It’s all part of Canada’s health care system and, “will result in benefits to Canadians” through improvements in, “accessibility, quality and efficiency,” promises Health Canada.

But, Wrong! – say people in British Columbia.

There’s an excellent chance personal and private data may end up in the wrong hands, they state, launching BC Opt Out to make sure they’re made a part of the province’s version only if they want to be.

Organisations concerned about medical privacy, “are saying the public needs to educate and protect themselves,” says News 1130.

The story has Micheal Vonn with the BC Civil Liberties Association saying information which might be useless to an emergency room doctor, “could be of interest to employers, insurers, police or researchers if it gets in the wrong hands”.

$108,489 on travel

In Ontario, eHealth, “tallied up well over $200,000 in meal and travel expenses during a few months,” the London Free Press quotes Tory MPP Elizabeth Witmer as saying.

“Staff members and consultants with eHealth Ontario, which is developing the province’s electronic health records, spent $39,235 on meals, $108,489 on travel and $18,327 on accommodation between October 2008 and January 2009,” wioth a further $48,257 spent catering “off-site” meetings, says the story.

“These people are out of control and nobody is providing any oversight,” according to Witmer.

You know better

Back in BC, to Opt Out of eHealth, “and protect your right to privacy, follow these simple steps,” suggests BC Opt Out, going on »»»

1. Open the letter templates below and fill in the highlighted fields with your appropriate information.
2. Print the letters and complete them with your signature.
3. Deliver the completed letters to your applicable health care professionals and MLA (click here to find yours), keeping a copy of each letter for your personal files.

Letter to your doctor

Letter to your pharmacist

Letter to your Diagnostic Imaging Lab

Letter to your testing lab

Letter to your MLA

BE PREPARED: When you present these letters to your health care provider, you might discover that they know nothing about eHealth. Some might tell you “not to worry” because eHealth isn’t up-and-running yet. Some might even tell you that you have no choice, that you need eHealth to get proper care. This only goes to show how unprepared BC is for the eHealth system.

You know better.

“Included with each letter template is a backgrounder on eHealth, tailored for each of your health care providers,” says BC Opt Out, adding:

‘Be sure to attach this page to your letters so that your doctor/pharmacist/diagnostic imaging tech/testing lab tech can learn the reality of eHealth. ”

News 1130 – Organization promotes opting out of eHealth system, April 7, 2009
London Free Press – eHealth agency ‘out of control’, April 7, 2009

restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

According to The Scotsman, his plans for the ’solar web’ were revealed in a speech to the Edinburgh International Television Festival.

The project also involves NASA and America’s Jet Propulsion Lab, says the story.

But don’t worry. Cerf’s linkage doesn’t mean we’ll soon see Google advertisements emblazoned in glowing laser letters on the moon.

Not yet, anyhow, because Google has nothing to do with the scheme, the story assures us, going on to quote Google’s Main Man as saying:

“What my colleagues and I would like to do is built a more elaborate networking capability and then standardise the protocols for deep space communication in the same way we standardised protocols on the internet.”

Meanwhile, the Net remains earthbound and, says The Independent, Asia now has the most users – 398.7 million – followed by Europe with 314.8 million and North America with 233.3 million.

“While 1.1 billion people are online globally, 5.5 billion are still waiting to be linked up to the Net,” adds the story.

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Also See:
The Scotsman – Internet pioneer prepares for ’space web’ to take off, August 27, 2007
The Independent – Google evangelist unveils his Web vision, August 27, 2007

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That’s what Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) architects and engineers have designed for an international exhibition in Spain.

The interactive “digital water pavilion” is made of digitally controlled water curtains that’ll contain an exhibition area, a cafe and various public spaces.

It’ll be sited at the entrance to Expo Zaragoza 2008.

The “water walls” comprise a row of closely spaced solenoid valves along a pipe suspended in the air, explains Carlo Ratti, head of MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory.

The valves are openeded and closed via computer control to create a curtain of falling water with gaps at specified locations, “a pattern of pixels created from air and water instead of illuminated points on a screen,” says MIT going on:

The entire surface becomes a one-bit-deep digital display that continuously scrolls downward.

All of the walls of the pavilion will be made of digital water, as will vertical partitions, both on the edge of the roof and inside it. The pavilion roof, covered by a thin layer of water, will be supported by large pistons and can move up and down. When there is too much wind, the roof will lower. Similarly, when the pavilion is closed, the whole roof will collapse to the ground and the whole structure will disappear.

While there have been other attempts to digitally control water droplets, this is being reported as the first time the idea has been used to create an architectural space.

The digital water wall concept was initially developed in the Zaragoza Digital Mile class at MIT, led by William Mitchell and Dennis Frenchman, with Michael Joroff and Carlo Ratti, says MIT.

The actual design was the work of Walter Nicolino, Carlo Ratti, Claudio Bonicco and Matteo Lai at the architecture office carlorattiassociati (Turin, Italy); the engineering company Arup (London, UK and Madrid, Spain); and landscape architects Agence Ter (Paris, France).

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Also See:

MIT – MIT architects design building with ‘digital water’ walls, July 10, 2007

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But it had a slight problem …

… it didn’t work with Apple systems.

However, that’s been fixed, Guillaume Champeau, one of the guys behind it, tells p2pnet.

And, “We’ll be releasing an update shortly that implements improvements required by the EFF,” he says, adding:

“The Mac version already comes with improved processing by replacing 0×20 ASCII spaces by 0×00 caracters.
This upgrade wil be the last one before the source code for is released, probably under the GPL license, says Champeau.

Good one.

Click here for Windows downloads, or here for Mac.

