DancingSamurai.ca

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…

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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• Tony Blair gives a great speech criticizing today’s media (sorry I don’t remember where I found this link):
  

  The result is a media that increasingly and to a dangerous degree is driven by “impact”. Impact is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed. Impact gives competitive edge. Of course the accuracy of a story counts. But it is secondary to impact.

• Here’s someone trying to do something positive about autism — arrange for more treatment — rather than playing the blame game.
• And a medical story too shocking to be believed… a patient writing on the floor of an ER, vomiting blood, ignored by ER staff yet looking sick enough for two people to call 911 from the ER, dies when nobody comes to help.
  

  In the 40 minutes before a woman’s death last month at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, two separate callers pleaded with 911 dispatchers to send help because the hospital staff was ignoring her as she writhed on the floor, according to audio recordings of the calls.

  (via Kevin MD)

• More talk of going to a pay-for-use model for Internet access. I think this would be great — provided that they stop telling me what to do with the bits I pay for. Rogers, although capping their customers’ monthly bandwidth use at 100 GB, still block a number of protocols (e.g. BitTorrent) that is pretty much the only reason to need 100 GB.
• A neat mini-documentary on teenagers’ spending in LA. And I mean spending… (via Over My Med Body)

Once again, taking some time off while trying to get some work done this weekend to go through the pile of links I have collected over the last little while. Here they are in no particular order:

• Open Medicine – a made in Canada, free, publicly accessible medical journal begins! They even have an RSS feed, which I have added to my Bloglines subscription… (via Michael Geist)
• Lots of blame has been thrown around in the Virginia Tech shooting this past week, from blaming Bill Gates to vaccines. Unfortunately, it seems, nobody is blaming the shooter. I’m reminded of that movie where these two russians come to the US, and one of them states the great thing about the US is that “nobody is responsible for their own actions”. (Anybody remember what movie this is?) It is also pointed out that horrible things like this happened even a long time ago… (via Respectful Insolence)
• I think I found the digital camera I want: The Lumix FX07. Word of mouth advertising? Works great!
• Rogers traffic shaping causing more problems – like degrading VPN and e-mail access. I have been ranting for a long time that an ISP who has a bandwidth cap has no business telling you what you use that bandwidth for. That’s why I’m glad my ISP is Teksavvy – unlimited bandwidth, great service. I have only great things to say about them!
• A wonderful Forbes article [ local cache ] on an alternative strategy to deal with crime in on-line social networking sites… (via TLF).
• The Automobile Protective Association is an interesting idea — make some deals with car dealerships for a no-nonsense, haggle free purchase of an automobile. They also list common problems with most models of cars. I’ll have to go back there when looking to buy a vehicle…
• Canadian High Interest Savings Accounts – a nice, comprehensive review.
• It seems drug companies aren’t the only ones being sleazy with drug prices — pharmacies (at least in the states) are also inflating drug prices. (via Get Rich Slowly)
• A passionate account (that’s becoming all too common) of how the music industry is comitting suicide.

I seem to be jinxed. When I left Toronto to come to Hamilton, I cancelled my Rogers Hi-Speed internet and signed up for Cogeco here in Hamilton. Actually, I had the business versions of both of those accounts, not because I was running a business, but because I was running such things as this website and didn’t want to deal with ‘no server’ clauses in the TOS. Anyway, I digress…

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I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I got a new Sony Ericsson W600 cell phone through Rogers Wireless.

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The new version of Azureus has header (and entire packet) encryption options. So users like me who want to use BitTorrent but are prevented by Rogers’ overly aggressive traffic shaping, now can hide BT traffic from said hardware and have full speed again. At least, that’s what the BitComet encryption did for me, but I don’t like that client, so it’s nice to have a good client implement these features.

A note about traffic shaping — I really don’t mind if Rogers implements some QoS on their networks. I always limit the upload bandwidth in my client to a reasonable rate, as I do NOT want my web surfing to suffer due to BT or other P2P apps. Similarly, I do want my neighbours who may be running BT or other P2P software at full, unlimited bandwidth, to have lower priority than my VoIP / web / e-mail / etc.

But throttling all BT traffic to 0.5 k/ sec upstream? Give me a break, that makes the whole protocol useless. I’m paying for these pipes. I’d happily pay more for fatter pipes. If you want to start charging for bandwidth used, by all means go ahead. But if you’re marketing your product as a high-speed connection, don’t cut the speed on the most popular things those connections are used for.

So Rogers has been blocking BitTorrent traffic in my area for many months now. Well, apparently, they’re throttling the upload bandwidth completely to death (I can get decent download speeds) which means I can’t maintain a good ratio to ‘give back what I take’. A lot of BitTorrent communities will ban you for this.

It is Rogers since if I VPN to the University, my Bittorrent bandwidth is instantly what I’m used to. Since I don’t really want to be hogging U of T’s bandwidth… I switched back to old school, newsgroups. Usenet search engines helped with that transition, so I don’t have to d/l gigs of headers.

And now… the latest crushing blow — Rogers is, as of Dec. 15th, discontinuing their newsgroup service. Thanks for telling me, Rogers — I would never have known had I not stumbled across it in a forum somewhere. *sigh*

So, it’s back to the drawing board. Apparently BitComet has a ‘packet header encryption’ feature that thwarts Rogers traffic shaping. So I may be back on BT after all… or I’ll just ‘borrow’ U of T bandwidth via VPN…