SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act that the US is trying to shove down american’s throats at the moment.  Recent political pressure seems to be forcing the Senate at least to remove the DNS blocking portions of the bill but more pressure needs to be applied in order to ensure that this bill never passes. Here is some background from Wikipedia: The bill would expand the power of the U.S. Department of Justice, and allegedly the...

All this discussion about Usage Based Billing here in Canada has claimed its first assault victim: Netflix.  Netflix was probably the cause of these caps to begin with (second only to intense greed) since most of the major ISPs in Canada have a substantial interest in TV programming. Yesterday I check my mail on my phone and was greeted with this: It seems as though Netflix is worried about costing its customers high bills from ISPs due...

The most egregious aspects of the UBB proposal, at it applied to the independent ISPs are: The indies use only a very small part of the major ISP’s network. They use the DSLAMs and the ISP local network to connect to their network. They do not use the major ISP’s backbone network. Pricing: since bandwidth costs for are in the order of 1¢ to 2¢ per GByte (this is generous as the indies do not use the core network), the...

Canadians have very belatedly come to realize that metered billing of their home internet bandwidth usage, a charge that is in place across the country, makes no business or economic sense. Americans too need to come to this same realization, or they will be hoodwinked just as we were, and end up paying a nonsense charge that cripples their access to the internet. The new Canadian understanding, which is still incomplete, was triggered by a...

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the top in data storage and access technology.  They have access speeds much faster than normal Hard Disk Drives but have the drawback of being much more expensive.  But, consider this: A 160GB SSD costs approximately $300 CDN.  This works out to about $1.88/GB.  Next day shipping in Canada for this SSD is around $10, and lets say 24h in transit.  That works out to you getting 15Mbps (since it...