Does WiFi pose health risks?

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 10:49 AM - 0 Comments

Viktor Hertz/Flickr

Radiation can give life and take it away. Sunlight, therapy to kill malignant tumors, powerful x-rays, and radio waves are all forms of radiation. Lately, much has been made of the health risks related to another source of invisible waves: WiFi.

In recent years, politicians and leaders in the health field have tried to do something about the perceived threat of exposure to radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic fields, on which WiFi, cell phone networks, radio signals, microwave ovens, and cordless home phones depend. Public fears about RF fields may have hit a fever pitch when, last summer, the World Health Organization designated them as a “possibly carcinogenic” agent—alongside others like coffee—for which evidence of harm is uncertain. Since then, we’ve heard our nation’s doctors raise concerns about the health risks related to cell phones; politicians, such as Elizabeth May, warn publicly about the potential harms posed by WiFi; and frightened parents say they’d move their children away from the invisible threat, as schools impose bans on wireless internet.

But what do we actually know about the health effects of RF exposure—and, in particular, the health risks related to WiFi?

Different technologies give off different amounts of radiation, explained Dr. Patrizia Frei (PhD), a research fellow at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, who has conducted reviews on the health effects of RF exposure. “While mobile phones cause mostly localized exposure to the head,” she said, “WiFi usually causes far-field whole-body exposures which are usually much lower.” According to the UK’s Health Protection Agency, “the signals are very low power, typically 0.1 watt (100 milliwatts) in both the computer and the router (access point), and the results so far show exposures are well within the internationally-accepted guidelines from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection.”

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How Bell will charge you for using Netflix

By Jesse Brown - Friday, December 23, 2011 at 5:07 PM - 0 Comments

ian boyd/Flickr

This week, Bell Canada, announced that it will cease its long-standing practice of throttling (stunting the speed of) BitTorrent traffic. Throttling has been a controversial practice of Internet providers–one that Bell has long argued it absolutely needs to do in order to stop “bandwidth hogs” from slowing speeds for everyone (only in Canada’s competition-deprived telecom industry would a company actually call its own customers “hogs” for using too much of the service they provide).

So why did Bell have such a radical change of heart? Continue…

SOPA critics are ready for a showdown

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 9:44 AM - 0 Comments

americancensorhip.org

For background on this potentially Internet-breaking bill, see my last post on the subject. 

How much does the Internet hate America’s proposed Stop Online Piracy Act? A LOT.

In anticipation of a congressional hearing on the bill on Thursday, online activists are mobilizing in a big way: Continue…

Why not searching on Google is stupid

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 4:37 PM - 0 Comments

Alain Bachellier/Flickr

Last week, I had the honour of speaking at the Online Educa conference in Berlin, an annual meeting of education professionals that this year attracted 2,000 visitors from more than 100 countries. Conference organizers have put up a video of my speech, which was about how food technology is driving economic growth in the developing world and, as a consequence, the collective demand for education there.

I also had the pleasure of participating in a debate on technological developments and their effects on privacy and learning. My teammate Peter Bowers, a teacher in the U.K., and I had the task of arguing against the following statement:

This house expresses its concern about the effect developments in technology are increasingly having on personal liberty and believes this will have serious consequences for learning in the future.

On Thursday, before the debate, I wrote about how I thought the statement was indefensible; that technology enabled liberty and therefore learning like no other force on the planet. While true, the debate was ultimately quite lively and resulted in an almost even split among the audience. Alas, our side lost by a narrow margin.

Continue…

On UBB, the fat lady has not yet sung

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 2:17 PM - 0 Comments

It’s been a week since the CRTC released its big decision on usage-based Internet billing. With the dust settled, everything is a lot clearer, right? Not really. Because of the ruling’s complex nature, it looks like it may be some time before its effects are felt and understood. One thing is clear: this long-running drama that everyone hoped would be resolved, with Internet users and small service providers on one side and the big telecom companies on the other, is far from over.

A number of consumer advocates have come out in favour of the CRTC’s decision. University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist wrote this week that it is a very good thing for small Internet service providers. By allowing them to purchase capacity rather than per-byte usage from large ISPs, they now have the flexibility to offer plans that are different from what the big guys sell: Continue…

Ladies and trolls of the Internet

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 1:06 PM - 0 Comments

The Internet is sexist. Virulently so.

