Results tagged “internet”

Since its official launch in August 2008, Google Suggest has been fuelling a new auto-complete meme that has taken off on social sites like Digg and Reddit and even encouraged news sites like Slate to take a pseudo-sociolinguistic look at Google's most popular searches. What we search can tell us a lot about who we are, so we thought it would be funny illuminating to use Google Canada's version of Suggest to find and dissect common queries about Toronto.

Back when Parliament Hill was in the throes of its last electoral shake-up, Bill C-61, An Act to amend the Copyright Act, was nearly forgotten, buried beneath all the high-stakes drama of a government on the brink. When Governor General Michaëlle Jean dissolved the thirty-ninth parliament at Harper's request on September 7, 2008, the legislation died, with a promised—or threatened—resurrection should the Conservatives win re-election.

Last week, Google and Measurement Lab introduced a new web application called Glasnost that allows users to test the extent to which their ISP throttles or blocks their BitTorrent traffic. According to the statistics currently available on their site, Canada is one of the worst throttlers in the world—Canada ranks fourth for blocked hosts and second for blocked ISPs. All of the major Canadian ISPs admit to traffic shaping, but whether it’s necessary is difficult to determine as none of the providers are willing to publicly release their data. Glasnost’s timing couldn’t be better—in addition to providing much needed transparency, the data should also assist CRTC in its current investigation of traffic management policies.

Last night, hours after the budget was announced and the day before a confidence vote could throw Canadians back into an election, over a dozen people gathered at Idée in the city's east end to change the way citizens communicated with their government, whether it be at a municipal, provincial, or federal level. Frustrated by the slow adoption of technology in collecting and tracking street-level issues, the group of developers, entrepreneurs, and communicators set out to develop an easy-to-use site for citizens to alert needs to the government and to each other. Inspired by the British site Fix My Street.com, the project, code-named Shamen, could help report problems that often get shoved to the backburner, such as a growing pothole in a decaying road or an unclear or misdirecting sign that confuses elderly citizens. (While small, these everyday problems accumulate and can create a nagging perception that the government is unable to—or unwilling to—respond to immediate issues.)

After a year of Whip TV’s cryptic advertisements that hinted at it, the Kingsway Theatre will officially reopen this Friday after hosting a special sneak peek and open house (featuring a free screening of Spike Milligan’s 1962 comedy The Postman’s Knock) last night. The art deco theatre, located at 3030 Bloor Street West near Royal York Road, opened in 1939, but has been closed since 2006. Before the doors were open to the public last night, Torontoist got taken on a tour by the theatre's new manager, Rui Pereira.

Currently wrapping up: day one of a fascinating two-day conference at City Hall on Web 2.0 and the internet’s potential to revolutionize civic engagement. The entire thing is being streamed, and anyone interested in the issues should really just start watching. The summit features a broad array of speakers and panellists, ranging from directors of various city departments to prominent web developers and activists to councillors and citizens relaying their day-to-day experiences to the city's existing sites and interfaces.

Stephen Harper's e-mail distribution list got hacked on Sunday. The person or persons responsible sent out two e-mails: The first was a sort-of adorable faux confession that said stuff like: "My name is Stephen Harper. I am an ALBERTAN, here me roar! My goal is to make Canada America's 51st state and destroy health care that all Canadians cherish by infusing my propaganda with hard core ad hominem attacks." The second was a one-paragraph e-mail comparing Kosovo's independence with Quebec's. It's no "okay, poop is coming out," and certainly Palin comparison (hiyo!) to a much bigger e-mail hijack stateside you certainly heard about last week. But for those of you who want the sordid details (the allegedly Winnipegean culprit! the extremely serious government investigation! the potential Stephane Dion connection!), NOW has them, and Maclean's has been all over this since Sunday.

While Second Cup and Starbucks have offered Wi-Fi service for years, the cost model has always leaned towards laptop users: customers can choose to purchase internet for an hour, a day, or a month. However, the explosion of Wi-Fi enabled smartphones changes the use of Wi-Fi: checking an email, using GPS, or finding a telephone listing takes minutes. Here's a catch: in the States, the internet period is limited to a single session. Once you log off, you're done for the day. We wonder if Bell will make the session cumulative or if the telco will follow suit. (Doesn't it appears that telcos plan to take advantage of the changing market to manipulate Wi-Fi at the major coffee chains to become marketing tools for products like the iPhone or WiMax?)

FESTIVAL: Toronto's annual Taste of the Danforth festival returns tonight and runs until Sunday. Along with the usual smorgasbord of excellent Greek food come expected crowds of over 500,000, and a healthy serving of ambivalence. Danforth Avenue from Broadview Avenue to Jones Avenue, 6 p.m., FREE.

If you have a few million bucks lying around, perhaps you'd consider buying 50% of Ashley MacIsaac's future music revenues? If you like the odds—note that MacIsaac declared bankruptcy in 2000; that his most successful album, released thirteen years ago, sold half a million copies; and that the auction contains the sorta ominous note that "the annuity will expire upon my death"—go for it. But thanks to the Reuters article, which notes that 1.5 million Canadian dollars is somehow now equivalent to 744 million British pounds (news to us!), a way better way to get really rich really quickly might be to just hop on over to England to take advantage of that killer exchange rate.

