Another Reason I left Canada: Bill C-61

Canada currently imposes a "fine" on all digital and analog media purchased, ostensibly to compensate artists for copyright infringement you'll do with that media. If you use your CDs for a more legitimate purpose than fair use, you paid the fine anyways.

Obviously, you're guilty, proof being irrelevant. This is akin to gasoline having a surcharge added for the speeding ticket you're expected to get.

This has backfired on the music industry. If you're on the side that states that the sales have fallen because the music industry hasn't made all much worth listening to in recent years, rather than piracy, you'll applaud this: Canada's RIAA arm got a serious smackdown about two years ago when the defendant successfully argued that no further damages were due because the fine for the crime had already been paid. That meant that because of the media reimbursement/fine/tax, copying music and video had basically been legalized.

Of course, copyright holders could not let this stand, and so had their henchmen in parliament propose a draconian addition, currently called bill C-61. Hon. Minister of Industry Bill Prentice deserves to lose his seat for this. Here is the summary - you'll note similarities with the US DMCA:

• Circumvention of encryption, no matter how trivial (like xor 81), is now a federal offence (called a felony in the US)
• $500 fine (not clear if it's a minimum or a maximum) for each copyright violation (so a Youtube posting will average $20,000)
• Unlocking of cellphones counts as circumvention of encryption (even if a provider locks your personal cell phone)

The issue, as always, is the fine print, usually skipped by the press. Critics who watch out for this sort of thing argue that the search and seizure rights granted by the bill and others on the books it refers to effectively make Canada a police state, like it isn't already (ask me about September 2003 at Vancouver International Airport one day).

Protests are cropping up all over the place, according to the CBC.

What's really missing from the debate are the following points:

• The new bill would empower distributors, who are the copyright owners (artists surrender this to get distributed), so it does not help artists, and thus does not help creativity.
• Security through Obscurity would also take over the Canadian technology market - it's okay for your bank to use XOR 81 encryption, since it's "illegal to circumvent." Tell that to your ID thief in Russia, and see if he cares. He's thankful his life was made easier.
• Security companies, those that nudge vendors to make their software more secure, now face legal penalties like they do in the United States. Point out another flaw in Internet Explorer, go to jail. There. Microsoft's happy.

Feel safer already?

The point is, the criminals on the networks don't care about this, and they are outside the reach of Canadian law. But the folks whom you trust to keep the people with your information honest will see jail if they tell the people with your information that they're not being responsible.

Good work, Canada!

PowerPoint(tm): The New Documentation Standard

Well, finally something work related.

So what did I miss? Apparently everyone dumped Visio (tm) and other technical drawing products, and replaced them with PowerPoint. Four years ago I lamented the same thing with a PowerPoint presentation being considered a "Product Plan."

Architecture Consultant: "We need a state diagram and a sequence diagram."

Developer: "Here it is."

AC: "That's a Power Point! The arrows don't line up, and there are no dotted connectors!"

Manager: (Manager overrides) "It's great!"

AC: "It actually does not show how anything interrelates, and how it relates to the software components."

Manager: "Well, you had better be able to fix out outage with this."


Yet, all this focus, and meetings have gotten longer, and the elevator pitch is a lost art.

What gives?

SunRocket and Consumer Recourse

I confess: Yesterday I could not stop hitting my browser's refresh button and watching the carnage unfold on dsl reports.

It does seem some subscribers did the math and realized SunRocket, nor likely Vonage, are tenable the way they are/did business. It's true, given how they're structured, the more people they sign up, the more money they lose.

I am not defending SunRocket, but:

The other interesting observation was of the customers that were very, very upset at the sudden loss of service. Talks of calling the FCC or other government authorities were bandied about. What these people don't realize is that the government does not owe them anything. For one, VoIP as structured, skirted the tax structure of traditional telecom - this is where the deals came from. No tax, no government regulation = no recourse. With the imposition of some regulatory fees came some recourse, but much of this was because the telcos granted area monopolies were seeing their best customers skimmed off by VoIP, and thus successfully argued that this eroded their ability to provide at-loss telephone service to out of the way places.

