Comments on: Why the net keeps shrinking

By: tree removal company

tree removal company — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 12:26:02 +0000

The photo is like saying "Enter Canada". Nice article chris.

By: edncda

edncda — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:09:41 +0000

Great article. Who would have guessed that the internet would turn out like this. And in less than a single generation. It's the electronic data equivalent of the "Big Bang"; the original "Internet" is fragmenting ever more rapidly into countless intranets. "Your own little world, the way we want you to see it".

By: @teledyn

@teledyn — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:45:15 +0000

a few months back we were able to demonstrate domain service censoring on a national scale here in Canada; I think many Canadians are unaware of the Great White Northern Firewall, and while they smugly deride other countries for imposing censorship through Google, all along they have been living under a far more insideous regime. We can't even say for sure who is doing it!

Here's how we tested: We selected an innocuous bittorrent, an old 1950's sci fi film, so there was no question of violating decency laws, the copyright may even be clear, but whatever, here is what we found: Subscribers connected to everus.ca, subscribers to Bell and Rogers dsl in Toronto and subscribers in Vancouver all found the torrent swarm to be a handful (less than 5) with no seed servers. Just across the boarder, in Seattle, a simultaneous test gave a massive swarm with dozens of participants and nearly a dozen seeds.

We already knew the Canadian backbone ISPs were actively inspecting and censoring our emails (aka spam filters, notorious for spectacular mistakes) although more recently they will grant us access to the trash bin (wasn't always the case) and we know they inspect individual packets to detect 'unwanted' network traffic to impede (and Bell was recently granted CRTC license to grant preferential bandwidth to their corporate partners), a practice known euphemistically as 'Traffic Shaping', but it was a shock to all of us to discover whole domains snipped from our access!

We lost a lot of our national smugness that day.

Worst of all, it is hard to even talk about this issue in Canada without non-technical people looking at you as some sort of conspiracy ufo tin-foil hat nerd! :)

By: MaggiesFarmboy

MaggiesFarmboy — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:22:59 +0000

I can put up with the hassle created by domestic licensing, although it irks me when I can't see a clip embedded in a blog or other US online media.

What really bothers me is when Global, for instance, buys the domestic distribution rights for a US program and fails to allow any access to it at all. (SNL, for example)

I realiz that Global are not exactly flush with cash these days, but what is the point of holding this stuff hostage if you don't have the resources to put it online?

Only Canadians would put up with this second-class status for so long.

By: knick

knick — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:33:17 +0000

Firefox has an option for 'Private Browsing' that might prevent redirections (don't know as I haven't tried it yet.)

By: I WANT MY NAME BACK

I WANT MY NAME BACK — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:52:57 +0000

Recalling how responsive the stock market is to the software that serves it, I hope that Google manages change to their software with diversity and legacy documentation as the core development directives.