Getting Bored. Isolated. Depressed. Don't!

"I know that you're not at risk, and that you want to see your friends. But if you do it, people will die."
"Even if you don't show the symptoms, you could still be carrying the genome, which means that  you can't go see that show."
"I haven't showered in three days, but my hands have never been cleaner."
Beatrice Martin (Coeur de Pirate), video, Quebec

"Limit your outings, try to avoid gatherings and respect social distancing measures."
"Greet people from a distance and wash your hands frequently."
"All these small individual sacrifices will minimize the impact of this pandemic on our community."
Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, Super Bowl-winning football player, M.D.

"The message I have today is for youth and teens. We have seen in Italy and in South Korea that young people were very important in the transmission of the virus and the information we have so far is that they don't take that seriously enough right now."
"Maybe as a young guy or young girl you're not really at risk of that, but you can give the virus to your grandmother or grandfather and then they are at risk."
Quebec Premier Francois Legault 

"Quebec authorities are using the proper channels to reach their target audience. If you're trying to get a message across to young people, then you need to go through social media. And they are doing that very successfully."
"Will that message get through? We'll find out soon. But coercive methods are not usually the most effective when speaking to rebellious teens. So I think this is the right strategy."
Dr.Sandrine Prom Tep, marketing professor, Universite du Quebec au Montreal, ESG business school

Montreal singer-songwriter Coeur de Pirate

When little else works to persuade the young on a prudent course of action, meet the  young on their own favoured grounds; social media platforms. And to that end, Quebec's Premier Legault sent out an appeal to popular Quebec celebrities whose following is mostly the young in the province, to help deliver a message in the interests of aiding the province to move toward a  high level of awareness among all its citizens, old and  young alike.

That appeal elicited the desired fallout, when popular Quebecois musicians, actors, comedians and athletes took to social media with videos, tweets and memes to appeal to the consciousness of young people in the province moved by the messages of the entertainers that have won popular acclaim as celebrities in the opinion of their young followers who have been immune to the messages urging social distancing to help avoid growing infection with COVID-19.

To date, 121 people in Quebec have been confirmed to have the novel coronavirus that is sending shock waves all over the world. One person has thus far died of the coronavirus in the province. The province is intent on delivering a simple enough message: stay home. Wash your hands. Avoid being a vector for transmission of the coronavirus.

Quebec is set on avoiding, if at all possible, a scenario where a St.Patrick's Day party took place in the streets of Kingston, where despite calls for it to be cancelled, Queen's University students chose to party. And something peculiar has arisen in that the Province of Quebec's director of Public Health, Dr.Horacio Arruda, who has gained the trust and admiration of Quebecers for his plain speaking style, has delivered a message of his own and it is resonating.

"Maybe parents should put soap and Purell next to the beer for your teens, and again, I do not recommend what I would call any exchange of bodily fluids at this time", Dr.Arruda delivered with a light smile during a daily briefing. In a video that highlights Dr.Arruda's messaging he explains the lack of rationality behind wearing a mask by those not infected by COVID-19.

"Wash my hands, so the virus I could have caught in the metro isn't on my hands anymore. But if I only wear a mask and think I'm protected, then I touch things and then I touch my face ...", he stated, while poking fingers around his eyes. His tone and explanations have gained him high praise in the Quebec media and approval from the public.

"Try doing what you never have time to do", suggested the doctor. As for himself,  his plans include trying out new recipes for Portuguese egg tarts. "It could be yoga. It could be music. It could be dancing, maybe even dancing online with someone else over FaceTime. But don't stay at home doing nothing. You'll get depressed."

Tempest In A Sanctimonious Apple

"We have no tolerance or sympathy for terrorists. When they commit unspeakable acts like the tragic attacks in San Bernardino, we work to help the authorities pursue justice for the victims."
"Apple is a uniquely American company. It does not feel right to be on the opposite side of the government in a case centering on the freedoms and liberties that government is meant to protect." "[But] this case is about much more than a single phone or a single investigation, so when we received the government's order we knew we had to speak out."
Tim Cook, CEO, Apple Inc.

"We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist's passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That's it."
"We don't want to break anyone's encryption or set a master key loose on the land."
James Comey, director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington

"This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information [Apple should assist the U.S. government's wish to hack into a locked iPhone, in the San Bernardino, California terrorist attack]."
Bill Games, former head, co-founder, Microsoft

A demonstrator outside the Apple store at the Grove shows a "digital sign" in support of Apple's resistance to help the FBI. 
(Sarah Parvini / Los Angeles Times)

He's out of the game that other vast conglomerates and their chief operating officers are still headily involved in, but his opinion still has a good measure of clout, if not now as a highly respected computer-giant-software entrepreneur, then as a philanthropic philosopher whose billions derived from the world-wide-web have been put to inestimable good use universally. So, while Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google are all averse to ceding to a government request to enable them to investigate possible links to Islamist terrorism through their platforms, Bill Gates stands foursquare for co-operation in this instance.

Tim Cook may talk a good line about lack of sympathy for the jihadi agenda, but he sees greater facility of purpose in denying investigative intelligence authority the means by which they may use the advanced technology of the Apple iPhone as a conduit to that intelligence. For one thing, defiance of government is hugely popular, particularly in the field of perceived intrusions into privacy, and a corporation such as Apple balancing its reputation on integrity and loyalty to its client base through their guarantee of privacy fits the bottom line as a superior public relations strategy.

While stating on the one hand that "it does not feel right" (thus establishing their selective patriotism) to defy government through a specific request bolstered by a court order, it is to Apple's credit among its clients that it poses as a protector of their security issues in a world where intrusiveness has been the subject of a colossal backlash from people addicted to their interface with online services and Internet social platforms, where in fact, they don't one whit mind unleashing on the world all their private concerns and actions which portray them as the noble and high-minded citizens that they reveal themselves to be.

So, Tim Cook loftily proclaims his pride in his and his company's decision to never to risk the "security of hundreds of millions of law-abiding people", who happen to be their clients, just for the possible chance that in allowing the FBI to hack one device owned by one erstwhile American citizen whose dalliance with fanatical Islamism caused him to take the lives of an unfortunate number of his co-workers. If the FBI hope to be able to link others within the community where the atrocity took place, or further afield, to the crime to alert them to the possibility it might be repeated, they can bloody well use other means.

The plea by FBI director James Comey that Apple owes this concession to the victims of the San Bernardino assault has fallen on the unconvinced ears that have balanced all the pros and cons and found that plea wanting even if it means that the FBI "can't look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don't follow this lead". So the iPhone that was a technical companion in communication for Syed Farook who killed 14 innocent people for the crime of not being Muslim, will remain locked against the FBI enquiry.

In the balance between a federal magistrate judge ordering Apple to concede its assistance to the FBI to enable it entrance into the password-protected phone, an industry giant thumbs its metaphorical nose at government, its intelligence agency, and its judiciary. Apple as defiant of orders to cooperate is simply Apple doing 'the right thing' for its product-constituents who expect no less of it, for having selected Apple's products they have chosen the fail-safe technology of encryption, a lock that puzzles authorities and investigators and that's just the way it is.