I’m moving my sites off of American servers. No, it doesn’t really stop the possibility of this being enacted against my sites - and in fact, I don’t even serve content that I don’t have the rights to - but I will not support a country that enacts such things.
I understand we want to control...
The best part is what Lifehacker posted earlier today: you could still access the blocked sites through their IP addresses. In other words: LOLOLOL.
It’s like if they said “we don’t want to encourage people to smoke, so we’ll hide the cigarettes behind a screen. But you can still buy them if you really want.” Which is something they’ve done here in Canada, actually. Surprisingly enough, people who want to smoke still buy cigarettes! Who could have predicted that! Granted, I know there are people who are too lazy/stupid to navigate to websites that way (would a bookmark to a site’s IP address still work?). However, those are the people who are just waiting for a decent legal alternative to illegal downloading. The actual pirates, who will pirate any way necessary, will keep doing it even if you try to hide the stash.
So yeah, gotta love ineffectual politics. Oddly enough, Canada is doing alright as far as the internet goes these days - the CRTC changed its mind about usage-based billing. Now, this doesn’t sound all that exciting at first. But here’s an illustrative example:
- When we were moving to Ottawa last summer, the usage based billing hammer had just dropped on independent ISPs. The one available to us in Ottawa, TekSavvy, had pretty high praise from its existing customers.
- Suddenly, TekSavvy’s bandwidth caps were dropped dramatically - on some plans, they went from 200 gb/month down to 25 gb/month.
- We ended up going with Rogers, paying $47+tax for 60 gb/month, “up to” 12 mbps download, and “up to” 512 kbps upload, plus inescapable throttling and outages in response to torrenting activity.
- Looking at TekSavvy now, for $43+tax per month, we would get “up to” 24 mbps download, “up to” 1 mbps upload, and a 300 gb/month cap. While they use the Rogers infrastructure, I don’t believe they enforce throttling and otherwise screw with their users. And for another $10/month, we’d get unlimited bandwidth (although we actually survive just fine with 60 gb).
I don’t remember what the offered speeds were for TekSavvy back then, but I assume they were terrible. But hey, would you look at that, the bandwidth caps went up by twelve hundred percent, making the independent ISP better in every way than the company they source their service from. Thanks, free market! Actual competition sometimes is good for consumers like the capitalists always said it would be!
Anyway, I think this is the exception to the rule when it comes to technology-related politics in North America. Politicians/the lobbying groups giving them ideas are perpetually behind the times, or at least too busy looking out for their own interests. If everything were right with the world, people that clueless/horrifyingly selfish would have no place making decisions for other people.
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As far as school goes, I’ve somehow made it into the final stretch without noticing. There’s less than three weeks of actual class left, and a month from now I’ll be finishing my last exam. I’ve got three-ish final projects due Nov 30th-Dec 2nd, but nothing between now and then. This means there will be no consequences for failure to work during the next two weeks. Delayed punishment is a notoriously difficult thing to feel bad about.
To combat this, I’ve drawn up an actual calendar on a piece of paper and put it at the front of my binder. I can see when my huge assignments are due, and see the divine punishment coming from a mile away. It helps to actually visualize the time I have left, instead of seeing a purely goal-based list of due dates. To that end, before Monday, my acceptable level of absolute failure will be completing two philosophy mini-papers (half a page of writing, unknown amounts of reading beforehand) and either some synopses or a mock research proposal for my research methods class.
I’m actually not being as hard on myself as it sounds, because I’m smarter than that, but I have to be honest too. I’ve been totally useless the past few weekends, and relatively unaccomplished during the weekdays in between (and for a while preceding them, too). Thus far, I’m pretty sure I’ve done well enough to scrape by with >90% in most of my classes - intro to systems programming is a bit iffy, since I’m doing great on the assignments (and, I think, the second test) but less well on the first test. I’m not reading my textbooks as religiously as I did last year, and in some ways it shows (not getting 100% on my multiple choice PSYC 2001 midterms, for example). But if I really push on these last assignments, it’ll be fine. I’m keeping my scholarship, too, even if I’d like to do a lot better than the 80% required for that.
Anyway, I’ll see how it goes. Apparently I forgot to sign into IM today, even though I’ve been home for hours. Oops. I’ll be sitting down to work for real over the next few weeks, though, so expect less availability. On top of that, I’ve got two separate birthday parties to attend this weekend, and I’m probably leaving one a bit early to go see Unexpect live. Whether or not I can survive all of that and still manage to get work done, I have no idea. I’ll be working sooner rather than later, just in case. And hey, if I can actually power through my work instead of pissing away my time, I’ll come out well ahead of schedule. So things are looking alright so far. And I’m eagerly awaiting December 15th-21st, when I’ll have nothing to do but write a couple of papers…