Growing Opposition Over Government Inaction On Broadband

After a number of reports on the state of broadband around the world have each given Canada low grades for it's high-speed internet service, government opposition parties are beginning to take shots at Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his ruling Conservative Party. “The Harper Conservatives have no vision for a digital future. The United States is enshrining net neutrality principles as a fundamental principle for economic restructuring. The Europeans are setting benchmarks for open access to high speed. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are giving the cable giants a free pass to gouge consumers.” read a statement from Charlie Angus, NDP MP for Timmins-James Bay, on his party's website Monday.

I'm sure the Conservatives will counter with the usual, we're a large country with a dispersed population... will this become an election issue?

Source: CBC.ca

A Wired Look At Fitbit - Getting Healthy By The Numbers

Today Wired takes a look at Fitbit, a $99 pedometer on steroids that will not only help track your activity and sleep efficiency but along with it's website stores your data, over time, and allows you to input other information such as meals eaten during the day for comparison with calories burned by activity.

"WIRED A true boon for data-loving geeks who want to track their workout progress. Nicely designed, minimalist hardware. Doesn't just focus on exercise: Diet and sleep are also tracked. Easily clips to just about anything. Nerd-tastic amounts of data can be had for a single C-note.

TIRED More prone to loss than the Detroit Lions. May be a bit hard for non-native speakers of the tech language to immediately master. Other running trackers work a tad more accurately. Come on Fitbit, spill your guts about the flower."

TV To Your Mobile Device

It seams as though television is not about to roll over and concede defeat to the internet just yet. On Thursday a group called the Open Mobile Video Coalition announced that it had created a standard for carving out a piece of the digital broadband frequencies to allow local television stations to broadcast live to mobile devices. The standard allows both free and for fee broadcasts and has the interest of several electronics makers, including Samsung, LG and Dell, who have all produced prototype devices.

I sure hope that the battery manufacturers and optometrists are ready...

Source: NY Times

Uruguay First Country To Truly Deliver One Laptop Per Child

Uruguay has taken the One Laptop Per Child project seriously and executed Plan Ceibal (Education Connect) to arm all children in primary schools around the country with a laptop. "This is not simply the handing out of laptops or an education programme. It is a programme which seeks to reduce the gap between the digital world and the world of knowledge," explained Miguel Brechner, director of the Technological Laboratory of Uruguay and in charge of Plan Ceibal. The feat makes Uruguay the first country to achieve the goal but as Brechner says "Its a culture shock scenario - many countries are simply too scared to put it into practice"

BBC News has more here.

New Wi-Fi Standard Allows Devices To Interact Directly

A Texas-based standards group, The Wi-Fi Alliance, who's members include Intel, Cisco and Apple, announced on Wednesday the introduction of a new technology standard, called Wi-Fi Direct. Wi-Fi Direct will allow devices that have been certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance to connect with each other without having to first go through a "hotspot," much like Bluetooth only with a longer range and faster connection speeds.

"The impact is that Wi-Fi will become even more pervasive and useful for consumers and across the enterprise," said The Wi-Fi Alliance's executive director Edgar Figueroa in a statement.

Devices using Wi-Fi Direct are expected to hit the shelves in mid 2010.

Source: CBC News

Sweden's Top Level Domain Dissapears Due To Typo

A small but rather far reaching error caused the entire top level domain of Sweden to go missing on Monday, according to Networkworld.com.

"The .SE registry used an incorrectly configured script to update the .se zone, which introduced an error to every single .se domain name," says web monitoring company Pingdom. "We have spoken to a number of industry insiders and what happened is that when updating the data, the script did not add a terminating '.' to the DNS records in the .se zone. That trailing dot is necessary in the settings for DNS to understand that '.se" is the top-level domain. It is a seemingly small detail, but without it, the whole DNS lookup chain broke down."

Sweden's Internet Infrastructure Foundation, which administers the .se domain, issued a statement saying "The cause was an incorrect software update, which, despite our testing procedures were not detected. Thanks to well-functioning surveillance system .SE discovered the error immediately and a new file with the DNS data (zone file) was produced and distributed within one hour. ... The false information that was sent out affected accessibility to all .se domains for a short time. However, there may still be some name servers that have not changed out of misinformation against the real."

The foundation then quickly but quietly posted a help wanted add on Monster.com ;)

Employer Blocking Social Networking Sites? There's Always A Way...

A recent survey conducted of 270 Chief Information Officers in companies across Canada showed that fifty-eight percent of them blocked access to social networking sites. This is not being looked kindly upon by young employees who have grown up with the sites and don't view them as time wasters. These employees are resourceful though, and using their mobile devices or connecting through proxy servers they are finding their ways to update their online status.

The Globe and Mail has the cat and mouse story here.

Moon Strike Not The Big Show Everyone Expected

I was glued to my monitor as the LCROSS mission unfolded and the camera refreshed as the Centaur rocket motor approached the surface of the moon, refreshing ever few seconds to bring an even tighter shot of the surface... and then...meh. I guess I was like many others around the globe who bought into the hype and expected a flare of impact and a huge dust plume! I truly hope that NASA was able to capture something of value, otherwise we're just polluting the moons surface with more space junk.

Discovery Channel:

"It's hard to tell what we saw there," said Michael Bicay, science director at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

Debris from the impact could have flown horizontally, or perhaps didn't clear the crater's rim, lead mission scientist Anthony Colaprete told reporters.

"Some luck has to come to get the ejecta to fly in the direction you want it to fly," he said.

"I'm not convinced we haven't seen the ejecta," Colaprete added. "We just have to go back with a finer tooth comb."

Bombing The Moon In Search Of Water

NASA will begin an assault on the moon this morning in the hopes of identifying water and other resources that may help to sustain a lengthy human visit or colonization, no joke! "The principle purpose is to identify if resources are there and if they are accessible," said lead scientist Anthony Colaprete, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "It's to pave the way for making decisions about where to go down the line."

The mission involves hurling a 50,817-pound empty rocket body at a crater on the moons South pole. The impact should kick up about 300,000 to 350,000 tons of material from the crater floor, of which about five tons is expected to soar past the crater's rim and into sunlight.

The entire operation will be viewed by amateur and professional astronomers and orbiting observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The best premier view will come via the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, known as LCROSS, designed and deployed for this it's only mission.

Source: Discovery Channel

Google Street View Goes Live In Canada

It appears as though Google has appeased the Canadian Privacy czar and this week made Street View available with maps of much of the Greater Toronto Area, Vancouver and the surrounding area, north to Whistler and east to Chilliwack, B.C., Hamilton, Kitchener, Waterloo, Ottawa and Windsor in Ontario, as well as Calgary, Canmore, Banff and Lake Louise in Alberta, Montreal and Quebec City in Quebec and Halifax, Nova Scotia. According to the CBC "Google has tried to address the privacy concerns of Street View brought up by Canada's privacy commissioner. The company has added privacy features to the service, including the automatic blurring of faces and licence plates to avoid identifying people and cars and an easy method for asking that images be removed."

Word from the company is that its cars have been filming in Saint John, N.B., Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg, no mention of Charlottetown but we've seen the cars around!