J. Carlos Navea – loconet

Consumers might be able to get something positive out of the recent outcry over the arguably pricey 3G IPhone plans offered by Rogers. The massive attention this issue is gaining online is prompting Canadians to question the way Rogers is conducting business, something which I have personally questioned for a while. This new found interest by consumers to inform themselves about competitors and unmask what some might label as monopolistic price gouging behavior, can only help the country’s economy in the long run and secure technological progress for the future. With that spirit then let’s compare another service Rogers offers: The Home Phone.

For those not familiar with it, Roger’s Home Phone service provides residential customers with a land-line phone connection much like that of offerings from Bell, Primus, etc. The service started as two offerings: Classic landline over telephone lines, and VoIP. As of June 2008, Rogers will only be offering the VoIP option (forcing existing classical land-line consumers to switch or cancel) so let’s compare their product with other similar VoIP services: Vonage and Primus.

Since I want to keep this simple while looking at the most features available, let’s compare their high-end options for Unlimited North America calling.

Rogers

How much: $41.95 + $5.95 (System access fee – yes, that mysterious fee again) = $47.9.
Features: Free 4-6 out of 15 available ($4.00 for each additional feature).
Long distance North America: Unlimited North America (+$19.95).
Free Europe calling: None – must add as different package ($24.95).

Total: 47.9 + 19.95 + 911 fees ($0.19) Hearing Impaired Assistance (HIA) fees ($0.22) + taxes = ~$77.13

Vonage

How much: $39.99
Features: All 21 features included.
Long distance North America: Free unlimited calling.
Free Europe calling: Free unlimited calling to: Italy, France, Spain, UK and Ireland.

Total: 39.99 + taxes = $45.19

Primus

How much: $49.95
Features: All 10 features included.
Long distance North America: Free unlimited calling.
Free Europe calling: None.

Total: 49.95 + 911 Fee ($0.40) + taxes = $56.90

I realize there are many VoIP options out there, some more expensive and some cheaper than these but I just wanted to compare Roger’s offering with two of the other popular options. Additionally, I have not taken into account individual international calling rates, which in fact would support my point even further as Roger’s rates are gernally a few cents higher per minute throughout the list of countries.

In conclusion then, much like the IPhone 3G plans, Rogers is not only positioning their service at a higher price but they are offering less for higher prices! Sadly there are a lot of people blindly buying into this. Thankfully for consumers who inform themselves, Rogers is NOT the only available option for VoIP and, at least for now, we are able to choose freely from one of the competitors. Unfortunately for IPhone fans in Canada, Rogers seems to be the only option for now. Not a good idea to have let Rogers buy out the only other GSM competitor huh?

Assumptions: Taxes are for Ontario (5% GST + 8% PST for telecomunication goods), one time setup fees not taken into account. Intangibles such as customer support quality not taken into account – I personally believe Rogers would lose big on this item.

McDonald’s menu style Internet offerings in the future? Here is an interesting (and scary) update:

I have been following the ongoing news regarding Bell Canada’s decision to throttle their reseller’s traffic. To those arriving late, Bell Canada owns the lines used by third party ISPs such as TekSavvy and recently decided to throttle bandwidth usage on those lines much like they throttle traffic from their own internet customers. Bell cites “fine print” in their Fair Usage Policy which, according to the company, allows them to do this if they see “excessive” use of their network. Why don’t they upgrade their infrastructure with the capital from all those record profits instead of giving us the story that someone is downloading too many movies. Oh, that’s right, it wouldn’t be profit anymore. Everyone can clearly see that the true reason Bell decided to throttle ISPs such as TekSavvy was to stop the move of costumers away from Bell services to more quality service where you get what you paid for, that is, the bandwidth you were promised.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago. Bell Canada is now is now lobbying to scrap mandated access by competitors to its network. That is, they want to get rid of a whole chunk of their competition all together. It would ultimately leave us with Rogers and Bell to choose from for Internet access. It is easy to see how this would translate into very bad news for consumers and economical progress in Ontario, and Canada as a whole. Without competition, the “free” market simply does not work. Consumers will not be able to vote with their wallets and the monopoly that is Bell and Rogers will dictate how things play out from then on.