The everyday misogyny expressed on virtually every open forum is so common that it has become expected. It shouldn’t be though, and Helen Lewis-Hasteley of the New Statesman has done a fine thing by asking nine bloggers to write about the violent and hateful messages they receive daily, and how if affects them (spoiler: it’s not banal when you’re the target of it).

For readers, there’s something darkly exciting about a bunch of bloggers sharing the worst hate mail they’ve received with you—at first, that is. Reading the piece, any excitement dissolves pretty quickly: sexist trolls are repetitive, stupid, and boring. Their put-downs and sexual insults, even their threats of gang rape—all of them are terribly uncreative and tedious. The intended menace rarely registers—all that comes across is how pathetic the trolls are, how sad it is that their default reaction to disagreeing with a woman (about politics, video games, anything) is to attack her appearance and suggest that what she really needs is… Continue…

Canadian broadband: the time for complaining is over

By Peter Nowak - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 5:36 PM - 0 Comments

Tiago Gualberto Morais/Flickr

I had to take a deep breath before writing this post, mostly to get all the four-letter words and other obscenities out of my system. There are few things that make me as angry as Canada’s abject failure on broadband issues, a situation that was highlighted again on Wednesday by our neighbours to the south and their creation of a plan to get high-speed Internet to the poorest Americans.

If you missed the news, the Federal Communications Commission introduced a plan that will give households in the National Student Lunch Program access to broadband for $9.99 a month. Moreover, the FCC’s Connect 2 Compete program will also get these families access to inexpensive computers ranging from $150 to $250, plus training on how to use them and the Internet. This is far from just a government initiative, though—the broadband part is coming through a partnership with cable companies such as Comcast, with the likes of Microsoft and Best Buy providing the other stuff.

It’s probably hard for anyone reading this (on the web) to imagine what life would be like without the Internet, but for those millions of Americans, it’s reality. That’s why, for the most part, the FCC’s plan is being lauded. Lefty types like it for obvious reasons while the righties like it too because it targets those 5.5 million homes that don’t—and most likely can’t—subscribe to broadband anyway. The plan doesn’t take money out of Internet providers’ pockets and it stands to add millions of people to what was once considered the economy of the future, but what is in reality the economy of the now. Continue…

Boo! A brief history of technology scares

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

Halloween isn’t the only time when everybody seems to enjoy being frightened. We must enjoy it year round, given the steady diet of fear the media keeps us on. It’s particularly true in the technology world. Over the past year, we’ve had the ongoing Wi-Fi cancer scare, more stories about the potential problems with biotechnology and lots and lots of attention paid to how the Internet is threatening our privacy.

Alas, a glance through time shows this is nothing new. People have been worrying about the effects of new technology since, well, fire.

Here, then, are five great examples from history. Continue…

‘Canadians have not been given sufficient justification’

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 28, 2011 at 10:03 AM - 0 Comments

The privacy commissioner questions the Harper government’s push for “lawful access” legislation.

Despite repeated calls, no systematic case has yet been made to justify the extent of the new investigative capabilities that would have been created by the bills. Canadian authorities have yet to provide the public with evidence to suggest that CSIS or Canadian police cannot perform their duties under the current regime.   One-off cases and isolated incidents should not prove the rule, nor should exigent or emergency circumstances, for which there are already Criminal Code provisions. 

As well, if the concern of law enforcement agencies is that it is difficult to obtain warrants or judicial authorization in a timely way, these administrative challenges should be addressed by administrative solutions rather than by weakening long-standing legal principles that uphold  Canadians’ fundamental freedoms. 

The German Pirate Party’s flagging sails

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Carsten Rehder/AFP/Getty Images

No one expected Germany’s Pirate Party to win representation in Berlin’s state parliament. Yet their campaign, which included a platform advocating a quixotic mix of data protection, a guaranteed minimum income and legalized marijuana, appealed to disillusioned voters who rewarded it with nine per cent of the vote.

Now, however, the past activities of some members are casting shadows over the Pirate Party’s move onto the national political stage. At least two members, including a regional chairman, have been ID’d as former members of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), which has been labelled by German intelligence as a “racist, anti-Semitic” entity that wants to create a Fourth Reich. (One later resigned.)

In addition, women complain that the party, which claims to be “post-gender,” is overwhelmingly populated by men. So far, party officials have shrugged off all the criticisms. As leader Sebastian Nerz told Der Spiegel, “We grew out of the Internet scene, and that happens to be dominated by men.”

