Internet matters – Page 41 – a sibilant intake of breath

Getting VOIP phone numbers

Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) is a way of sending and receiving telephone calls over your internet connection. At its best, it means not having to deal with local fixed-line telephone providers at all. It is also cheaper and more versatile than a conventional phone and offers possibilities not normally available, such as having local numbers all over the world that you can access from any internet connection, as well as things like having your voicemail messages emailed to you.

Those waiting for SkypeIn to be available in Canada do have at least one option of comparable price:

Get a router with SIP based VOIP functionality. (For example, the Thomson ST780 sold by Teksavvy.)
Get Canadian Direct Inward Dialing (DID) numbers from someone like Voip.ms. These cost $2 per month each, and are available for a great many different areas. You can also get numbers in the US, UK, or elsewhere. Many numbers can be used seamlessly with the same phone and voicemail system.
Get a free account with MySIPswitch.com.
Have that free service configured by someone who actually understands how it works (not me).
Configure the DIDs to point to MySIPswitch
Configure your router
Plug a phone into your router. It will now receive calls from any of your DID numbers, and can also place calls anywhere in the world at low rates.

Sure, a pre-packaged system of the Skype or Vonage variety would requires less tinkering. That said, the approach above works right now, and costs very little to boot.

Improv everywhere

The internet creates the possibility of organizing amusing mass pranks. Improv everywhere (who have done some funny things in the past) came up with a clever idea employing twins and subway cars.

Both of my brothers did improv of the more conventional on-the-stage variety. These sorts of surreal social experiments don’t require creative skill on the part of the performers, though they do produce entertaining bafflement among passers-by.

Canada Day photos

For Canada Day, The Globe and Mail asked readers to submit photos of some of their favourite places in Canada. Of the four I submitted, three ended up in the final slideshow: one, two, three.

Stupid comment forms

The following is a short rant intended for all those who design comment forms on websites:

When you have a box that says ‘homepage’ or ‘website’ it is absurd to make people type http://www.mysite.com. The HTTP means Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Every website in the universe uses this transfer protocol, so making someone type it is always redundant.

The same goes for ‘www.’ Homepages and websites are on the world wide web. They aren’t mail servers or any other sort of networked beast.

In conclusion, I should be able to type sindark.com and your comment form should understand it.

P.S. Even more unforgivable than sites that produce errors when ‘http’ and ‘www’ are lacking are the small minority that produce absurd URLs when you enter a site name in X.com format. I have seen sites where putting that yields a link to: “http://www.siteIamcommentingon.com/X.com.” Nightmare!

P.P.S. See www is deprecated for the argument that having to say ‘www’ is unnecessary in all circumstances, not just when filling out comment forms.

iTunes movie rentals

Last night, Emily and I tried renting a film through iTunes. I think it’s fair to say that this is another media technology that Apple got right. There are endless problems with systems that promise to let you buy films in the form of downloads. There are limitations on usage, and no guarantees that you can use them on future devices. Renting is quite different. Apple offers a service akin to that of a video store for a comparable price and without the bother of picking up and returning discs. With a bit of equally convenient competition, costs may even fall further.

Indeed, it seems pretty fair to predict that video shops have no future among those customers with computers and broadband access. Eventually, web based services will offer far more films at similar quality and far greater convenience.

Personally, I am rather looking forward to the day when it will be possible to spend $4-5 for two days worth of access to most any film ever made.

A bad new copyright bill

Canada’s proposed new copyright act is unacceptably poor, most importantly because of its treatment of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Under the new law, circumventing any such system – no matter why – is against the law. This means that if the company that sold you a song decides to stop letting you access it, you are out of luck. Under the new law, it would be a crime to copy music from a DRM-protected CD that you bought to an iPod that you own, with an associated fine of $20,000.

The law would also mean that organizations like libraries cannot have any confidence in their future ability to use digital materials today and people with disabilities will not be able to use technology to make protected works more accessible. It would make it a crime for me to use VideoLAN player to watch DVDs I bought in Europe, just because people selling DVDs have decided to use monopolistic regional codes to boost profits. Indeed, it would criminalize the distribution of VideoLAN itself.

It must be remembered that the purpose of copyright law is to serve the public good, not copyright holders. We allow copyrights because they create a legal environment in which it is possible to profit from a good idea. As a result, copyright protections help to ensure that people are furnished with new and high quality music, books, etc. By failing to protect the legitimate needs of consumers, this bill fails to enhance the public interest. As such, it deserves to be opposed and defeated.

Linking to relevant news

One thing that I try to do on this site is accompany posts on all topics with links to related materials: both in terms of what I have written and what is out on the wider internet. One way I do this is by leaving comments that link to and quote from relevant news stories and websites. By convention, these comments are attributed to ‘.’ since it doesn’t take long to write and cannot easily be confused with a real person.

Readers who come across relevant stuff that they simply wish to link, rather than say anything about, are encouraged to use the convention as well. If you use ‘dot@sindark.com’ in the box for the email address, your comment will have the ‘Just some news’ gravatar placed beside it.

Net neutrality

Today, there is a rally on Parliament Hill in favour of net neutrality. Basically, these people are arguing that internet and telephone companies should not sift through the kind of data their customers are using: designating some for the fast stream and letting some linger or vanish.

In general, I am very supportive of the idea of net neutrality. On the one hand, this is because packet filtering has creepy privacy and surveillance issues associated with it. On the other, it recognizes that established companies will usually do whatever they can to strangle innovative competitors. Without net neutrality, its a fair bet that we would never have had Skype or the World Wide Web.

At the same time, there are legitimate issues about bandwidth. There are people out there exchanging many gigabytes a day worth of movies, music, and games. I am not too concerned with piracy and intellectual property, but that traffic is a real strain on the network and a burden to others. It pushes up costs for everyone as ordinary users subsidize excessive ones.

The best solution seems to be to allow bandwidth capping but disallow packet filtering. That way, sending a terabyte a month of illegally copied films will be restricted, but Skype-like new services will continue to emerge and there will be fewer general opportunites for telecom companies to abuse.

I cannot go to the rally myself, since I will be at work, but I would encourage those who are free and feeling a bit activist to attend.

10^5 visits

Recently, this blog got its 100,000th visitor since August 2005. While such numbers don’t have much meaning in and of themselves, they do provide an opportunity to take stock and consider what has happened so far and where things are going.

Between August 2005 and July 2007, the major purpose of the site was to document the Oxford experience and stay in touch with friends and family while off in England. Since returning to Canada, it has had less of a defined purpose. There has also been a conscious decision to make it significantly less personal overall. As a result, it now mostly consists of either personal musings on impersonal topics or responses to books or news items. This is not wholly without value. It fosters interesting discussions and provides a mechanism for keeping in touch with some friends. It may also help to inform some people a bit about topics of interest or importance, such as climate change.

At the same time, there are some things that concern me. I don’t really see enormously much value in providing links to information available elsewhere, along with minimal commentary. Additionally, I worry a bit that writing drips and drabs every day could sap energy that might otherwise be put into longer-term and more ambitious projects.

With Emily here, I also have less time to spend on random musings. As such, writing a daily post is more often than not an exercise in frantically scanning the news for something that I can comment upon without overly much thought or research. One solution is to dial things back and only write when I actually have something I want to say. That removes the impetus to come up with something daily – which has advantages as well as disadvantages – but should help to keep me from boring people with items of only limited interest or creativity.

Category: Internet matters