Remember - a normal telco, say Verizon, is granted a monopoly in an area in return for not turning down customers. This means if you live somewhere where they need to string wire to you, they cannot charge you more than the guy in the downtown apartment. In return, nobody can go anywhere else. Those calling for government intervention circumvented the system, in almost all cases, knowingly. "So you left for the high seas to get away from your navy and customs people, and when the pirates come, wonder where your navy is?"

Now, you can knock SunRocket on consumer laws, but most of these only take effect in the case of outright fraud, are difficult to prove, and moreover require there be assets in that company to allow the damages to be paid. Which means that if you do take them to court, even if you win, no matter the size of the judgment, there probably won't be enough to take to even pay your lawyer.

In the end, people, knowing what they're in for, can either accept the risk of going with VoIP (or this new-fangled thing called the Internet - your virus checkers are up to date, right?), or return to the traditional, sheltered telco environment. It's a free country - you're free to complain too.

Just be sure you've got your number porting paperwork in.

Sunrocket done at COB today

I also got copied on the internal memo stating that they had not found a buyer. More than anything though, it seems pretty clear that people don't quite understand how the porting system works. The last dev remaining sent an IM my way saying that he was turning out the lights. If I had been in town I'd be pulling gear out of the lab right now, they had some really nice kit in there.

Porting a number is "pull" process most of the time. This means that there need not be anyone alive on the other end to release the number. The only system that will still see the number at its original location is the system that you have ported from. In SR's case, they'll be "bricking" or killing their ATA's today sometime, so this won't be a problem. Secondly, SunRocket never bothered going through the registration to get its own numbers for a number of reasons (good for everyone, as it turns out), so proof of number ownership lies with the upstream number providers anyways: Global Crossing, Qwest, Broadwing.

How to Port:

1. IMPORTANT: Print out a SunRocket statement from the web site!
   
2. Open an account with your chosen provider, and tell them you'd like to port the number.
3. Send them a copy of the printed statement (not that it says much).
4. Once inbound calls start working on your new equipment, call SunRocket to cancel your account. Skip that step - they're no longer answering.

--------------- (edited for clarity)
NOT RELATED TO PORTING:

Other cool links:

ATA (Gizmo) Passwords, posted here:
User: admin
Password: 7UprUtew

Another Gizmo site

If the decision (at Sherwood Partners) is not to blow away the actual Gizmo firmware (killing them permanently), one should technically be able to re-use them for whatever service one ports to.

Kicking the Dead Horse: Top 10 Mistakes of Sunrocket

Other than the top-10 list I posted some time ago I suppose now that my stock options are worthless I have no incentive to hold back.

I still dig top-10 lists, so here we go:

10. Failure Framework: Hiring telco execs in CXO positions out of the gate. Who else to piss away money the fastest on "future proofing" while the sysarch has to explain why these "web servers" are necessary?

9. Gotcha: Claiming a "no-gotcha" company while maintaining strict radio silence when things were going wrong.

8. From bad to worse: Hiring the same people responsible of a major loss in shareholder value at AOL to run Sunrocket. Of course, they covered their butts and so this is impossible to prove. I'll mention this: nobody in their 40's "retires" from a VP position. That's jargon for not being able to find a new job before it becomes plain as day you suck at your current one.

7. We tanked like this last time: Telco execs hiring ex-telco NOC staff to run what's essentially a dot-com network hauling primarily UDP traffic. To their credit most came around to running internet systems, but this was much harder than it needed to be. The bitching of the "seasoned Telecom execs" about Linux not being UNIX and then one of their stars tanking a UNIX machine (Solaris... that's UNIX, right?) by typing "hostname help" at the root prompt did little to point out their own irony.

6. Improvement aversion: vertically scaling session border controllers originally purchased as a stop-gap measure while politicking to have a solution with 1/20th the per-subscriber cost in back office equipment (and scales horizontally) taken off the map. Not to mention it provided a gateway to the Jabber protocol's Voip (can you say peering with GoogleTalk?) service. Can't do that - it could make us popular.

