Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Blockbuster news!  While watching the season opener, Ottawa Sens vs Toronto Maple Leafs, TSN announces that RIM founder Jim Balsillie is the new owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins.  Wow!  Speculation: will he keep the team in Pittsburgh, or are they coming to Southern Ontario (Hamilton, or Kitchener?).  And can Southern Ontario support a third NHL franchise alongside Buffalo and Toronto?

Unlike Mark Goldberg, I welcome the ISP Privacy Pledge initiative put forward by Online Rights Canada.  The pledge is a very concrete way to send a message to Parliament that privacy is important, and that laws providing for warrantless searches (like the US DMCA, and US Patriot Act) would reduce us to a police state.  There is already one police state in North America.  No need to set one up here too.

One of Mark’s objections is to wording in the pledge which says “If we see evidence of illegal activity, we may notify law enforcement”.  He asks why the ISP wouldn’t pledge to notify the police if there is evidence of illegal activity. 

In a civil society, we are not tasked with policing our neighbours. We have rights to speak freely, to protest, and to act according to our own collective consciences. We can choose civil disobedience, if we desire, as a form of protest. In this particular instance, the pledge is a political act, a part of the ongoing battle over copyright and DRM.  Many individuals, including myself, feel that the entertainment industry has gone too far in the US.  Now this same industry is lobbying to introduce DMCA style legislation here in Canada.  ISP’s shouldn’t be tasked with policing for the entertainment lobby. Some might view an ISPs decision to not act for the entertainment lobby a legitimate protest.

At the same time, it is easy to imagine that an ISP discovering evidence of a particularly reprehensible crime — for instance, the distribution of child pornography — likely might choose to notify authorities.

Each individual needs to make those choices according to their own conscience.  Hence, “may”, not “will”. 

Mark also brings up commerical data collection activities, such as contextual ad targeting, and asks why these aren’t being targeted also.  They should be.  The organizations being asked to sign a similar pledge, however, should be the advertisers themselves.  

What would you do if you had the market leading commercial distribution of the Asterisk, and you were looking for new ways to expand?  If you’re Fonality, you buy the largest online community of Asterisk users, Trixbox. Tom Keating has the scoop on the announcement, which is due to be made today.

According to the interview, Fonality will maintain Trixbox as a 100% GPL platform, and devote engineers to helping Trixbox founder Andrew Gillis to innovate faster.  Especially interesting was Fonality CEO Chris Lyman’s assertion that they are getting 50% more downloads of Trixbox per day than Digium has with Asterisk.

What this does is seriously align Fonality and Digium to compete with each other.  While at VON, Digium staff were openly describing their upcoming new download, with the new Digium GUI.  It will be a head to head competitor with Trixbox.  With this acquisition by Fonality, the two companies will have similar products targeted at similar markets. 

It makes you wonder why Digium didn’t acquire Trixbox themselves.

 

Mark Evans notes that the Blackberry Pearl has arrived here in Canada. $249 after rebates and signing up for a three year contract with Rogers, or $449 with a one year contract. Ouch! It seems steep when compared to the Nokia 6682, another 1.3 megapixel camera phone. RIM ought to bump up the quality of the camera on the Pearl. At 1.3 megapixels, it's pretty dated. Applications like scanr, which turns your camera phone into a digital scanner, copier and fax, would seem to be a great fit for Blackberry's business focused customer base, but require a minimum 2 megapixel camera. Nokia's latest N-Series phones, incidentally, all sport 3 and 5 megapixel cameras.

Jim Courtney has just written a short piece on the Voice 2.0 conference happening here in Ottawa in two weeks.  He’ll be here representing Skype Journal, as will at least one other prominent blogger — Martin Geddes.

Hullo CEO Bob Mimeault asked me about the conference the other day.  He wanted to know how it was different from other events.  This is clearly an au courante idea.  Quite independently from this event, Telco 2.0 is happening in the UK this week, and ETel in Silicon Valley in the spring.  Each has a slightly different flavour, but the thrust of all three is similar. These are events designed to actively design the future of communications technologies and the communications industry.

Hope to see you there.