Welcome to Gahtan’s Technology and Internet Law Blog

The FTC is set release a report, entitled Effectiveness and Enforcement of the CAN-SPAM Act, which addresses the the effectiveness of the 2 year old CAN-SPAM Act. Officials from state and federal enforcement agencies, as well as the Canadian Competition Bureau, will also announce criminal law enforcement initiatives targeting illegal spam operations.

CAN-SPAM, which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing, is better known as a tool that has made it easier to send unsolicited mail because it took precedent over sometimes conflicting, but usually more consumer oriented, state legislation.

The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence at Home (SETI@Home) project, which utilized a downloadable screen saver to harness idle CPU cycles from millions of Internet-connected PCs across the globe in order to analyze data collected from massive radio telescopes in the search for patterns that might signal intelligent life, shut down last week. However, the project is not dead. A new downloadable client will allow users to also devote spare CPU power for other research projects, such as climate change, astronomy and curing human diseases.

Wi-Fi VOIP handsets are great if they are intended for use either with (i) private hotspots or (ii) public hotspots that do not re-direct users to an initial page where they must log in or at least agree (click through) to some terms of use. However, since these devices lack web browsers, they cannot be used with public hotspots that require the user to do something on a redirected initial web page. I’ve tried two experiments in the hope of finding a work around to this problem. One failed but the other succeeded.

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Some blogs have recently been commenting on the competitiveness of the Canadian telecom market. I decided to check out Fido’s website to see how things have changed during 2005. Thanks to Rogers (who acquired Fido just over a year ago), the bill for Fido subscribers heading south this winter as compared to last may be twice as high. So much for competition.

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The Governor in Council has indicated that Ontario’s Personal Health Information Protection Act is substantially similar to Part 1 of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act as it applies to health information custodians and has issued an exemption order in respect of such health information custodians.

Canadian Privacy Law Blog

Wireless e-mail software provider, Visto, joined Good Technology and Nokia in licensing NTP’s patents. Maybe the reason was legal. However, it likely was also done for marketing reasons. It helps put additional pressure on Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry, and the ongoing publicity regarding the dispute causes more people to look at competitive solutions.

New York Times - Blackberry Dispute Aids Rivals

What a difference a day makes. I reported yesterday that Vonage was finalizing the beta on its new handset. We’ll they have now apparently starting shipping the UTStarcom F1000 wi-fi voip handset. The phone is available for US$79.99 after a $50 rebate. See Vonage’s site for more details. Interestingly, information about it is also available on the Vonage Canada website. So Canadians may not need to wait for a delayed rollout.

John Battelle reports that Alexa is opening up its web search platform:

Anyone can also use Alexa’s servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things - perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example. Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or …well, whatever creative folks can dream up. And then, anyone can run that new service on Alexa’s (er…Amazon’s) platform, should they wish.

It’s all done via web services. It’s all integrated with Amazon’s fabled web services platform. And there’s no licensing fees. Just “consumption fees” which, at my first glance, seem pretty reasonable. (”Consumption” meaning consuming processor cycles, or storage, or bandwidth).