Internet founder blasts ISPs for hurting national interests

Vint Cerf, who developed the technical principles on which the internet works, has blasted telephone and cable companies for harming national interests by holding investments in their networks to ransom.

Cerf, a long-time advocate of keeping the internet free from control by service providers and a current senior vice-president for search giant Google Inc., told the Silicon Valley Watcher blog that the companies are being childish by threatening to withhold upgrading networks unless they get breaks from regulators.

"Basically, it's like little kids in a tantrum: 'I'm not going to build this system unless you give me three scoops of ice cream and a pony,'" he said in a video posted on the blog on Tuesday. "My reaction to this is quite negative. It's harmful to the national interest to behave in this way because it is serious infrastructure — it's very much like the road ways."


LINK

Bell's internet throttling is like reading people's mail, ISPs say

The CBC has an article about the Canadian Association of Internet Provider's final submission to the CRTC in the Bell throttling issue: WN is not part of CAIP, because it costs money to join. However, we support much of their work and are pretty well in the same boat.

"Bell Canada Inc.'s slowing of internet speeds is the equivalent of the post office opening people's mail and deciding when they should get their letters, a group of small service providers have said in their final volley at the company.

The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, a group of 55 companies that rent portions of Bell's network to provide their own broadband services, made its last plea Wednesday to regulators to force Bell to end its speed throttling.

In November Bell started using deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to identify what its customers were using their internet connections for, then started slowing peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as BitTorrent.

The company extended the practice to CAIP members in March, which prompted the group's complaint to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in April.

In its submission on Wednesday, CAIP said Bell's defence for throttling — that the company is only slowing P2P downloads, which still get to the user "eventually" — is discriminatory and anti-competitive."


LINK

Not Wireless-related-- Job Posting from my Day Job

Lots of Wireless Nomad users and members are tech people, so this might be of great interest to someone. It's not wireless or co-op related, but here goes...
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Who: Phoenix Geophysics is a Toronto-based company that designs and builds geophysical exploration equipment. We've been around more than 30 years, have almost 50 people on our team, speak more than a dozen languages in our office, and work all over the world.

What: Develop and maintain a great user interface for our geophysical software.

When: Application deadline is Wednesday, August 6, 2008, 8 p.m. EST., full-time work starting as soon as possible.

Where: At the Phoenix office in Toronto, Canada (Victoria Park Ave. & Steeles Ave.)

Why: To make our existing software easier to use and make new software to let our users do more.

How Much: $50,000~$75,000 CDN per year to start (depending on experience), plus good medical and dental benefits, three weeks vacation per year, and employee profit sharing when times are good (there was a 15% bonus in 2007).


LINK TO JOB POSTING on ArsTechnica

Beautiful New Server (Finally, some good news...)

Beautiful New Server

A couple weeks ago, Steve and Ron spent the better part of a Saturday installing a beautiful new server at a new hosting facility in downtown Toronto. The server was generously donated by another Wireless Nomad member, and gratefully received as a welcome and needed upgrade to the previous hardware (thank you, Anonymous!).

While the processor is only a Pentium III, its three main advantages lie in 1) the hot-swappable hard drives that will make future repairs much easier, 2) the dedicated hardware RAID controller that will make the hard drive disk access much faster, and 3) automatic synchronization when a replacement hard drive is installed in the case of a failure. The processor is also upgradable, should it become heavily loaded as Wireless Nomad continues to be used more and more by people across the city.

All in all, the new hardware is very graceful, and much more powerful and reliable than what we had before.

The new server hosting facility is also much better, with the new Wireless Nomad server in a cooler, easier to access location. We also have much better on-demand access to our server in the case of a problem, which was something we did not have before without significant difficulty. There is also a technician on-site that can do tasks like hard drive swapping and checking cables as required, which will help reduce downtime in the case of any hardware problems.

Enjoy,
-the Wireless Nomad team