[PHOTO] Gainsford House, Charlottetown

At 102-104 Water Street, Charlottetown's Gainsford House is a building listed on the Canadian Register of Historic Places for architectural and historical reasons.

The heritage value of the Gainsford House lies in its role as the oldest surviving brick home in Charlottetown, its association with the Gainsford family, and its association with publisher of the Islander newspaper, John Ings, and its importance to the Water Street streetscape.

In 1832, the land on which the Gainsford House stands was deeded not to Elizabeth Gainsford herself but to three prominent citizens, Hon. T. Haviland, Daniel Brenan Esq. and Rev. B. McDonald in trust for her. Although it is a foreign concept today, until 1896, married women could not purchase, hold, or sell property on Prince Edward Island; it was placed in trust for them.

The Gainsford House was constructed at some point between 1832 and 1834 of brick. Most homes at this point in Charlottetown’s history were being constructed of wood, however a house on Richmond Street which has not survived had been constructed of brick as early as 1823. The decision to build in brick may have been influenced by the fact that John Gainsford was a partner in a brickyard and made his own bricks. The Gainsfords decision to build in brick proved to be a wise one, as a devastating fire swept through the area in 1857. The building was the only one to survive in the area, partially because of its construction material, but also through the “extraordinary exertions, and the constant application of wet sheets and blankets to the roof”.

When the house was built, the Gainsfords' lived in the western section and rented the eastern section to the publisher of the Islander newspaper and Queens Printer, John Ings. After Elizabeth Gainsford died in 1852, John Gainsford sold the eastern section to John Ings and the western section to plasterer, James Connell. Connell sold his section to Archibald Kennedy in 1863, but Ings would stay on until 1908.

In 1847, Ings built an addition to the eastern side of the Gainsford House, where he would publish the Islander newspaper and operate a reading room. Later in the early twentieth century, the western side of the Gainsford House also received an extension. This small wooden addition, with a brick facade, housed veterinarian, James L MacMillan’s office.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Anders Sandberg, as a good scientist, takes a look at the evidence same-sex marriage could be associated with floods (as a Briton claimed) by looking at his native Sweden.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling thinks that a Facebook executive's prediction of the death of E-mail is substantially a Facebook power grab.


• BlogTO chronicles the history of the Spadina Hotel, an edifice whose history as a hotel may have come to an end with the closure of the hostel that took its place.


• Discover's Collideascape notes that the parable of Easter Island as a metaphor for global environmental collapse is no longer supported by the data.


• Far Outliers takes note of the Arab awakening in the Ottoman Middle East circa 1915.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer thinks that the Syrian civil war hasn't become a conventional conflict and isn't close to ending.


• Gideon Rachman takes a look at the plight of maids, specifically Indonesian ones, in Hong Kong.


• Savage Minds revisits Franz Boas' classic essay The Methods of Ethnology.


• Supernova Condensate rightly takes issue with a Nature blogger, Henry Gee, who has taken to outing anonymous bloggers.


• Towleroad notes the Japanese government's defense of the barbarous Taiji dolphin hunt.

[NEWS] Some Wednesday links

• Thanks to Michael for linking to a Slate photoessay drawing from years of photography of the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant.


• Universe Today notes that Fomalhaut C, a dim red dwarf companion to the brighter A, has a debris disk of its own.


• io9 notes a Type Ia supernova in neighbouring galaxy M82, 12 million light-years away.


• CBC reports a recent international survey suggesting that housing across big-city Canada isn't especially affordable, and that Vancouver is worst.


• The Carthaginians actually did practice infant sacrifice, The Guardian reports.


• Conrad shared a report of anti-African racism in Delhi.


• Der Spiegel notes that France, most recently in Africa, is the only European power actively intervening anywhere. This has import for the European Union.

[LINK] "Russian Spy Nodes Caught Snooping on Facebook Users"

Wired News' Kevin Poulson reports on something that doesn't surprise me, a survivor of Russia-originating DDoS attacks on Livejournal: a Russian server network is surveilling Facebook users. (It's likely an individual, they conclude.)

