Open Access to Information lags in Canada

Freedom of Speech

On most topics I tend to think that Canada is more progressive than the US. However there are some areas where Canada lags sorely behind… one of those topics is open access to information. A recent comparison between the US and Canada found that Canada is significantly behind the US when it comes to free public access to information.

December 15th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Some good news on privacy (for once)

Privacy

December 15th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

A Remix Manifesto

Copyright & Patents

I watched RiP: A Remix Manifesto (surprisingly) on an Air Canada flight. Its a great documentatary about copyright and its (significantly negative) impact on our creative freedom. I definitely recommend everyone check this one out.

December 15th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

A cornucopia of biological bounty

Biology & Genetics

Yet another topic that doesn’t get nearly enough love on IA, so may have seen a couple of these stories before:

December 15th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

The world’s first internet router

Internet Culture

Check out the world’s first internet router… hard to believe that only a 30 years ago that was cutting edge technology.

December 15th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Anti-matter created in a lab

Physics & Math

Not a topic that gets a ton of love on IA so you might have already seen these stories before:

December 15th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Space news just slightly behind our time

Space

Lots of this topic’s news is a bit on the moldy oldie side… but just incase you missed it:

December 15th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Its the little things

Fun Stuff

YouTube is arguably the best thing to ever have happened to the internet… in many ways it answered all the questions about whether computers would destroy community or bring us closer together. The only problem with YouTube is that there is waaaay too much. Videos that 50 million hits, other think suck. That’s why Wimp is the best thing to happen to the internet in the past year… its the perfect filter for the onslaught of video. In 20 minutes you are up-to-date on all the best video our planet can produce. Not bad.

December 15th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Why Usenet is still awesome

Software & Games

I keep trying to get out but it keeps pulling me back in: Usenet the ugly duckling of the tcp/ip world is still worth using. Yes its based on one of the oldest and most arcane protocols still in use (the only worse system I can think of was Gopher). Usenet is based on the exact model that every internet media distribution method developed in the last 10 years has been built to work around. Usenet connects you to a single server (or at least a server farm) to do all your downloading. The downside is that whomever sees your packets going to that server knows exactly what you’re downloading (more on this later). And, yes, Usenet has a steep learning curve but… the pay-offs are  huge.

The first payoff is privacy: modern Usenet allows for SSL connections… yes its a bit slower but with an SSL connection no one (not even your ISP) can tell what you are transfering… Well… except your Usenet provider. This means that choosing your Usenet provider is a critical decision. I use Astraweb. Why? Its cheap ($10 US a month), they keep around 400 days of usenet posts (which is a lot) and its fast (see below)… but most importantly they don’t keep any log. Combine this with SSL and you have a very fast and private service.

The second payoff is speed: I get about 1.5 MBps (thats Bps not bps) continuously downloading. Some of the most highly seeded torrents download at around 600 KBps (and this isn’t continuous). 1.5 MBps means that you can download a 15 GB file in less that 3 hours (every time, no matter who else is downloading it).

The third is that your ISP doesn’t care: 15 GB files sound great but isn’t your ISP going to be freaking out when you’re downloading 100s of GBs of movies? Nope. Why? Your ISP doesn’t care about downloads they care about uploads. Torrents are terrible for ISPs because they do a lot of uploading. Usenet does no uploading at all. This means that all that crazy traffic shaping and filtering that your ISP does, does not affect Usenet either. I’ve literally downloaded 250 GB of movies in a month and never heard a peep from my ISP.

The last is selection: almost everything that eventually gets posted to torrents first came from usenet (don’t tell the RIAA/MPAA). This means that movies, games, software, tv shows, images, music etc are all available. I use Usenet mostly for high-def movies, TV shows and games. The selection is vast but it all depends on how much your Usenet provider will store (and for how long)… this is why using your ISP’s usenet servers typically isn’t good enough. A third party Usenet provider is much much better (Astraweb keeps more than a year’s worth of posts). Thus far there has been absolutely no censorship of Usenet. None. Even in the US.

Sounds good right? So what’s the catch? Well besides the monthly fee for a Usenet provider, you’ll need Usenet reader software and you’ll need to figure out how to use it. This is a good and short introduction to how exactly usenet works.  Remember its a technology based in the 70s, so basically everything is treated as a textual post. Lots of tricks and workarounds have been employed to allow Usenet post to include data files.