Freedom to hyperlink has copyright consequences

By Jesse Brown - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 4:27 PM - 6 Comments

The Supreme Court of Canada gets the Internet.  This week, it unanimously ruled that linking to libelous or defamatory content is not the same thing as publishing libelous or defamatory content. The case involved a former Green party campaign manager, Wayne Crookes, who wanted one Jon Newton to remove links from an article about Crookes on his website. While Newton’s article was not libelous, Crookes felt the material he linked to was. Publishing the link, Crookes’s attorneys argued, was no different than publishing the material it linked to.

The Court did not agree.

First of all, there’s an unsolvable technical problem involved in deeming linking and publishing to be the same thing. Unless I’m linking to my own content, I have no control over what lies at the other side of my link. The page I link to today may change tomorrow. If linking in Canada were to be considered publishing, then publishing would instantly become too risky to pursue for anyone with assets to protect. It would be like telling a cookbook publisher that the latest tome about cupcakes they just sent to the printer may or may not hit stores with images of child pornography included.

The effect on the Internet in Canada, the Court ruled, could be “devastating.” Continue…

Welcome to the Internet. No kids allowed

By Jesse Brown - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 3:50 PM - 2 Comments

If you’re under 13, you’re not allowed on Facebook.

That’s not the command of a strict parent—it’s Facebook policy. It also happens to be U.S. law. Thanks to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, it’s illegal for websites to collect the personal data of anyone under 13 without parental consent. Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to fight this law, but for now, Facebook won’t let you sign up unless you state your age as 13 or over, regardless of which country you live in.

Of course, Facebook is just one of the sites kids aren’t supposed to use. Just about every commercial website has small print in their TOU (Terms of Use) limiting access to those legally able to enter into binding contracts. In Canada, as in most countries, this means ages 18 and up. So if you’re a teenager who follows the rules, you can’t tweet, you can’t watch a YouTube video, and you can’t even run a Google search. Continue…

Britain’s futile quest to ban Internet porn

By Peter Nowak - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 8:06 AM - 12 Comments

British Prime Minister David Cameron has embarked on a rather humourous endeavour to try and save the United Kingdom from porn. Earlier this week, it was reported that, at Cameron’s behest, the four largest Internet service providers in the UK would begin an opt-in program where they would automatically block porn websites unless customers explicitly said they wanted them.

No sooner did the ink (real or virtual) dry on that story than those same ISPs—BT, TalkTalk, Sky and Virgin—started talking about how the system would have no effect. The opt-in process, it turns out, will apply only to brand new customers, which means very little because only about 5 per cent of people change service providers in a given quarter.

That’s not exactly the best way to say it will have no effect—after all, at that rate it will only take 10 quarters or two-and-a-half years to block the majority of the country from porn. Still, the ISPs’ chafing at the idea is what makes Cameron’s effort humourous because it’s doomed to fail for a host of reasons.

First, there are the freedom of speech issues. The Australian government’s effort to enact a similar ban has hit all kinds of snags, from coalition partners refusing to support it to several big ISPs refusing to play ball, even with something as universally deplorable as child porn. Things have gotten downright silly Down Under, with the banning efforts extending to erotica that features small-breasted women, which supposedly encourages pedophilia. The resulting joke, of course, is that Australians want their porn stars to have big boobs.

Then there are the logistical problems. How, exactly, does something qualify for the banned list?

Banning porn on the Internet is ultimately a fool’s errand. It’s here to stay and, while laws and technology can try to help, in the end its parents’ responsibility to ensure their kids aren’t getting to where they shouldn’t be.

If a country were to successfully ban online porn, however, it’s a safe bet its Internet traffic would nosedive. While accurate numbers are tough to come by, there are some hints that suggest pornography still makes up a good chunk of traffic. Five of the 100 most-visited websites (that are in English) are porn-related, according to Alexa rankings, while Ogi Ogas – author of A Billion Wicked Thoughts – says about 13% of web searches are for erotic content.

Applying this chain of logic to Canada, if Internet providers here really were worried about congestion on their networks, they wouldn’t be enacting usage-based billing to try and slow consumption with the likes of Netflix. They’d be trying to get porn banned.

You’re about to become a copyright criminal

By Jesse Brown - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 1:19 PM - 45 Comments

The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld

If you’re a student, or if you consume a lot of music, movies and TV, or if you do fun stuff on the Internet, there’s a rather good chance the Conservatives’ Copyright Reform Bill will make you a criminal.

