DancingSamurai.ca

I previously talked about Bell’s unilateral, competition-stifling move to throttle their wholesale DSL offerings. Bell has made a submission to the CRTC to refute CAIP’s application, but not before Primus (another independent ISP) put forward their letter supporting CAIP in their request for an immediate injunction. This was reported on Digital Copyright Canada (with a longer article on itWorldCanada) and by Michael Geist, with some insightful commentary.

Lawrence Lessig has also posted his address to the FCC regarding Network Neutrality, which provides timely (if a little US-centric) points as well.

[UPDATE]: p2pnet has a daily digest of Bell’s Throttling.

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A quick break from studying to comment (too briefly) on Bell Canada’s latest behaviour.

It seems Bell has decided to degrade the internet connections of not only it’s Sympatico users, but the users of independent ISPs, who lease the ‘last mile’ connection from Bell (and pay handsomely for those lines) as required by the CRTC tariffs. Bell is picking on peer-to-peer traffic specifically, although some report encrypted traffic (like VPN traffic used by many companies for employees to connect to workplace networks) is getting hit in the crossfire.

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As a bit of a holiday gift to myself, I ordered an unlocked AT&T Tilt via eBay… it’s one of these all-in-one cell phones – has the phone, obviously, but is a Windows Mobile 6 PocketPC, too. With a built-in 3 MPixel camera and a GPS, to boot.

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Sometimes I need to access my home computer from work. Probably the easiest way to do this is with a Remote Desktop solution — there are lots out there. Windows XP has Microsoft’s “Remote Desktop” — which apparently is a pretty insecure solution. Also, most of the computers at the hospital are running Win2000, which doesn’t have the tool installed by default.

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So this weekend for some reason (maybe thinking about all the cool things I plan on doing with my home network at my new house?) I got the urge to set up a public Wireless Access Point.

My Primus WiMax modem had been sitting around for a while collecting dust, so I thought since I wasn’t using it, why not let everybody else try it? (The reason I’m not using it? The PCMCIA card for my laptop doesn’t have a good enough signal to pick anything up in my concrete apartment building. Nor at the Second Cup. So it’s basically useless unless I sit in the middle of the street downtown… *sigh*. The desktop receiver works — if I put it near a window. I’m not going to rewire my setup so I can get the 1MBit WiMAX when I have great 5MBit DSL service from TekSavvy…)

I had a spare Linksys WRT54GL lying around, so I put the latest DD-WRT firmware on it, signed up for worldspot.net, and configured it as per the wiki entry.

Worked great! Now people can connect to my AP, and know who to thank for their free Internet. :)

However, when I try and limit their bandwidth via worldspot.net’s interface, my router crashes. :( So I’ll have to think of something else — especially when I do this at my new house, where I don’t have a second ISP and will be sharing my own access… this post may help me, but I’ve had enough for today!

Having put aside computer games for the nth time, I have been a little more productive in my spare time — such as studying. Some friends and I are starting to prep for the LMCC Part 2 coming up in — eek — a few short months.

Besides that, however, I finally acted on my paranoid fear of losing years of data if my computer HD ever fizzled out (or worse yet, was stolen or destroyed) and started to implement a back-up system online. I had mentioned plans for this before, back in April, but didn’t really sit down to do it.
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I’ve been pretty busy lately but due to some downtime of my main Internet provider for upgrades (TekSavvy – I love ‘em by the way, and ordinary people wouldn’t have noticed it since they’re kind enough to do their upgrades in the middle of the night — but I’m a night owl… :P ), plus my increasing boredom at some of our lectures, I’ve been playing around with the Primus WiMAX trial I mentioned before. And it seems Google has been doing a decent job, since another blog managed to find my little note out in cyberspace!
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After looking for years for a Palm-based VOIP client, Gizmo Project finally releases one… they also have one for Nokia phones.

Gizmo is a great soft-phone based Voip provider – I used them a lot before switching to Primus for more hardware ATA support (and Canadian Call-in numbers). Of course, this latest development is a little late for me, since I no longer have a Palm due to an unfortunate accident involving a bucket of water…