Montreal — Page 33

Is there anywhere

December 19, 2000 by Michael Boyle

you can get reliable data on the current state of the internet down to the local level? I know of the Internet Traffic Report, but that doesn’t seem to indicate that there’s anything wrong, and anyhow talking about North America as a whole seems a little broad to me.

I’m prompted by the problems that some folks in San Francisco seem to be having, but also because we had the same situation at work a couple of weeks ago when UUNet went down here in Montreal for 8+ hours. Our sites stayed up cause they’re cloned elsewhere, databases and all. But the ISP whose BoD I’m on had huge problems – their backup bandwidth from Videotron relied on UUNet as well (which was news to everyone).

Fair warning!

December 18, 2000 by Michael Boyle

There’s an event this week. Dinner and drinks at Nantha’s Kitchen, a fabulous Malaysian/Indonesian place on Duluth right near St-Laurent. The regular crew of Montrealers who keep weblogs is coming out, plus one of our favourite former Montrealers, the irrepressible Jish. Are you coming? Everyone’s welcome.

I’ve been added

December 18, 2000 by Michael Boyle

to the team for YULBlog, a weblog about Montreal and tech. I’m going to start contributing this afternoon or this evening. There are a couple of recent things that they missed!

There was more on the privacy front

December 14, 2000 by Michael Boyle

in Canada today. Jen Ditchburn (who I knew when she lived here in Montreal) reports that the privacy of personal data is to become a right that will be protected by law. The new law will apply pretty broadly too, it seems. Good news.

There’s a new

December 14, 2000 by Michael Boyle

real-life kernel to what will surely become an urban legend in the Montreal Gazette today. It’s about a guy who returned a defective Visor back-up module to Bureau en Gros (that would be Staples to non-Montrealers) – only to have a friend call him up and let him know that he’d been reading the guy’s diary in the store a minute ago. The story’s been going around Montreal for a couple of days now – I know a couple of journalists who were approached with the story, and the guy whose life was on display is a friend of a friend. Anyhow – each time I’ve heard it the story has mutated a little bit. It’s only a matter of time until we start hearing that the Visor had nuclear secrets on it or something like that.