How? In plenty of ways. Here are a few:

• Your professor assigns you a digital course pack. It contains excerpts of copyrighted material, but because you’re using it for education, you get a pass. At least, that is, as long as you delete those files within 30 days of the end of class. If you keep them around to use for reference in your honours thesis, or if a stray copy makes its way onto your phone and you forget to erase it, then you’ve broken the law.
• You transfer your CD collection to your iPod. Two years later, you get a new iPod, and give the old one to your little sister. If you neglect to destroy your CD collection first, you’ve become a criminal.
• Just for giggles, you mash up some Thomas the Tank engine video clips with a Biggie Smalls song. You post the mashup to your blog, it goes mini-viral, and you make ten bucks and a few cents from Google AdWords hits. You’re now a commercial copyright infringer.

And that’s just for starters. There are many other harmless things millions of Canadians do in the privacy of their homes that will soon constitute copyright infringement. I’ll be back soon with a few more.

For now, here’s the bill. Have a read, and see if you can add one or two potential criminal scenarios of your own in the comments.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Caught in Facebook’s net

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of social networking giant Facebook, stepped onstage at a developers’ conference in San Francisco last week and, probably unwittingly, launched into his best Steve Jobs impression. Wearing jeans, sneakers and a grey T-shirt (the Apple Inc. chair favours black turtlenecks, but you get the idea), Zuckerberg took the wraps off a host of new Facebook features while peppering the presentation with Jobs-isms—“really easy” yet “so powerful”—that emphasized just how intuitive and exciting everything about the overhauled Facebook would be.

Except that none of the new features unveiled appear to be either—at least not at first blush. Once a relatively spartan piece of online real estate, users’ profile pages will now display a comprehensive “timeline” of their lives, curated in part by Facebook’s software and by users themselves, while a new window shows exactly what everyone in your network is doing at any given moment (Stephanie likes Peter’s status update, Lisa commented on her photo, Steve is friends with Sharon . . . and so on). Zuckerberg called it a place to monitor “lightweight” activity that threatens to bog down the main news feed, which will now consist entirely of material that is deliberately posted by a user’s friends.

Turns out there’s a reason Facebook decided to create a dedicated space for all of these auto-updates: it plans to unleash a torrent of them on its users. The company is planning to throw TV, streaming music and other online media services into the mix so that users can see, in real time, what songs their friends are listening to, which TV shows they’re watching and what news stories they are reading—and soon, no doubt, where they’re shopping. “What’s even more interesting and exciting than getting people signed up is all the things that are possible by having these connections in place,” said Zuckerberg, who suggested that Facebook and its partners will “rethink some industries.”

Continue…

Tweets v. Ideas

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:49 AM - 9 Comments

Neal Gabler sketches the demise of ideas.

To paraphrase the famous dictum, often attributed to Yogi Berra, that you can’t think and hit at the same time, you can’t think and tweet at the same time either, not because it is impossible to multitask but because tweeting, which is largely a burst of either brief, unsupported opinions or brief descriptions of your own prosaic activities, is a form of distraction or anti-thinking.

The implications of a society that no longer thinks big are enormous. Ideas aren’t just intellectual playthings. They have practical effects.

Continue…

Lawful access and online freedom

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 3:17 PM - 5 Comments

Alexander Ly and Andrew Webb oppose the government’s “lawful access” legislation.

Under current laws, internet service providers (ISPs) can voluntarily disclose customer information to the authorities, but they are only required to do so if served a warrant. Bill C-52, Section 16 (1), would supersede this liberty, and force providers to disclose consumer information to the authorities without a court order. Making matters worse, Bill C-50 would enable the police to intercept “communications” – as vaguely defined by Bill C-51 – without a warrant as long as they deem the intervention necessary. This shift toward warrantless investigations removes court oversight from the monitoring of wired and mobile internet, and allows law-enforcement authorities, without justification, to have a free hand in spying on the private lives of law-abiding Canadians.

Our own Peter Nowak considers the future of governance in the Internet age.

Governments must adapt to Internet, not other way around

By Peter Nowak - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 1:09 PM - 11 Comments

Photo by Jeremy Brooks c/o Flickr Creative Commons

When the Cold War ended just over twenty years ago, it was convenient to think of it as democracy’s final triumph over tyranny, autocracy and every other form of government. With communism defeated, it seemed pretty obvious that the system left standing was the best one – the one we were always destined for and the one that every country should strive for.

