’s in good taste, and waste quite a bit of time — and if we ban certain software and sites, we’ll curtail some copyright infringement, distasteful content and time-wasting.

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I read an article recently in The Globe and Mail (a national Canadian daily newspaper) about a new notification system from Rogers (a major Canadian Internet Service Provider) that lets users know when they are approaching their bandwidth download/upload limit.

The article cites various internet and privacy gurus who suggest that this new technology is nothing short of insidious and misleading (with the notable exception of Cynthia Brumfield from IP Democracy, who sees it as just another notification).

In case you’re wondering, here’s what the actual screenshot looks like:

Annoying? Yep, I’d be a bit annoyed with Rogers deciding to take up half my screen space with their bandwidth notification. Pure evil? Hardly. Also note the ‘click here if you don’t want to receive this message in the future’ in the middle of the screen.

What the article completely misses the point on however, is the bandwidth cap itself. I first ran into bandwidth caps when dealing with Videotron (another major Canadian ISP), where I received a surprise bill of several hundred dollars for exceeding the bandwidth cap that was concealed in the fine print of my contract.

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For those of you who don’t know, I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (there are approximately two and a half million people that live in Toronto, making it the largest city in Canada).

A few days ago, I heard about the very bizarre story of an art project gone horribly wrong — where a Toronto art student placed a ’sculpture’ (which closely resembled a bomb) in the Royal Ontario Museum (since most readers are not from Toronto, the ROM is one of the biggest museums here in Canada).

To make the story even stranger, the art student recorded a video of both his placing of the bomb in the ROM, as well as of a fake ‘explosion’ for his art project, and placed them on YouTube. Understandably, not everyone thought this was either very artistic, or frankly, very smart. You can watch an interview with the art student here.

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