Conservatives to review CRTC’s usage-based billing decision

Image: Adapted from Stephen Harper - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2010 by World Economic Forum under a CC-BY-SA license.

The Canadian meltdown over the CRTC’s ruling that network owners could punish smaller ISPs with usage-based billing has met with mild political progress.

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, or as I like to call him “fuck you,” declared on Tuesday that there would be a review of the finding with a decision coming March 1.

My biased, angry, but no less accurate prediction? Since everyone has agreed an election is coming, the Conservatives will likely strike down the decision for political points. They will use the issue to further demonize and weaken the CRTC, thus removing the chances of Canada ever getting robust regulation of internet providers, and ultimately furthering the corporatist agenda. In the end, we’ll get slightly better service than the current rampage-of-greed, such that we can live with it, but not more.

Once again, Fight the power.

Anonymous fights for WikiLeaks, State Department confesses irony of “World Press Freedom Day”

Welcome to your daily WikiLeaks update.

Anonymous has entered the fray on the side of WikiLeaks, polishing off the old DDoS chestnut and launching attacks against PayPal, Julian Assange’s prosecutor, Assange-account-freezing bank PostFinance, Visa, and MasterCard, causing inconveniences but no major damage. Unknown counter-forces later took down 4chan in retaliation for the efforts. Of course, WikiLeaks itself was booted from its DNS provider, EveryDNS, following ongoing denial of service attacks which the company claimed harmed other customers.

This whole thing is starting to get… frenzied. CNN.com has been running a separate set of stories just for WikiLeaks in the last few days, and now I get to cite them in a story about Anonymous.

In an ironic and grossly hypocritical move, the United States Department of State announced yesterday that it will be hosting “World Press Freedom Day.” The first couple minutes of the video truly must be seen to be believed. Assistant Secretary Philip Crowley can be seen bumbling through the announcement, making remarks like “obviously, we decided upon this before the latest round of news” and “there certainly is an irony here.” The event is intended to highlight, in particular, American support for “press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.” This, of course, was immediately followed by the revelation by PayPal that the company quit ties with WikiLeaks when they discovered the State Department alleged what WikiLeaks was doing was illegal.

Image: Adapted from Wikileaks logo by Wikipedia under a CC-BY-SA license. Yes, you can similarly share alike!

Julian Assange is a Bond Villain on the Right Side of History

Some are reporting that WikiLeaks.org is now being hosted from a Cold War-era Swedish bunker built into a fucking mountain, but at this point, it has become difficult to tell where the WikiLeaks’ website is actually hosted. Wikipedia says the organization’s site was moved to servers in France following denial of service attacks and a brief stay with Amazon. According to Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, the site is now being hosted from Thor Data Center in Iceland. It may very well be the case that WikiLeaks’ hosting is spread out among some or all of these locations.

What is more clear is the accuracy of jokes surrounding the bunker story, those being that founder Julian Assange is some kind of Bond villain.

… Continue Reading

Jiffy’s Lazy Links: Arnocorps Edition

Crytek UK, the studio once known as Free Radical Design, has been chatting up publishers in the hopes of creating a new TimeSplitters title. Oh please, please, please, let it come to Wii (yeah right). The TimeSplitters series is also known as the spiritual successor to GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. It’s also the only decent FPS series around.

As you might have heard, Republicans stormed back into the American Congress riding a wave of ignorance and hatred. One tool available to the white and bitter in their quest to hassle “unwanted elements” out of voting was the Voter Fraud App. This iPhone, Blackberry, and Android app allowed whitey to take quick shots of suspicious looking characters when they attempted to vote for later investigation.

Japan’s dating sim market has seen considerable growth thanks to the LovePlus phenomenon. 2009 saw an 83% jump in revenue for the genre, with more growth expected for 2010.

Hey, here’s a trailer for Sucker Punch. It’s an action-fantasy film from Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen). Looks even crazier than those movies.

Ghostbusters 3 might still be happening. Anything is possible, but Bill Murray sure doesn’t seem interested.

David Cage, the man behind Heavy Rain, isn’t too up on the Wii. He called the PS3 “a real multimedia center with an extremely strong videogame [experience]” and compared it to the Wii, which is apparently “something that is like a toy, a funny boardgame.” Well, that closes the book on Wii. Who would ever want something as unpopular and with as little staying power as board games?

250,000 rally for sanity

As we mentioned earlier, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was held yesterday afternoon.

It is now being reported that over 250,000 descended upon the National Mall in Washington, DC for the event. That dwarfs, destroys, and utterly embarrasses the 90,000 or so who showed up for Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally. Those people came equipped with many hilarious and correctly spelled signs, making full use of pop culture references and internet memes.

Although the three hour event was, at times, awkward and unfocused, it came together in the end when Stewart delivered a more serious speech addressing the shrill level of discourse that exists in American politics and news media. The whole rally can be re-watched here.

It’s a good thing Stewart came out to explain more plainly what the day was all about, too. In general, the media had a tough time figuring out the point of the whole thing before that.

Ultimately, the event succeeded in doing exactly what its name promised. It called attention to what is most often ignored in American political discourse, sanity. This was a rally that celebrated cordial disagreement and peaceful coexistence in what Jon Stewart called “hard times, not end times.”

Image: Adapted from Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear by cliff1066™ under a CC-BY license.