If they can get away with this how can we determine where this will stop? Say good bye to VoIP. VoIP must run through your ISPs network, and if that ISP is Bell or Rogers (i.e. direct competitors to VoIP providers) who is to say they will not choke out the competition in the same manner they are planning to do it with internet wholesalers? Who is to say they will not consider things such as the upcoming high quality Youtube streams as “abusive” use of their network? Afterall, Youtube competes in one way or another with Bell’s and Roger’s TV service. Will we get to the point where internet service is tiered and chopped into nicely designed marketing-approved McDonald’s menu style offerings where I have to pay extra if I want to use SSH or attach large attachments to my e-mail? Will I have to pay extra if I want to use gmail instead of Sympatico’s own web mail? Would you like FTP traffic with that order?

As a software developer, avid internet user, and consumer, the potential for a future as described above scares the living crap out of me. The majority of people see the issue of Netneutrality as something that matters only to geeks. Sadly, what they don’t realize is that this wonderful progress the Internet has brought to the world is largely due to the existence of that openness, of that “neutrality” of the service. The ability for my neighbor to listen to online radio stations or play online games while I surf the web or e-mail clients without our service providers “deciding” for us what form of usage is more “valuable” is what keeps this wonderful progress going. Bell Canada’s move to eliminate competition this way introduces a slippery slope that will see this progress come to a halt.

I am not a fan of the government stepping into citizens’ lives and setting unnecessary and damaging market roadblocks, however, when one considers that the free market cannot work under this conditions, I think it is time for the Canadian government to step in and put an end to this. To many, the Internet has become a utility with importance almost as high as that of the telephone system, gas, water, and electricity. Considering that Bell’s infrastructure was largely paid by tax payers dollars, I think it is time we decide how we use those lines and for Bell to stay off OUR Internet!.

For those using the latest ff 3.0 b3 release and interested in updating their lget installation, you can get the latest version from mozilla’s official addons site. Note that the linked version will only work on Firefox 3.0 b3.

The most requested feature is to get rid of the download window after submitting the URL (and I agree, it can be annoying). I will address that as soon as I get some free time.

UPDATE: lget 0.4.1 for Firefox 3.0 final is released. Click here for more info.

The government of Canada is preparing to attempt to bring a new DMCA-modeled copyright law in Canada in order to comply with the WIPO treaties the country signed in 1997. These treaties were also the base of the American DMCA. The new Canadian law will be even more restrictive in nature than the American version and worse than the last Canadian copyright proposal, the defeated Bill C-60. Amongst the many restrictive clauses, in this new law – as Michael Geist explains – is the total abolishment of the concept of fair use, “No parody exception. No time shifting exception. No device shifting exception. No expanded backup provision. Nothing.”. This new draconian law has the potential of reshaping the whole technology industry and leave consumers at the mercy of copyright owners. Michael Geist provides a list of 30 things that can be done to address the issue.

Via : http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/27/canadas-coming-dmca.html

The Canadian government is about to bring down Canada’s version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it promises to be the worst copyright law in the developed world. It will contain an “anti-circumvention” clause that prohibits breaking the locks off your music and movies in order to move them to new devices or watch them after the company that made them goes out of business — and it will follow the US’s disastrous lead with the DMCA in that there will be no exceptions to the ban on circumvention, not even for parody, fair dealing, time shifting, or other legal uses.

This will be even worse than the last Canadian copyright proposal, the defeated Bill C-60.

But there’s hope. The last two Ministers who tried to push through a US-style copyright bill in Canada lost their jobs, thanks in large part to Canada’s coalition of artists, educators, archivists, and public-interest activists. Selling Canada’s digital future out to a handful of US companies is a bad career move for Canadian politicians.

Gear up for a fight in the New Year. The American record labels, in particular, are said to be well organised and ready to push this through on a fast track (even though they’ve abandoned DRM in the rest of the world, they view Canada as a weak sister they can push around).

