OpenMedia sent me a success email recently:

Yesterday, finally, the CRTC pulled back from its mandatory metered billing decision. This decision won’t stop all big telecom metering, but it could provide a much needed unlimited, independent option for many Canadians. It is truly rare for people to outmaneuver Big Telecom lobbyists, but together, we did it. Thank you for playing a crucial part in safeguarding the affordable Internet.

Emphasis theirs.

The next step, like with the banks, is to switch to an independent provider. OpenMedia links to a big list of Ontario ISPs, but specifically suggests switching to one of these:

Acanac: http://www.acanac.ca/
Distributel: http://www.distributel.ca/
Eagle: http://www.eagle.ca
Start Communications: http://start.ca/
Teksavvy: http://teksavvy.com/
Telnet: http://www.telnetcommunications.com/

The list of indies in BC is sadder:

Distributel (Vancouver, Victoria): http://www.distributel.ca/
Teksavvy (Vancouver): http://teksavvy.com/

I’ve never heard of Distributel. Weird.

Anyway, thoughts? I’ve heard good and bad about Teksavvy.

Yesterday Polanski won some Eurofilm awards for The Ghost Writer, which he accepted over Skype from his home in France.

Home in France? Yes. The Swiss Government released him when the US refused to forward the secret testimony against him. Hooray for Freedom!

Polanski was the subject of some discussion on this blog a while back.

Now if the Swiss would just stop bothering Wikileaks (neutrality, one supposes, applies only to international relations, not to private citizens, somehow).

In Seattle this…

… is an appropriate police response to jaywalking. And that’s why I don’t travel through or to America.

A bunch of old-media losers had an injunction granted against TPB in Germany that shut down their internet connection. I couldn’t download all day yesterday*.

Luckily, information wants to be free so the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. Here’s TPB’s “official” statement:

PLZ LEARN: TPB CANT BE SHUT DOWN

LOL!

AS U MITE HAS READ OR NOTICD, PEEPS ONCE AGAIN R TRYIN 2 SHUT US DOWN. DIS WILL NOT SUCCED, LOL. OURS RLY NICE WEBHOST WUZ THREATEND WIF RLY HUGE FINE, SO WE DECIDD 2 MOOV TEH SIET SO DAT THEY DIDNT GOT INTO TROUBLE, LOL. TEH DECISHUN 2 MOOV WUZ TAKEN BY US, TEH PIRATE BAY, LOL.

TEH PIRATE BAY IZ AN UNSINKABLE SHIP. IT WILL SAIL TEH INTERWEBS 4 AS LONG AS WE WANTS IT 2. REMEMBR DAT, K THX.

TPB, ONLY IN IT 4 TEH LULZ SINCE 2003

LOL! I’m in ur intellectual property, pimpin’ it to ma peopleZ.

* Think about the cost/benefit of the legal team’s fees versus shutting the site down for a day — because industry management sure isn’t. Man, shareholders should be peeved.

I’ve started to quite dig Canon’s photography products. However, their software support is atrocious. For example: I own a copy of Canon PhotoStitch, their panoramic photo generator, but I’m not allowed to use it.

I don’t take panoramas often at home, so I don’t have it installed. Now that I’m on vacation taking panoramas like crazy I need it — and it’s not available for free download. It’s just available free, on disc, with your purchase of a camera. Free, on disc, but on the other side of the planet.

This has got to be a common use-case: being caught on vacation without software. I’m forced to wonder if they’re trying to extort another $20 from me or if they’re just incompetent. Poor form.

I’ve been forced — by the company — to switch to open source. They must be quite confident in PhotoStitch — they’re driving their users into the open arms of development communes, confident we’ll come running back.

We’ll see how wise that turns out to be.

MSNBC sez that Google has dropped the “Great Firewall” censorship filters imposed by China en route to pulling out of the country entirely. The infamous Tiananmen Square search, for example, now works correctly.

Meanwhile in the West, WikiLeaks reports, via a leak, that the US DoD conspired to shut them down by running the proverbial tank over any whistleblower-protesters.

On the bright side: Governments the world over seem to have a common bond — hating freedom.

… was one of those Mohammed cartoonists.

The civil suit brought against Israel by Rachel Corrie‘s parents — the Cascadian girl who was bulldozer-murdered by the IDF because she was protesting in support of Palestinian rights — begins today in Haifa.

There’s been continuing drama over Cryptome, a site that… Well, here it is from the horse’s proverbial:

Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance — open, secret and classified documents — but not limited to those. Documents are removed from this site only by order served directly by a US court having jurisdiction. No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here — or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if comical but otherwise ignored.

Some of the drama was over this document, which contains Microsoft’s policies for providing information to police, including advice to the cops on what to ask for and how to ask for it.

I’ve read it, and it’s actually pretty benign, aside from Softie’s DMCA action over it. The part about XBox Live is the most intrusive. Microsoft preserves, forever, every IP ever used to talk to your 360 and the title-and-time of every game you’ve ever played while online, as well as obvious stuff like your GamerTag and credit card info.

MSN conversations, interestingly, aren’t retained server-side at all. This has been a big worry of mine and my more paranoid friends for a while.

That said, you should still encrypt basically everything.

Via BB, Assassin’s Creed 2‘s supposedly “uncrackable” DRM (Digital Rights Management) was broken in less than 24 hours.

DRM is bad business, for a bunch of reasons. When I was working for Unnamed Giant Game Conglomerate they wanted us to cripple our games for future generations by making them unarchivable add digital locks to our games to briefly stop piracy.

“Briefly”, yes. The theory was if we could hold off the pirates for just a month — just one — then most of them would give up and buy the game.

So we added a week to our already-horrible schedule (at the cost of actual features) to cripple lock-down the product.

We uploaded the gold master to the disc printer, and my brother sent me a link to download a cracked version that afternoon.

BUSINESS FAIL