Dear Prime Minister Harper, I have recently read over the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century (IP21C) Act. Giving the police the power to take down online criminals is a virtuous enterprise; however, allowing police to view any internet communication information without a warrant is unacceptable. Bypassing the cheques and balances of the courts in [...]
Today, the headline read, “CRTC allows Bell to continue internet throttling.” What the hell were you thinking? Do you have anybody at the CRTC who has a clue about Net Neutrality??? The telecoms are trying to hijack control of the Internet to make money off the people. They want to turn the Internet into a [...]
Bell insists that throttling Internet services is necessary. More specifically, Bell engages in “deep packet inspection,” which means they figure out what kind of data your downloading, and slow down the stuff they don’t like, i.e., peer-2-peer traffic. They argue that this is all for their customers: before traffic throttling, 5% of users ate 33% [...]
Time magazine recently named Vladamir Putin Person of the Year. Say What? Is this the same Russian president that had the leader of an opposing party, chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov, thrown in jail for protesting without permission and chanting antigovernment slogans? Is this the same Putin who threw democratic standards out the proverbial window and, [...]
I don’t blog for the money, but for those who do, purported online marketing gurus provide a proliferation of epistemically baseless, if not bogus, advice. I prefer recommendations with some data behind them. Recent research presented at the International Conference on Information Systems may be of interest. Researchers June Zhu and Bernard Tan of the [...]
Today BBC news reported that a U.K. man was “arrested after being spotted allegedly sitting in a street with a laptop using someone else’s unsecured wireless connection.” Apparently, at least two others have been arrested on similar grounds, those grounds being a UK law called The Communications Act (2003). This act makes it an offense [...]
On August 16th, Stephen Colbert interviewed Andrew Keen, author of a new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture. Admittedly, I’m a little behind the rest of the blogosphere on this one, but only because I wanted to be more specific then just saying Keen is a senseless twit, [...]