I highly recommend using Newsbin as your Usenet reader software. Its pretty much a standard, has great customer support and does lots of complex stuff automatically for you. Check out the documentation to learn how to use it.  Newsbin is so good I actually paid for a copy of it!

Once you’ve got Newsbin setup with your Usenet provider, you’ll need to add groups. There are -many- groups each dedicated to different types of media. My suggestion is to use Newsbin’s sort feature to sort by number of posts, typically the more posts in a group the better the group will be: alt.binaries.hdtv.x264 is my favourite group since it contains HD quality versions of pretty much all recent movies and TV shows. It gets about 700,000 posts an hour (note that each movie can be made up of thousands of posts).

You’ll need to download all the post headers (basically the subject line of the post) before you can start downloading. This takes a while the first time but is quite quick on subsequent loads. Once you’ve got headers you can either search them or just scan through them looking for stuff of interest. Make sure you totally read the subject, for example some movies are in different languages or weird formats or have wacky subtitles.  Once you’ve found somethink you like, download it and Newsbin will do the rest.

Now that you’re actively downloading this is probably the first time that you’ve maxed out the speed of your internet connection. Bask in the unbriddled speed of Usenet. Once the download is finished Newsbin automatically unarchives the files and they should be ready for you to use/view. Your 12 GB blu-ray rip of the Dark Knight is all ready to watch.

Yes this is a bit complex to get setup initially. Yes Newsbin has a bit of a poor interface. But the payoff is well worth the learning curve. A vast selection of high quality, fast and anonymous downloads are waiting for you right now.

October 5th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Network Neutrality in Canada

Internet Culture

Network Neutrality is important. The last thing you want is Telus and Rogers controlling what you can view and how fast you can view it. In the US the Obama backed FCC is finally seriously considering moving forward with NN legislation. Unfortunately Canada seems to be lagging behind and seems incapable of leading the world. An interesting counterpoint, Cringley has a post on the state of NN in the US and why it really doesn’t matter in the end.

  • Social storage seems to be a big thing on the net these days. Both Wuala and Drop.io do a good job of making online storage free, easy and fast.
  • Need to figure out where an image came from? Check out Tinyeye image comparison and search.
  • Are our brains being re-wired by the internet and video games? And is this a bad thing?
  • There has been a ton of wacky news recently about the Pirate Bay. Apparently it is being hosted in the Ukraine now… but it doesn’t seem up today. In the mean time, here are 25 Pirate Bay alternatives. Edit: the Pirate Bay is back up!
  • Finally in some great news, ICANN cuts cord to US government… this is theory means less control by the US government over the internet… but seems mostly like a talking point than a real move forward.

October 5th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Live Streaming TV over the Net

Internet Culture

Usenet and bittorrent have made me seriously consider getting rid of my TV cable subscription. Its just so quick and easy to get any show on TV… plus no ads. However, sometimes you really want to see shows live when they air: enter live streaming sites. You have a ton of options (some of them require somewhat sketchy downloads) but with these sites you’ll be able to see almost anything (including pay-per view events) live. Quality is somewhat crappy but you get what you pay for!

October 5th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Wimp.com is the best thing on the internet

Fun Stuff

Thanks to IA reader Cam, our office is addicted to Wimp.com. 10 new videos posted every day… each one screened by the mysterious Wimp. Its the best thing about the morning.

October 5th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Google Wave

Software & Games

Aech sent me a link to the Google Wave demo which is an hour an a half long video. At the beginning I was thinking “what could possibly be cool enough for me to sit through an hour an a half long video of geeks at a conference”. By the end I was shouting out “Oh my god that it soooo cool!”. Google Wave appears to be a revolution for the internet. If you are interested in the future of the net, I highly recommend watching the video (or at least skimming it). One obvious highlight was the real-time, character-by-character translation being transmitted in real-time to anyone with your Wave. Apparently a Beta of Wave will be available soon to selected users.