Amid all the cute overloading our recent Internet history, all the LOLcatz and YouTube Charlies, we began to feel that something very important was missing. We just couldn't figure out what it was. Did we need more plush? More anime? More stuff on our cats?

The government has introduced revamped copyright legislation intended to address the needs of the digital age, arousing the ire of people who like to copy stuff. However, the topic is complex and controversial, and MPs are ready to head to the cottage for the summer, so it's unlikely the changes will be passed anytime soon.

At the end of May, the Mesh Conference brought some of the internet's finest to Toronto. In the MaRS building, Canadians-done-good Michael Geist, Lane Merrifield, and Garrett Camp spoke about technology and the web. Laptops were open, ready to Google a fact or Twitter about a comment. We caught up with Garrett Camp just before he was about to have a night on the town. Camp, a Calgarian, was excited to meet up with some friends in the city and explore Toronto. ("I'm supposed to meet up with a friend who lives on B-L-O-R-E Street?" he asks someone.)

Wikipedia recently updated their list of the most prolific editors, and Torontoist was pleased to discover that at 181,749 edits, the most prolific human is a Toronto resident. Bearcat’s user profile describes him as "an underemployed gay freelance writer of Franco-Ontarian stock in Toronto, Ontario, who votes for the New Democratic Party, drinks Alexander Keith's, hangs out at the Church and Wellesley Timothy's."

How many brands does it take to get you through the day? Jane, a pseudonymous Torontonian ad executive, sought to discover just that. She posted the results on her blog, Dear Jane Sample, in what Ad Broad later dubbed a “Brand Timeline Portrait.”

To the casual net surfer it might seem that Bell’s newly launched online video store is just another way the telecommunications giant is competing with rampant P2P file-sharers.

The serialized web show Team Epic is quintessentially Toronto, hence our interest. Following the success of all things superhero, the series follows a team of Canadian superpowered do-gooders.

The day after the CBC announced its plans to release the finale of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister through BitTorrent, Bell Canada has moved quietly to throttle its services—including peer-to-peer filesharing—outraging both its customers and wholesale clients.

Photo by Jordan Roberts from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Fans of obscure pop culture and history buffs will welcome the complete redesign and relaunch of the CBC Digital Archives. The website features an amazing collection of 12,000 television and radio clips drawn from seventy years of CBC broadcasts. The CBC's serious side is well-represented on the site, with historic clips of the Second World War, political profiles, and stories of cultural milestones. But there are also plenty of quaintly anachronistic news reports, such as the public broadcaster's take on Toronto beatniks in the 1950s and Yorkville hippies in the 1960s. Until now, access to these nuggets was hobbled by an outdated and cumbersome Digital Archives website, which hadn't been revamped since its original launch in 2002.

Toronto principal in controversial controversy over explicit poems he wrote and posted to his website. This is of course the first recorded case ever of somebody getting in trouble for something they wrote on the Internet, and the scandal has sent shock waves through the online community. "Wait, somebody actually this shit?" said Patrick Metzger. "Dammit, I better re-emphasize that my erotic snuff story about Geri Halliwell is purely a work of fiction!"

City sells "the McDonald's site" on Bloor for a fairly low price. However, Adam Vaughan insists there are upsides to the deal, such as being able to limit the height of the condo development that will take its place, because who would want tall buildings in the downtown core?

In the music industry's latest attempt to lazily claw itself out of the grave, the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) is proposing a $5.00 per month licence fee on Canadian Internet accounts that would legalize music downloads. They're calling it the Right to Equitable Remuneration for Music File Sharing, a "reasonable and unobtrusive system of compensation" that will allow consumers to fill their bellies full of all the music they can handle from any peer-to-peer network while creating added revenue for artists, publishers, and labels alike.

Photo by Denmar from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Provincial Conservative leader John Tory, battling to stay employed in the face of disaffected fellow partiers who want to hold a leadership review next month, says in a letter on his website that he has travelled the province listening to members and coming up with ideas to address their concerns. The Tories are lucky; a leader who also had a job as an MPP probably wouldn't have time for stuff like that.

Google has always been known for its clean, lightweight, ad-free search page, but Canada's largest provider of broadband internet is under fire today for messing with it. Toronto-based Rogers has begun testing a controversial technique that allows the media empire to insert its own content into another entity's web page, angering net neutrality proponents. According to a tip passed to L.A.-based technology expert Lauren Weinstein, the system being employed is manufactured by the "in-browser...

Bell is launching a preemptive strike before the much-drooled-over iPhone lands in Canada. The Star reports that Bell customers with the new HTC Touch phone (pictured right) could get unlimited wireless data for just $7 a month. (Data transferring is necessary to get music, games, television and the web onto your phone.) The Touch is similar to the iPhone in that both substitute a keypad for a touch screen and can run applications, but the...

Our national infrastructure needs $123 billion in investment to avoid collapse. If Canada's governments don't spend the money, we will end up looking like The Road Warrior. (Torontoist dibs being the Gyro Captain.)

Bad news if you're a lacrosse fan: the 2008 National Lacrosse League season has been cancelled. Pick your joke: 1) "I'm sure all three of you are very disappointed"; 2) "Players are refusing to play until they get reimbursed for their bus tickets"; 3) "My God, this is the national sport we're talking about here! Why isn't Stephen Harper doing something, for the love of God?"; 4) "So, why are the Toronto Rock still offering season tickets for sale on their website?"