If this law passes, it will mean that as soon as a device has any anti-copying stuff in it (say, a Vista PC, a set-top cable box, a console, an iPod, a Kindle, etc), it will be illegal for Canadians to modify it, improve it, or make products that interact with it unless they have permission from the (almost always US-based) manufacturer. This puts the whole Canadian tech industry at the mercy of the US industry, unable to innovate or start new businesses that interact with the existing pool of devices and media without getting a license from the States.

If this law passes, it will render all of the made-in-Canada exceptions to copyright for education, archiving, free speech and personal use will be irrelevant: if a technology has a lock that prohibits a use, your right to make that use falls by the wayside. Nevermind that you’ve got the right to record a show to watch later — or to record a politician’s speech so you can hold him to account later — the policeman in the device can take that right away with no appeal.

If this law passes, it will make Canada into a backwards nation, lagging behind the UK, Israel and other countries that are passing new copyright laws that dismantle the idea of maximum copyright forever and in all things.

I took a little break today to play around with Avant Window Manager and installed it on my Gutsy installation. Like any other piece of software in development, it has a lot of issues that need to be addressed before it can be called “ready” but what is available so far is superb. Projects like this and Compiz will be major players in getting more people to experience Linux on the desktop.

Screenshot of my desktop:

New theme installed, testing…

A pretty cool project was brought to my attention today by a co-worker as well as digg. The project is reCAPTCHA, a project from Carnegie Mellon University, and Luis von Ahn, one of the pioneer CAPTCHA developers. reCAPTCHA aims at “recycling” human brain power used when we are forced to enter CAPTCHA text on websites. reCAPTCHA does this by providing website developers with a library, which instead of presenting a random piece of text to the user for processing, uses previously scanned pieces of text from books being digitized. reCAPTCHA creates CAPTCHA images from text the OCR system was unable to identify successfully, essentially leaving the recognizing to the experts, us humans. As a result, CAPTCHA’s ability is extended to aiding in the accurate digitalization of books, ultimately killing two bird with one stone. Brilliant stuff.

MIT Press has released a book covering topics of motivation behind the Open and Free Source movement from technical, economical, social, and legal views. This should be a fantastic read for those unfamiliar with what it is that drives Free/Open Source. Where it gets its strength from, and why it is becoming more and more a viable alternative to closed and proprietary software.

What is even better, in true free/open fashion, you can download the entire book for free.

This one is for those out there who keep bring up the argument that nobody really uses Linux and that big companies, specifically Microsoft, don’t really care about Linux and what it does. Well let me show you the extend of their “indifference” towards Linux via this little project started by Microsoft to study Linux users in order to attempt to drive customers away from the “temptation” of using Linux. “Winning the Against Linux the Smart Way” Microsoft says. Well, hopefully this time they are smarter than in the past because Linux is only growing.

It is obvious that at this point in time whoever believes that nobody notices Linux is living in a vacuum under a cloud of denial which won’t even let them see their cereal at breakfast. More than noticing Linux, Microsoft is, for lack of better term, pooping their pants…

Link – Linux Personas: http://www.linuxpersonas.com/

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
  —  Mahatma Gandhi

Another well written article on why people should think twice before running out and upgrading to Microsoft’s (once again) “Newest and best Operating System ever”.

Windows Vista includes an array of “features” that you don’t want. These features will make your laptop less reliable and less secure. They’ll make your computer less stable and run slower. They will cause technical support problems. They may even require you to upgrade some of your peripheral hardware and existing software. And these features won’t do anything useful. In fact, they’re working against you. They’re digital rights management (DRM) features built into Vista at the behest of the entertainment industry.

And you don’t get to refuse them.

The details are pretty geeky, but basically Microsoft has reworked a lot of the core operating system to add copy protection technology for new media formats like HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks. Certain high-quality output paths–audio and video–are reserved for protected peripheral devices. Sometimes output quality is artificially degraded; sometimes output is prevented entirely. And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you’re doing something that it thinks you shouldn’t. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. We still don’t know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching it is, but it doesn’t look good.

