My Own Pirate Radio

The US has operated a Do-Not-Call registry to prevent unwanted phone calls since June 2003. When I wrote about this two years ago, the list had 110 million registrants. The latest stats I found, in an October 2007 PDF, says the number now stands at 145 million. Meanwhile, Canada is still waiting. The Canadian registry is due to launch — finally — in summer 2008.

Snail’s pace aside, the Canadian do-not-call registry will also have exemptions that allow many different kinds of organizations to continue contacting you.  Charities, political parties, polling companies, newspapers, and companies with a prior business relationship are free to continue calling until you explicitly tell them to stop.

Great. I can hardly wait.

In response to this, Michael Geist, a law professor at University of Ottawa, has built his own solution: he has just launched a site called iOptOut.ca that helps plug the loopholes. Once you’ve registered on iOptOut it will send your contact info to all the organizations you don’t want to hear from. Just like our do-not-call registry should have done… err, should be doing… in the first place. Better yet, it’s free, very easy to use (it took me two minutes to register), and privacy-clean.

Once this is up and running I’d love to see iOptOut extended to provide a do-not-mail service, including admail. We could feed that list to Canada Post, and to companies that deliver direct like YellowPages.ca. 

Bravo, Michael!

Business Week just published a short article called "Public Wi-Fi: Be Very Paranoid". Here’s how they showcased the story on their main page:

Give me a break.

The article is not about espionage, or the airport security staff listening in on your conversations, as the headline might lead you to think. It’s about the general lack of security in public wireless networks. Which isn’t news, last I checked.

Fear-mongering headlines like this seem to be ever more popular in today’s media. For shame. How about making the articles themselves more interesting, so that you don’t have to resort to sensationalist headlines to lure people in?

Anyway… I got suckered. I clicked through, and read the article. And I thought, "this is nonsense".

I use public Wi-Fi networks every day to read and write email, look up heaps of info on the web, and synchronize business documents. So far nobody has stolen my identity, emptied my bank account, or pilfered my ever-so-vital business files.

Yes, once in a while I do wonder, "is it safe to use this network?"  But I don’t lose sleep over it, and you shouldn’t either. If the network name looks authentic and it isn’t a peer-to-peer or ad-hoc network, game on.

The reality is we’re soon going to have Internet access everywhere, for cheap or free. WiFi, WiMax, mobile phone networks, projects like WiFiDog… it’s coming.  And on the current trajectory, nearly none of these public wireless gateways to the Internet will be secure.

Not secure. Just… like… the Internet.

Yes, technologists will eventually deliver and deploy better end-to-end security solutions. For instance, the online banks I use are all secured with HTTPS. And those docs I synchronize every day are pushed around by Foldershare,  which encrypts everything (well, almost everything; there is a long-known bug that prevents Mac-to-Windows encryption. Get off your butts, Foldershare team!).

But don’t hold your breath waiting for airtight security. Instead, just use common sense. Be cautious when accessing confidential stuff on public networks. Use different passwords for banking, work, and email. Since you can’t remember all those different passwords, keep them somewhere secure, like Password Safe. And above all, don’t run with scissors; they’ve been known to have sharp edges!

If you don’t own a Sonos media player, or you don’t like CBC Radio, this post is not for you. Everyone else — and I can probably count you on the fingers of one hand, since Sonos’ pricing is still so screwed up in Canada — read on.

Sonos is pretty good at playing streaming Internet radio stations. However, you might run into a bug whereby Sonos can’t connect to CBC Radio One. Here’s how to fix it:

The Quick Fix

Go to the Radio section in the Sonos controller, click "Add New", and use the following URLs instead of the ones CBC publishes:

CBC Radio 1 Atlantic (Halifax) is http://mfile2.akamai.com/9617/live/reflector:36748.asx?bkup=36749

CBC Radio 1 Central (Winnipeg) is http://mfile2.akamai.com/9617/live/reflector:36807.asx?bkup=36808

CBC Radio 1 Eastern (Toronto) is http://mfile2.akamai.com/9617/live/reflector:36859.asx?bkup=36860

CBC Radio 1 Pacific (Vancouver) is http://mfile2.akamai.com/9617/live/reflector:36748.asx?bkup=36749

Note these URLs are not guaranteed to keep on working.  CBC might change ‘em.  If this happens, bug Sonos or CBC, don’t bug me. Or read further to find out how you can fix this yourself.

Under the Hood / Teach a Man to Fish

Sonos appears to have trouble extracting the correct music stream information from the Windows Media .ASX playlists that CBC publishes. You can work around this by manually extracting the URL from each playlist. Reciva Radio Portal explains how:

Microsoft WMA Streams - Playlists

• Playlists are often used to deliver content.
• These are basically just text files with lists of direct audio URLs inside.
• Microsoft playlists have a .asx file extension. An example ASX playlist is shown below.
• If you are running Linux you can retrieve playlists using wget
  (e.g. wget "http://player.virginradio.co.uk/core/audio/wmp/live.asx?source=playerv4&service=grbb")
  Windows users can also use wget - just type "wget for windows" into Google and it should take you to a download page.
  The ASX playlist format is documented on microsoft.com. In summary, the direct audio URLs are always in a line that starts "< ref href".

The Financial Post ran a very interesting story last week about GeoSign, a Guelph, Ontario company whose business model was to arbitrage price differentials in Google and Yahoo! search engine advertisements. It’s worth a read if you’re interested in the economics behind search advertising, or if you ever wondered why more and more web pages are nothing more than an empty list of ads.

Essentially, search arbitrage involves an individual or company buying Internet traffic through the acquisition of keywords from Google, then sending viewers who click on the ad links to a site ("landing page" in Google terminology) that appears to have content, but is actually just full of online advertising linked to the original search term. Anyone clicking an ad link there makes money for the keyword holder. For example, a company might bid for the Google rights to the phrase "small town car sales" and send traffic to a website it controls, filled with more car advertisements, called "Alltheautomotive.com." The keyword cost only 20¢, while a click on the advertising on the website might yield $1.50 return.

Geosign convinced a VC to invest $160M just before Google pulled the rug out by changing their advertising policies.