  • A recent problem with many virus scanners is that they produce a lot of false positives. Clearly its better to be more safe than less but often times the virus scanning companies are getting paid off to make keygens and other cracks show up as virii even when they are not. Enter Virus Total a program you upload your questionable file to and it checks the file against almost all major virus scanners, then you are in a better position to make an informed decision about the file.
  • Old news now but Songbird (the open-source and free iTunes replacement) has gone 1.0 and looks to be a viable alternative (if you don’t need to sync with an iPhone or iPod).
  • If you download shows or movies off the internet using torrents (and why wouldn’t you?) then you should be using RSS with your torrents. Why? Because it allows you to automatically download shows and movies as soon as they are released. Check out the these tips on getting it setup.
  • Also old news now but Nintendo destroyed Sony and microsoft in 2008 gaming sales
  • In other cool Google news, check out Goog-411 now you can use google from any cell phone.
  • Finally a very interesting sounding software made by university of washington researchers called OneSwarm which allows P2P connections (like BitTorrent) but does so in an anonymous way. Still under heavy development but looks like it has huge potential.

August 17th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Windows 7

Software & Games

This week I have been inspired by, of all things, Windows 7. For years now I’ve used IA as a platform to rally against microsoft. Long time readers know that I’ve never, ever, capitalized microsoft simply because there approach to business, computers and their users was in my opinion evil. Even now that MS has been somewhat humbled by Apple, their anti-competitive pratices have left an indelable scar on the software world.

Having said that, I’ve used a microsoft operating system as my primary OS since DOS 3.1.1. Why? Because it has been the dominanent OS of the time (and I’m a software junkie). Some of microsoft’s releases have been amazing (DOS, Windows 95 and XP) and some have been collosal failures (Windows ME and Vista). I installed Vista twice in recent months and twice lasted less than 24 hours before deleting it. Why would I upgrade to something that is slower, had more crap built-in software -and- was more annoying to use when Windows XP was stable, fast and ran all available Windows software?

Recenetly, I noticed that Windows 7 gold (meaning this is the version that you’ll be buying a few weeks when it actually comes out) has been leaked onto the net and that a reasonably reputable (but of course there is no garuntee of that) crack was available. After reading some reviews of the beta I decided to re-partition my main drive and check it out. Since that time I’ve completely abandoned Windows XP and re-formatted my main drive on my main computer for Windows 7.

In a nutshell, after three weeks of use, I think Windows 7 will be seen as one of the great microsoft OSs. So far it seems  fast, stable and reasonbly minimal.  It certainly isn’t significantly slower than XP. While some of the annoying features of Vista (such as User Access Control) are still around in 7, it is much much easier to turn these “features” off.

Microsoft has done a good job of improving the OS by adding features while not changing the metaphors already understood by Windows users.  Right now the only reason not to upgrade (in my mind) is that driver support while generally good (since Vista drivers work for almost everything) are still spotty for some brands. However even XP drivers can be made to work through Windows 7’s built in virtualization.

August 17th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

White & Nerdy

Fun Stuff

There is such a big backlog of stuff in my IA inbox that its become a daunting task to even go through it. For now I’ve gotta post some of these Fun Stuff links:

August 17th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Back from the dead…

Fun Stuff

Its weird the things that inspire us. For me… after all this time… it ends up being a japanese beatboxing kid. Yes its been forever since I last updated. I hope you haven’t been checking for new posts every day! I’ve been super busy and IA has been going through some serious technical difficulties. Enough excuses. Hopefully I’ll have some more time to post during the summer. Also, check out this other video with the same kid.

May 20th, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

No more lawsuits from the RIAA?!

Copyright & Patents

Hath hell frozen over? The RIAA (Recording Industry of America) will now pursue a “graduated response” to infringements which basically boil down to a Notice and Notice system (which is similar to what we have in Canada). This means that there won’t be any further out of the blue lawsuits. Those being sued will no doubt have plenty of warning that they are infringing.

February 2nd, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

How Canadian ISPs are throttling your bandwidth

Internet Culture

How Canadian ISPs throttle bandwidth is a look at who, how and what Canadian ISPs are throttling (and not telling you about). This my friends is why we need net neutrality.

February 2nd, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Going Solar and Energy Star Compliance

Ecology

February 2nd, 2009, posted by Street Samurai

Privacy continues to take a beating

Privacy

February 2nd, 2009, posted by Street Samurai