It would be foolish, however, to think that the way we govern ourselves has stopped evolving. Our current system of democracy is by no means the be all and the end all of human governance. The same way that the printing press and a newly educated population forced the evolution of monarchies into republics centuries ago, so too is the internet now forcing governments of all stripes to grow, adapt and change. As people become further connected with advanced technologies, this movement will only accelerate.

But before things get better, they will get worse. The riots in London are only the tip of this iceberg. The internet has furthered the collective education and consciousness of the public and given us access, literally, to a world of information. It has never been easier for the average person to see just how much of the world’s increasing wealth they’re missing out on, or how much their particular government is screwing them. This, as much as anything, can explain the unrest and riots, which seem to be happening in both developed and developing countries with a growing frequency.

Democracy has been on a downward spiral in many developed nations for decades, with voter turnouts hitting new lows – excepting periodic uptick aberrations – in each successive election (the recent election in Canada saw only 61% of voters turn up, slightly higher than the record low set in 2008). The decline shows more people are either losing faith in the system, or they are fine with the status quo and simply can’t be bothered with it.

Whatever the case, with their mandates shrinking, governments are feeling less beholden to the public and are acting more boldly. Whether it’s stripping away civil rights, detaining people without due process or negotiating legislation and treaties in secret, our democratically elected governments are behaving more and more like the communists they defeated not so long ago.

But democracy is alive and well on the internet. Indeed, it’s the de facto model that almost every online operation works on; topics trend on Twitter depending on how many people are discussing them, news stories get assigned, ranked and displayed based on similar factors (as opposed to chosen by human editors, like they were in the past) and websites show up in Google searches based on how many links they have pointing to them. Online, the good and popular rises to the top – whether it’s YouTube videos, Apple apps, Amazon books or Digg stories – while the bad or unpopular is ignored or voted down.

Moreover, online democracy is exerting itself as its own form of court system, which some might call vigilantism. When Sony recently sued a hacker who had cracked the PlayStation 3, other hackers took down the company’s online video game network for a month. Conversely, when Microsoft welcomed the hacking of its Kinect games system, it earned kudos and thanks from the online community. The underlying notion behind both being that cracking devices is necessary to learn and thus propel innovation forward. Anyone who stands in the way of that, the online community has ruled, is being a bad netizen.

This is because from its very beginnings, the internet has been based on the principles of openness and community. The technical protocols on which it runs were made available for free, as was the first web browser. The fundamental principles of the internet, therefore, are the same as democracy – each user is entitled to freedom and openness, so long as they don’t harm anyone else. Those that do harm in the eyes of the collective are punished, one way or another.

Governments, whether they’re in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada or China, are beginning to understand this and are now trying to extend their reach and control into the online world through various forms of censorship or control (China is obviously further ahead). It’s a struggle they are not likely to win because laws and enforcement take time, despite diminishing democratic controls, whereas new technological circumventions move at lightning speed. The continued survival and success of The Pirate Bay, the file-sharing site that authorities have been trying to shut down for the better part of a decade, is just one example of this. Simply put, laws will never catch up to technology.

Indeed, the inverse is more likely. The principles of openness and freedom cultivated on the internet, which has coincidentally been part of mainstream culture since the end of the Cold War, are more likely to bleed into the real world – literally, through riots. Governments will inevitably have no choice but to acquiesce and adapt to what are ultimately basic human desires: to be open and free. Otherwise, as advanced technologies make living in a virtual online world more realistic and palatable, people will inevitably abandon the real world and move into the ether permanently, leaving governments with no one to govern.

In the air tonight

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 4:56 PM - 33 Comments

This afternoon, Elizabeth May took to Twitter to fret about the harmfulness of wifi. Some degree of mockery ensued. As to the central issue, Kate Heartfield posts a Citizen editorial from a year ago.

The World Health Organization says there is no convincing scientific evidence that wireless networks cause any damage to human health. Yes, wireless devices emit electromagnetic radiation, as do other electronic devices we use in our homes and offices: computers, televisions, even baby monitors. The exposure to radiation from a mobile phone, which is generally much closer to the person using it than a wireless access point, is much higher than that from a wireless network.

