Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Some time ago, former Prime Minister Paul Martin began a series of weekly addresses.  Because none of the networks would carry his missives to the people, the Liberal Party paid for them as advertising and hosted them on their site.  In order to get access to the Prime Ministers chats, you had to enter your email address.  Naively thinking that the Liberal Party would respect my privacy, I did so.

Boy was I stupid. 

I’ve been the target of their spam ever since.  It hasn’t been often, but it has been regular.  The latest is Bill Graham’s hysterical letter about the Conservative Budget. 

My initial reaction was to simply look for an unsubscribe link.  However, Mr. Graham’s letter doesn’t actually have an unsubscribe link. It’s full of links soliciting donations, but no unsubscribe link. After digging around on the Liberal website, I finally found unsubscribe information located in the party’s privacy policy.  Simply reply to the unwanted mail, with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line.

Hypocrites that they are, by spamming me with Liberal propaganda, they’ve violated their own privacy policy.  Their hypocrisy is further amplified by the fact that what they’ve done contradicts the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, section 4.2.4 which states:

When personal information that has been collected is to be used for a purpose not previously identified, the new purpose shall be identified prior to use. Unless the new purpose is required by law, the consent of the individual is required before information can be used for that purpose.

And here, of course, is the irony.  It was a Liberal Government which introduced the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

Need a conference bridge?  Skip the expensive telco solutions.  Brian McConnell has published a 4 page article on building a conferencing system with Asterisk and Gizmo.  With dialing plans, recommendations for hosters, and a variety of other bits and pieces, this is worth a read. 

Have the US incumbents written off their landline businesses?  It certainly seems as if they must have. 

Via Om Malik, here are selected line loss figures for some of the most prominent of the bunch.  These are annualized rates, paired with actual losses in the quarter. 

• BellSouth - total access line declined 6.1% (238,000), residential lines declined 8.8% (120,000) to bring down the total access lines to 19.8 million.
• AT&T - 6% (600,000) drop in access lines to bring down the total to 48.8 million
• Verizon - 7% (830,000) drop in access lines to bring the total down to 47.97 million
• Qwest - 5.2% drop in access lines.  

The pattern is consistent, and perhaps even a little positive.  In August of last year, James Enck reported selected Q2 2005 land line losses for North America (on an annualized basis) as:

• Bell Canada -5% vs. -2.68%
• Telus -4.33% vs. -1.8%
• SBC -6.36% vs. -4.92%
• Verizon -6.52% vs. -4.96%
• Bellsouth -7.32% vs. -4.76%

Between the three largest players in the US — Bellsouth, AT&T, and Verizon — they collectively control around nearly 120 million landlines.  A 7% annual decline represents 8.5 million cancelled phone lines.  That’s a helluva opportunity for cable and wireless.