Internet – Page 7

Facebook Violates Canadian Privacy Law

July 16, 2009July 16, 2009 Doug Groves canada, facebook, privacy7 Comments

Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has found that social web giant Facebook violates a number of Canadian privacy laws. Facebook has about 12 million Canadian users alone, so the privacy concerns affect a large swath of the population. One of the most egregious concerns is that when a user decides to delete their Facebook account, their personal data remains on the site, and is still accessible by 3rd party applications. An overarching concern was that, although Facebook provides information about its privacy practices, it is often confusing or incomplete. For…

Net Neutrality In Canada: An Update

July 14, 2009July 14, 2009 Doug Groves CRTC, net neutrality, throttling0 comment

Last week, the CRTC began conducting its hearing into the status of a number of issues facing Canada’s digital future, not the least of which is throttling practices. Since it’s launch just about all the major players, from telecoms to creative associations and private individuals have all had their say. There’s still at least one more day to go as we all await to hear from Bell (who’s 3rd party throttling helped propel the issue to the forefront), but in the past week there’s been some interesting stances, as well…

Canadian High Speed Internet (Slowly) Trickles Out

July 9, 2009July 9, 2009 Doug Groves Bell, couch, Rogers2 Comments

Marketing Strategies Highlight Duopoly In announcements just a day or so apart, Rogers and Bell/Aliant are starting to offer up real high speed internet for Canadian consumers in limited areas. Rogers is bringing 50Mbps DOCSIS cable access to Toronto residents, for the price of $150/month. Besides the 150Mbps, you’ll also be looking at a data cap of 150GB per month, which is pretty anemic for the price. If you do the math, you could blow through your 150GB cap in about an hour 10 hours if you’re going full (non)throttle….

CRTC Bell Hearings Continue – Let your voice be heard!

June 12, 2009June 12, 2009 Doug Groves Bell, CRTC2 Comments

As we’ve covered many times in the past, Bell has continued to put a stranglehold on innovation in Canada’s DSL infrastructure, as we’ve seen our rankings in the world continue to slip further back. Although slow in coming, the CRTC hearings continue regarding Bell throttling 3rd party wholesale customer, and public input for round two is open, until June 22nd. To Fight The Power…

Leo LaPorte says what we’re all thinking…finally.

June 8, 2009June 11, 2009 Danny X media8 Comments

I’m no big fan of Leo LaPorte. While I consider him an honest and genuine reviewer and host, I find watching his show “The Lab with Leo” on G4TechTV to be irritating at best and frustrating at worst. The only thing I can imagine being more annoying that watching Laporte would be being a guest on his show; he habitually ends his guests’ sentences for them and guides his interviews with all the deft grace and subtlety of a punch in the face. But he’s no Mike Arrington.

Jumpcut: Best Before June 15th

June 6, 2009June 6, 2009 Paul L 2 Comments

And by ‘best before’ I mean ‘nonexistent after’… Most of my personal film projects are primarily linked at Jumpcut. I kinda knew this was coming lately, in fact, I should have seen the writing on the wall the moment Jumpcut was bigfished by the aimless monstrosity that is Yahoo!, but I procrastinated and it’s still going to be a huge pain in the ass. Time to start chasing down them dead links! Dear Jumpcut user, After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009….

Canada Sucks When It Comes To High Speed Net Access

June 2, 2009June 2, 2009 Doug Groves 5 Comments

Michael Geist has a op/ed piece in [yesterday’s] Toronto Star that describes how craptastic Canada is when it comes to high speed Internet access. Here’s the bottom line: According to a new OECD report, Canada has one of the slowest and most expensive consumer broadband networks in the developed world. The OECD report, widely viewed as the leading benchmark on broadband networks in the world, compared Canada with 29 other countries on a range of metrics. These included broadband availability, pricing, speed, and bandwidth caps. As for specifics, how about…

Microsoft’s Bing Goes Live

June 2, 2009June 2, 2009 Doug Groves bing, google, Microsoft8 Comments

I’m not sure if the folks at Redmond have changed their water supply, but for the last 6 months to a year, Microsoft has been getting a lot more right than they have wrong. As evidence of this, their new search engine bing.com (formerly codenamed Kumo) has opened to the public in preview mode, much the same way Gmail has been in beta for over 5 years now. After a few random searches, I’m sold, or at least rented.

Download Decade a must read/watch/listen

May 20, 2009May 20, 2009 Doug Groves DRM, torrent1 Comment

Earlier this month, Canadian newspaper The Globe And Mail recently launched The Download Decade series, which is a multimedia cornucopia looking at how the media landscape has changed since Napster launched 10 years ago (as of June 1st). Besides a wealth of articles on all aspects of digital media, the site, which was months in the making, has a number of video and audio features, which can be viewed not only through YouTube and iTunes, but also downloaded via the oft-maligned bit torrent. I can say that this is one…

Warren Ellis’s Webcomics Week Explored – Part 1

May 19, 2009May 20, 2009 Paul L webcomics7 Comments

What do you get when you select all the webcomics artists who follow a certain foulmouthed comics writer by the name of Warren Ellis (of Transmetropolitan fame, and currently writing FreakAngels and Ignition City)? When such selection is jumpstarted by Ellis putting out the call personally on Twitter, you get a motherfucking kickass webcomics roundup thread, that’s what. It’s not the first time he’s done this, but the collection appears to be snowballing. I’ve only tackled the first three-odd pages of the thread so far in my reading and in…

[TFLN] will never let you live down your shameful drunken deeds

May 4, 2009July 28, 2009 Danny X twitter0 comment

[TFLN]: TXTS FRM LST NGHT is a new-ish site with a mission to keep a record of a phenomenon that’s likely familiar to all of us on some level. Remember that time you havered your ex because it was 4 in the morning and you just had to get something off your chest? Ya that’s kind of the idea. From the site: Texts From Last Night (TFLN) was founded in February 2009 by two friends for reasons that may or may not include: the tendency to press send more easily…

Toronto one of the top 10 most photographed cities on Earth

May 4, 2009July 25, 2009 Danny X photography, Toronto5 Comments

According to LIFE Magazine, Toronto has joined the ranks of Barcelona, New York City, Tokyo, and 6 other large cities as the most photographed in the world. LIFE’s process was not particularly scientific, but still telling, in that it appears that the stats come from casual or amateur photographers and not necessarily from any corporate-sponsored initiative: A glance at the list of Flickr’s all time most popular tags reveals that a handful of cities are consistantly photographed by the users of the popular photo hosting site. Check out the stream…