It’s certainly true that exposure to wifi networks has increased over the past few years, and that it might take time for any ill effects to show up in the research. So it makes sense for health agencies to keep monitoring the research and be prepared to change their minds, as is true for all science. The evidence from the research to date, though, is clear and reassuring. There is certainly no reason to start getting rid of wifi in schools and other places where children spend a lot of time.

The WHO fact sheet on wireless networks is here. More recently, Health Canada posted the following video. Continue…

The Web’s best friend?

By Emma Teitel - Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 12:15 PM - 0 Comments

Photography by Liz Sullivan

A ghost of Internet past is back in the form of Wag.com—a new Amazon venture set on recreating Pets.com, the pet supply store whose failure in 2000 became an enduring symbol of that era’s dot-com bubble. Wag.com is the creation of Quidsi, the company responsible for Diapers.com and Soap.com. Amazon acquired Quidsi for $540 million in April, and hopes to dodge the bad luck linked to Pets.com, which couldn’t break even on shipping costs despite massive marketing success and a Super Bowl spot. The new site sells 10,000 pet supplies including food, clothing and litter. While Amazon hasn’t had much luck with its prior pet ventures (it backed Pets.com), Quidsi co-founder Marc Lore told the New York Times that today’s health food craze may give Wag.com an edge that its predecessor never had. “People buy more organic pet food now,” he says, “so shipping costs as a per cent of revenue are lower.”

Xplornet asked me not to write this

By Jesse Brown - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 12:33 PM - 27 Comments

Photo by wheresmysocks/Flickr

File this one under “Streisand Effect.” It’s a story I wouldn’t be writing if I hadn’t been warned not to.

Let’s start with some background: in Canada, we supposedly have Net Neutrality. That means your Internet service provider can’t mess around with the speeds of your connection based on which sites or apps you use. Yet ISPs in Canada still mess with the speed of our connections based on which sites or apps we use. How is this possible? Two reasons:

1. Because there are exceptions to the CRTC’s Net Neutrality regulations (if ISPs say they have to slow you down in order to manage “network congestion,” they can).
2. Net Neutrality rules are only enforced after they are broken, only if consumers complain, and only if the CRTC bothers to investigate and act.

Recently, Internet law prof Michael Geist obtained public CRTC documents revealing that, though dozens have complained about cases of speed “throttling,”  the CRTC has only enforced Net Neutrality once, on a company called Barret Xplornet—a government-subsidized provider servicing rural areas with satellite service.

Continue…

A Canada without YouTube? It could happen.

By Peter Nowak - Friday, July 15, 2011 at 3:00 PM - 42 Comments

Photo by jonsson/Flickr

Here’s an interesting if somewhat disturbing thought: can you picture a world without YouTube? Or more specifically, a country without YouTube?

It seems improbable, almost impossible, but it’s entirely conceivable if the CRTC loses its collective mind and decides to regulate such “over-the-top” Internet services in Canada.

The regulator, answering to cajoling from traditional broadcasters, has now concluded its “fact-finding mission” on whether YouTube, Netflix and other OTT services should have Canadian content rules foisted on to them. At some point, it will decide on whether to proceed with a new, full hearing, or whether it will just drop the issue, at least for now.

Continue…

Rogers launches LTE network

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 5:09 PM - 4 Comments

Rogers has launched Canada’s first LTE (Long Term Evolution) network in Ottawa, with a rollout in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal expected this fall. The service is both faster and boasts lower latency than current mobile Internet offerings, making it a better replacement for interactive applications like gaming. Download speeds will at first have a maximum of 75 Mbps, though customers should typically see speeds of 12 Mbps to 25 Mbps. HTC and Samsung are expected to release LTE-capable smartphones later this year.

Rogers Redboard

The watcher

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 3:52 PM - 12 Comments

Tabatha Southey questions the Internet surveillance portion of the government’s promised omnibus crime bill.

Imagine that, because you’re pressed for time, you take a cab to the library. The cab driver is obliged by law to install a device that will monitor where he takes you. While in the cab, you call your friend to talk about your day. The phone company is obliged to track whom you talk to and for how long. At the library, you speak to a librarian, who jots down your query, because legally he must. He directs you to a specific shelf, and notes that too; each book you open will be recorded as well. Later, you see a film. The theatre notes which one, as it has to….

Most Canadians would be outraged about this situation, unless someone explained to them that all these actions – the visiting, conversing, research, commerce and movie watching – were conducted on the Internet. Substitute search engines for libraries and cabs, and telecommunications companies for the theatre, and lots of people quiet down.