DancingSamurai.ca

As I wrote before, the hospital I work at has a firewall and they’re getting more and more particular about what traffic they let through. Since I am on call quite a bit, and often have to stay in the hospital for hours, and I have my laptop, so occasionally I like to get my youtube fix in. Or my World of Warcraft fix. Or whatever.

By default their firewall doesn’t let any of that traffic through. For some web sites, using a proxy like I described a few years ago works quite well – but for other applications, it doesn’t work at all.

Never fear! It’s actually pretty easy to circumvent as long as you have access to an unfiltered connection (your home Internet connection, for example). I’ve written out the basic steps below more for my own reference, if someone wants a step-by-step HOWTO contact me and I can flesh it out a bit.

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Well, I’ve finally gotten around to trying to backup all my important (and not so important files) offsite. Here I’ll give a rundown of the sync products I tried and some issues I ran into…

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Yeah, I had that problem. zenphoto uses flowplayer, but I think the problem would exist in any flash-based video player. Basically, it would need to download the whole .mp4 file before starting to play – defeating the whole idea of ‘streaming’

Apparently, I’m not alone with this problem. And, as often is the case, someone else on the internet has solved it admirably with MetaDataMover.

Doesn’t your mp4 file stream properly over the Internet? Does the mp4 need to download completely before playing in a Flash player? rndware’s Metadata Mover moves metadata from the end to the beginning of mp4 files. This allows any mp4 file to be streamed using Flash players, without needing to load the entire movie.

I’m just puzzled why this tool needs administrator access. Hope I haven’t installed a trojan…

Local cache: mp4MetadataMover0.9

I just received a link to a CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Authority) survey about their WHOIS policy. As you may know, sometime last year, due to privacy concerns, hid individual users’ names and contact details from the public WHOIS results. (I mentioned it briefly years ago).

Many have commented (see for example Michael Geist’s article on CIRA) how weak this protection actually is, since ‘law enforcement’ can just claim to be investigating you and get your details. (Oh, they have to claim its related to terrorism… but they claim EVERYTHING is related to terrorism these days.). Not to mention, the loophole that if someone has an intellectual property right claim against you… they can get your details.

If it’s a legitimate complaint, get a court order. How hard is that?

So, it seems they’re asking for input. Is it too much to hope for that they are rethinking their ways, or is this just a show to appease the critics? Unfortunately, I remain sceptical… a lot of questions were asking about EXPANDING the above loopholes…

I laughed at this xkcd comic… because of course if there is a single site on the internet that has ever sucked me in all night, it’s been tvtropes. Check it out, you’ll see what I mean (it’s worse than wikipedia!)

Hearings are this week. Some articles by Michael Geist, and a great summary of the issues on CBC.

Update: Michael Geist with some info from Day 1 of the net neutrality hearings:

It was the consumer presentation that did the most to link network management to the law and it also highlighted reason for great concern. I think that the consumer groups rightly focused on who should bear the burden of demonstrating that DPI and other Internet traffic controls are consistent with current Canadian law. The groups argued that these are prima facie violations of Section 36 of the Telecommunications Act and that the onus therefore should fall on the carriers to show that there is a serious problem, the solution minimally impairs users’ rights, and is proportional to the harm.

Unfortunately, the questions that followed suggest that the CRTC Commissioners start these hearings having accepted the carriers’ claims that congestion is a problem and that inhibiting the use of deep packet inspection could result in increased consumer costs for Internet access. This suggests that there is a steep mountain to climb in these hearings, leading me to believe that the issue will ultimately be a political one with pressure on the Conservatives to join with the Liberals and NDP in supporting net neutrality.

Too bad, really. Congestion was never a problem for me, not on DSL, anyway. Now I my p2p crawls during peak times… maybe I should set up MLPPP… TekSavvy supports it, and apparently it bypasses throttling…

Check out the Search Engine Interview with the latest conservative dunderhead in our government. Cory’s paraphrasing about sums it up:

Search Engine: Here’s some audio of your predecessor promising, on behalf of your party and your government, never to ever allow the police to wiretap the Internet without a warrant.

Minister (as though he had been off on another planet): We never promised not to do that.

Search Engine: What about all the personal information that you guys are now proposing to give to the cops without a warrant?

Minister (tragically unclear on the subject): We’re not requiring ISPs to give out any personal information without a warrant, just your real name, your home address, your IP address, your home and cell number…

Search Engine: Huh. Well there’s this really critical, high profile court ruling that calls all that stuff private information?

Minister (pretending he didn’t hear): The courts have ruled that this isn’t private information. Canadians have no legitimate expectation of privacy when they use the Internet, not when it comes to your name, address, cell phone number, etc

Search Engine: Do the cops really need to get this information without a warrant?

Minister: Oh yes. There are MONSTROUS BABY-EATING CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS WHO ADVERTISE THAT THEY ARE ABOUT TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT A LIVE CHILD IN TEN MINUTES and we need to be able to run down their IPs without talking to a judge first.

Search Engine: But when a child is endangered, the law already allows you to get this information without a warrant, right?

Minister: Why are you still asking questions? Didn’t you hear me? BABY-EATING CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS! Surely that settles the matter.

A Liberal Press Release:

“In a free and open democracy in the 21st century, in an innovative and progressive economy, no tool is more paramount than the Internet,” said Mr. Garneau. “The Internet is the backbone of today’s flow of free ideas.”

Mr. Garneau asked the Conservative government whether they supported net neutrality but Industry Minister Tony Clement refused to answer the question.

“The issue of net neutrality is a global one,” said Mr. Garneau. “Internet management should be neutral and not be permitted for anti-competitive behaviour nor should it target certain websites, users, providers or legitimate software applications. We must protect the openness and freedom of the internet, and maintain competition to spur innovation, improve service levels and reduce costs to users.”

(via Michael Geist)