Welcome to Gahtan’s Technology and Internet Law Blog

I noticed yesterday that TigerDirect was dumping Siera Wireless’ now discontinued VOQ Professional Phone at a really attractive price. The phone originally sold for about $500-600 about 18 months ago and at the time I was seriously considering buying it. Instead, I opted for a different smartphone and was glad that I did given Sierra Wireless’ decision to get out of the cell phone business.

In any case, I picked up one of the phones at the Toronto outlet store today. It was not labeled as used or refurbished and was made to look new. I got it home and started to look around. To my surprise, it contained 135 SMS messages (received throughout 2004 and early 2005), many of which obviously belonged the phone’s previous owner - he had quite an adventure to Meca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, and then was apparently looking for a house in Toronto. It contained birthday messages (so one would know his birthday) and his anniversary (two common items used for authentication by many businesses). It contained a password for something called Rogers Desktop (he was a Rogers Wireless subscriber) as well as activation codes for certain services. Amazingly, it also contained login credentials to access what appeared to be a corporate email account at Sun Microsystems. I’ve deleted everything but it just highlights to me the dangers of sending malfunctioning computer equipment to the manufacturers who then “refurbish” or “recondition” it without even going to the trouble of performing a “factory reset” to wipe the memory on the device. And it was disappointing that Tiger Direct does not prominently note that the product is factory recertified. Also, I guess the term factory recertified at Tiger Direct means that product could have been used for more than a year.

One of the big problems with VOIP is that it lacks encryption. Some manufacturers do provide end-to-end encryption capabilities but only between their products. Its also difficult to assess how good such protocols really are. All that is about to change.

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High speed wireless data sounds great, doesn’t it. For approximately C$100 per month, you can get unlimited high speed data service from Telus or Bell. But is it really unlimited?

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Wired News reports on the Great MySpace Crackdown of ‘06.

MySpace’s rapid transformation into the largest community of teens and twenty-somethings in history made a backlash perhaps inevitable. In the three years since its launch, MySpace has gathered over 57 million registered users …

Concerns over the site fall generally into two categories: unease over the type of content teens are posting, and fear of the type of people they’re meeting.

School teachers and administrators are sending home warnings to parents while some schools are now blocking access from their systems.

The Globe and Mail reports that:

The market is abuzz with speculation the federal government may recommend creating a fourth national wireless carrier. It’s seen as a way for Ottawa to stimulate competition — the percentage of Canadians with cellphone service lags the United States and other countries.

Canada currently has three national carriers - Rogers Wireless, Bell Mobility and Telus - there are also resellers such as Virgin Mobile Canada that use other carriers’ networks (Bell’s network in the case of Virgin).

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has released a public notice asking for input on the development and operation of a National Do Not Call List (DNCL) and on telemarketing rules. The CRTC has been authorized to establish a national DNCL, select a third-party administrator for the national DNCL, and to levy administrative monetary penalties. The Commission will be holding a public proceeding to address many issues such as:

The New York Times has an article about portable hotspots. These are boxes from companies such as Junxion, Kyocera and Top Global that bridge a high speed cellular data PC card (available from Sprint, Verizon, Cingular or T-Mobile for approximately $50-80 per month) inserted by the user with an internal wi-fi access point.

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Is it Google Analytics all over again? Google launched an early test version of a Web page creation and hosting service, Google Page Creator, on Thursday and hours later stopped accepting sign-ups, citing overwhelming demand