Microsoft put all those functionality-crippling features into Vista because it wants to own the entertainment industry. This isn’t how Microsoft spins it, of course. It maintains that it has no choice, that it’s Hollywood that is demanding DRM in Windows in order to allow “premium content”–meaning, new movies that are still earning revenue–onto your computer. If Microsoft didn’t play along, it’d be relegated to second-class status as Hollywood pulled its support for the platform.

It’s all complete nonsense. Microsoft could have easily told the entertainment industry that it was not going to deliberately cripple its operating system, take it or leave it. With 95% of the operating system market, where else would Hollywood go? Sure, Big Media has been pushing DRM, but recently some–Sony after their 2005 debacle and now EMI Group–are having second thoughts.

What the entertainment companies are finally realizing is that DRM just annoys their customers. Like every other DRM system
ever invented, Microsoft’s won’t keep the professional pirates from making copies of whatever they want. The DRM security in Vista was broken the day it was released. Sure, Microsoft will patch it, but the patched system will get broken as well. It’s an arms race, and the defenders can’t possibly win.

I believe that Microsoft knows this and also that it doesn’t matter about stopping pirates and small percentage of people who download free movies from the Internet. This isn’t even about Microsoft satisfying its Hollywood customers at the expense of those of us paying for the privilege of using Vista. This is about the overwhelming majority of honest users and who owns the distribution channels to them. And while it may have started as a partnership, in the end Microsoft is going to end up locking the movie companies into selling content in its proprietary formats.

We saw this trick before; Apple pulled it on the recording industry. First iTunes worked in partnership with the major record labels to distribute content, but soon Warner Music’s CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. found that he wasn’t able to dictate a pricing model to Steve Jobs. The same thing will happen here; after Vista is firmly entrenched in the marketplace, Sony’s Howard Stringer won’t be able to dictate pricing or terms to Bill Gates. This is a war for 21st-century movie distribution and, when the dust settles, Hollywood won’t know what hit them.

To be fair, just last week Steve Jobs publicly came out against DRM for music. It’s a reasonable business position, now that Apple controls the online music distribution market. But Jobs never mentioned movies, and he is the largest single shareholder in Disney. Talk is cheap. The real question is would he actually allow iTunes Music Store purchases to play on Microsoft or Sony players, or is this just a clever way of deflecting blame to the–already hated–music labels.

Microsoft is reaching for a much bigger prize than Apple: not just Hollywood, but also peripheral hardware vendors. Vista’s DRM will require driver developers to comply with all kinds of rules and be certified; otherwise, they won’t work. And Microsoft talks about expanding this to independent software vendors as well. It’s another war for control of the computer market.

Unfortunately, we users are caught in the crossfire. We are not only stuck with DRM systems that interfere with our legitimate fair-use rights for the content we buy, we’re stuck with DRM systems that interfere with all of our computer use–even the uses that have nothing to do with copyright.

I don’t see the market righting this wrong, because Microsoft’s monopoly position gives it much more power than we consumers can hope to have. It might not be as obvious as Microsoft using its operating system monopoly to kill Netscape and own the browser market, but it’s really no different. Microsoft’s entertainment market grab might further entrench its monopoly position, but it will cause serious damage to both the computer and entertainment industries. DRM is bad, both for consumers and for the entertainment industry: something the entertainment industry is just starting to realize, but Microsoft is still fighting. Some researchers think that this is the final straw that will drive Windows to the competition, but I think the courts are necessary.

In the meantime, the only advice I can offer you is to not upgrade to Vista. It will be hard. Microsoft’s bundling deals with computer manufacturers mean that it will be increasingly hard not to get the new operating system with new computers. And Microsoft has some pretty deep pockets and can wait us all out if it wants to. Yes, some people will shift to Macintosh and some fewer number to Linux, but most of us are stuck on Windows. Still, if enough customers say no to Vista, the company might actually listen.