Philipp Winter and Stefan Lindskog of Karlstad University in Sweden identified 25 nodes that tampered with web traffic, stripped out encryption, or censored sites. Some of the faulty nodes likely resulted from configuration mistakes or ISP issues. But 19 of the nodes were caught using the same bogus crypto certificate to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on users, decrypting and re-encrypting traffic on the fly.

At times the evil nodes were programmed to intercept only traffic to particular sites, like Facebook, perhaps to reduce the chances of detection.

“These are the ones that we actually found,” says Winter. “But there might be some more that we didn’t find.”

Tor is free software that lets you surf the web anonymously. It achieves that by accepting connections from the public internet – the “clearnet” — encrypting the traffic and bouncing it through a winding series of computers before dumping it back on the web through any of over 1,000 “exit nodes.”

Traffic is safe from interception in the middle of that tangle of routing. But when it hits the exit node it’s unavoidably vulnerable to spying, the same way a postcard is intrinsically vulnerable to a snooping mailroom clerk.

[. . .]

The new study looked at exit nodes that were going beyond passive eavesdropping on unencrypted web traffic and were taking steps to actively spy on SSL-encrypted traffic. By checking the digital certificates used over Tor connections against the certificates used in direct clearnet sessions, researchers found several exit nodes in Russia that were clearly staging man-in-the-middle attacks. The Russian nodes were re-encrypting the traffic with their own self-signed digital certificate issued to the made-up entity “Main Authority.”

[LINK] Two links on the decline of Facebook and the rise of WeChat

io9's Robert Gonzalez linked to a recent paper arguing that the growth and decline of Facebook can be predicted by epidemiological models.

By drawing similarities between Facebook's rapid adoption and the proliferation of an infectious disease, researchers at Princeton have devised a model that predicts Facebook will lose 80% of its users by 2017.

"Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models," write authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler in an article recently posted to the preprint database arXiv. The basic premise is simple: epidemiological models, the researchers argue, can be used to explain user adoption and abandonment of online social networks, "where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery."

The authors have based their models on data that reflect the number of times "Facebook" has been typed into Google as a search term. Checking Google Trends reveals that these weekly "search queues" reached a peak in December of 2012, and have since begun to level off. Plugging these figures into a modified SIR model for the spread of infectious disease – the researchers call theirs an "infection recovery," or "irSIR," model – yields the chart at the top of this post, and "suggests that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017."

The researchers tested their model by comparing Google search query data for "Myspace" against adoption/abandonment curves predicted by both traditional and infectious recovery SIR models, demonstrating "that the traditional SIR model for modeling disease dynamics provides a poor description of the data." By comparison, the search query data matches up rather neatly with the proposed irSIR model.

I read about WeChat's dynamic growth in David Barboza's recent New York Times article. In its, Barboza argues that WeChat has not only preempted Facebook in China, but that it might well be one of the first Chinese global Internet brands. (Longtime readers of the blog might remember that both of my cell phones have been Huaweis.)

Weixin is the creation of Tencent, the Chinese Internet powerhouse known for its QQ instant messenger service and its popular online games. Tencent, which is publicly traded and is worth more than $100 billion on the Hong Kong exchange, is now seeking to strengthen that grip in social networking and expand into new areas, such as online payment and e-commerce.

[. . .]

Tencent, meanwhile, is so confident of its messaging app that it is promoting Weixin overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia, where there are already tens of millions of users. The company also plans a marketing blitz in Europe and Latin America, using the name WeChat. The company declined to say whether or when it would promote the service in the United States.

Weixin could help change global perceptions of Chinese companies. Although Chinese Internet companies are still considered knockoffs of Google, Facebook, Twitter and eBay, analysts say they are quickly transforming themselves into dynamic, innovative technology companies with unique business models.

Weixin, for instance, is no mere copy of an existing service but an amalgam of various social networking tools: part Facebook, part Instagram and even part walkie-talkie. Rather than send a short mobile phone message by typing Chinese characters, which can be time-consuming, users simply hold down a button that records a voice message.

“Chinese Internet companies are no longer behind,” says William Bao Bean, a former technology analyst who is now a managing director at the venture capital firm SingTel Innov8. “Now, in some areas, they’re leading the way.”