Letters to the editor

Re: No one @Home (Nov. 21)

Your article on the @Home story really hits home, pun intended.

After receiving four e-mails on how important it was to change over our e-mail address to reflect the @rogers.com transition, they have delayed things to complete testing.

The Rogers help site indicates that the transition has been delayed. I’m sure that this will be delayed again as they have never delivered on time yet.

This is the latest info from their help page.

Thank you for visiting the Rogers @Home Transition
Website.

The transition has been delayed to 4pm today
November 22, 2001, to complete testing of the
system.

Please visit this site at that time to complete
the transition. In the meantime, please visit our
Frequently Asked Questions links at the left and
check out the contest.

When you return to the site to make the
transition, please ensure that you have your
temporary Rogers password and new @Rogers.com
E-mail address which was mailed to you via Canada
Post a few days ago.

By the way, I have not received the temp password yet. So how does one plan to retrieve one’s e-mail? Plan B of course, is that I only use Rogers’ outbound e-mail server, and continue to use my Netcom account as my e-mail address.

Marshall Postnikoff


Re: Laureate or leave it (Nov. 20)

I could not agree with you more. While I have been working in the Internet space for some time, most of my work is in developing the knowledge base about how to use The Tool. It is simply not enough to bring people to a computer and say Go! You can lead a mind to ideas, but you can’t make it think.

Martin Timusk


Re: Fuzzy borders and hurt feelings (Nov. 15)

I don’t think you have taken your analysis far enough. While it is true that freedom of speech is involved in this case, and while it’s also true that national jurisdiction is nearly impossible to enforce on the Internet, there are more issues than that. Example: if somebody stands 10 feet on the other side of the border of France, and shoots and kills someone in France, would he not still be guilty of murder? Or if a manufacturer of ladders sells some made of inferior and dangerous material and someone in his own country and someone somewhere else are severely injured as a result, is the manufacturer only responsible for the one in his own country?

The other side of the matter is that a country’s laws do apply in its own territory – remember the fuss about that U.S. kid that was caned in Singapore because he’d scratched some cars? It follows from that that a country can enforce its own laws. In this case, Yahoo had to make sure its actions no longer affected France in a way that France found unacceptable. The U.S. is really bad for this sort of thing; they know they can’t make companies operating in other countries conform to U.S. laws directly, so they fine or otherwise punish the domestic branch of the company to make them force their foreign subsidiaries to toe the line.

If Internet users want to have the Internet continue to be the free force that they want, they are going to have to get involved in the solution of these problems.

Peter Lacey


You’ve got the catchiest titles for your articles! I don’t know how many times I get intrigued and click on them. The articles are good too! Keep it up.

Patrick d’Entremont
DDA Computer Consultants Ltd.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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