5. The Ostrich: One exec signs a deal for a SQL Server-based billing system (read: runs Windows, not UNIX) with no due diligence. Want to know why Sunrocket could not actually make money? They could not bill. The result: Call detail records were present three times in the billing database with the call merging done in-database. A perl script would have been 20 times faster. A funny one was that it was the same exec that called a meeting to explain the "web server line item" asking why this was needed, what this thing called Linux was - and then promptly complained that SQL Server cost money, and nixing the enterprise choice so fail-over could work.

4. The Ostrich 2.0: Deploying (I don't know if it ever went live) the next billing system on servers with no floating point processors (Sun T1000 systems). Now fine, billing systems should count tenths of pennies or so (i.e. not need floating point), but Oracle 10g sure does, and programmers sometimes forget that you're quickly down to two digits of precision when daisy-chaining floating point calculations. Are the T1000's even Oracle certified?

3. The Sheep: Outsourcing development and call center without actually agreeing to a development process in house. And then wondering why things fail, take twice as long, or end up canceled. Repeat after me: The good thing about outsourcing development to India is you get exactly what you specify. The bad thing about outsourcing to India is you get back exactly what you specify. If you're a bank, fine, you probably had 20 years to sort your process and procedure out - doing it as a dot-com is an express ticket to dot-gone. Oh, and the project managers that were not allowed to manage projects... Wait! Innovation was outsourced to ... AOL execs. Yaaay!

2. Security? That's the sysarch's problem: SR could have called itself the official VoIP provider of Al-Quaeda for a while - the session border controllers were so bottlenecked that authentication was effectively off at times, and ATA (the box that gives you dial tone) configs were unencrypted. Of little consolation is that your account password is the same as the account number ... hmmm. Too bad the sysarchs weren't usually allowed on the session border controllers.

1. Penny wise, pound foolish: The whole thing was rolled out seam-of-the-pants style. To the first 7 month team's credit, it all mostly worked (except believing some vendors, like the SBC people, that their capacity assessments were actually accurate). Conveniently, Mr. "what's-this-webserver-thing" canceled the inital lab to diagnose or load-test anything because it would be too expensive, and he did not want to run another 60A of power to the machine room. That was until the building engineer got all huffy showing the circuit distribution box hitting 166F on his thermal cam, so at least the circuits came.

Now fine - I have no trouble admitting my part in this. I never produced a nuclear-sub-grade operations manual for the whole system, with step-by-step procedures for when some green light went red. But then, nuclear subs cost 60 billion each and take three years or more to build. But was fun pointing the network staff at a folder on their network during an outage (I wasn't there anymore, but I also like my phone working...) that outlined troubleshooting and recovery procedures, and lists of every process needed to to support production on every production system and hearing "I never even heard this existed..."

<full_disclosure>
Oh, and I got fired for getting upset that someone with control over the access list at the data center decided to "omit me" the day I was to work on-site with a vendor, and then pointing this out. Plausibly deniable - only other CXO's admitted to hearing the perp admit this was not an accident. But perfect timing, since my mom had just died, and I was somewhat vulnerable as a result. Who says telcos can't innovate?
</full_disclosure>

Arguably, the number one folly at Sunrocket: for a communications company, we all should have been better at communicating. The irony.

I feel better now.

SunRocket turns Scud Missile

Well, the word is in: SunRocket is out for the count.

As the guy who did the wiring diagrams for the place (now you know who I worked for), it's sad to see. Congratulations to the ex-AOL management (you know who you are!) that took over for a new record in running a company into the ground, and congrats to the board of directors for yet another successfully mismanaged venture.

Internally, SunRocket's politics went further and further in preventing effective execution of the technology vision. But can be expected when you mix telecom and dot-com? The dot-com "meltdown" was a drop in the bucket compared to the losses incurred by telecoms companies during the downturn years, and clearly management from the has-beens has not learned from their mistakes. I won't make myself sound like a disgruntled former employee, but anyone who has worked there should not be surprised at the outcome.

All the best to the folks let go today and last month, and I'll get some toilet paper printed in the shape of stock options certificates!