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Also See:
scrub them – Free iTunes ID eraser, June 28, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

WiTricity, wireless power transfer over two meters (about 6.5 feet), has been achieved from the coil on the left to the coil on the right, where it’s powering a 60W light bulb.

The team which made it happen are: front row, Peter Fisher (left) and Robert Moffatt; second row: Marin Soljacic; third row: Andre Kurs (left), John Joannopoulos and Aristeidis Karalis.

And their experiment opens up a future in which cell phones, household robots, mp3 players, laptop computers and other portable electronic devices could charge themselves without ever being plugged in.

Even better, some of them might not even need batteries at all.

WiTricity is based on using coupled resonant objects, says MIT, going on >>>>>

Two resonant objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects. A child on a swing is a good example of this. A swing is a type of mechanical resonance, so only when the child pumps her legs at the natural frequency of the swing is she able to impart substantial energy.

Another example involves acoustic resonances: Imagine a room with 100 identical wine glasses, each filled with wine up to a different level, so they all have different resonant frequencies. If an opera singer sings a sufficiently loud single note inside the room, a glass of the corresponding frequency might accumulate sufficient energy to even explode, while not influencing the other glasses. In any system of coupled resonators there often exists a so-called “strongly coupled” regime of operation. If one ensures to operate in that regime in a given system, the energy transfer can be very efficient.

While these considerations are universal, applying to all kinds of resonances (e.g., acoustic, mechanical, electromagnetic, etc.), the MIT team focused on one particular type: magnetically coupled resonators. The team explored a system of two electromagnetic resonators coupled mostly through their magnetic fields; they were able to identify the strongly coupled regime in this system, even when the distance between them was several times larger than the sizes of the resonant objects. This way, efficient power transfer was enabled.

Magnetic coupling is particularly suitable for everyday applications because most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so interactions with extraneous environmental objects are suppressed even further. “The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations,” Kurs, a graduate student in physics, points out.

The investigated design consists of two copper coils, each a self-resonant system. One of the coils, attached to the power source, is the sending unit. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, it fills the space around it with a non-radiative magnetic field oscillating at MHz frequencies. The non-radiative field mediates the power exchange with the other coil (the receiving unit), which is specially designed to resonate with the field. The resonant nature of the process ensures the strong interaction between the sending unit and the receiving unit, while the interaction with the rest of the environment is weak.

Moffatt, an MIT undergraduate in physics, explains: “The crucial advantage of using the non-radiative field lies in the fact that most of the power not picked up by the receiving coil remains bound to the vicinity of the sending unit, instead of being radiated into the environment and lost.” With such a design, power transfer has a limited range, and the range would be shorter for smaller-size receivers.

Still, for laptop-sized coils, power levels more than sufficient to run a laptop can be transferred over room-sized distances nearly omni-directionally and efficiently, irrespective of the geometry of the surrounding space, even when environmental objects completely obstruct the line-of-sight between the two coils. Fisher points out: “As long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of such wireless power, it would charge automatically, without having to be plugged in. In fact, it would not even need a battery to operate inside of such a room.” In the long run, this could reduce our society’s dependence on batteries, which are currently heavy and expensive.

At first glance, such a power transfer is reminiscent of relatively commonplace magnetic induction, such as is used in power transformers, which contain coils that transmit power to each other over very short distances. An electric current running in a sending coil induces another current in a receiving coil. The two coils are very close, but they do not touch. However, this behavior changes dramatically when the distance between the coils is increased. As Karalis, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, points out, “Here is where the magic of the resonant coupling comes about. The usual non-resonant magnetic induction would be almost 1 million times less efficient in this particular system.”

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Also See:
MIT – Goodbye wires…, June 7, 2007

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

I’ve been using previous versions for quite a while, now, and I spent time with Trib Four Zero this weekend.

What’s it like? To use that awesomely over-used word, it’s awesome : )

For now, here’s all you need to know

• Adds more than simple keyword search, youtube grid
• See what other people like, related files, find person with the same taste
• When the download is on its way, you can use the integrated video player to start watching ASAP
• Search Bittorrent, Youtube, and Liveleak for content.
• No need to hunt down .torrent files, upgrade to the latest Divx codecs, install the Flash plugin. Tribler IS one-stop shopping

Click here for a download. And when you’ve installed Tribler, check out the boost feature – helping at its best : )

Cheers!

JN

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f your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

Holland’s Tribler 4 is slated for release in the very near future, p2pnet understands, and now comes news of a video streaming app being developed by The Pirate Bay.

Tribler is a research project of the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science faculty of Delft University of Technology’s computer science department.

An independent ad-free way to distribute live and recorded video content, it’s been online for some time. “Just sit back and relax while Tribler scans The Internet and automatically finds .torrent files,” Delft professor Johan Pouwelse said when Tribler 3.6.0 was released. “No need to visit the various .torrent websites.”

The application is now at beta 3.7.1 (Windows, MAC). The current version works with Windows, MAC OS and Linux. And V4 could be out literally any day now. Key features include: better recommendation, integrated video player, and a completely redesigned user interface, screenshot from a working version below.

And now The Pirate Bay has entered the arena, says Torrentfreak.

“Some believed the video site might evolve from the idea that is Playble.com – a free music site started by Brokep of The Pirate Bay and the Swedish rock band Lamont – that aims at compensating artists directly and cutting out record companies,” says a post, going on:

But Pirate Bay admin Brokep has put that rumour to rest.

Up until now, we weren’t completely sure if this was going to be the YouTube killer that TPB fans everywhere have been talking about. But a statement published today on The Pirate Bay Blog outright confirms it:

“YES – we’re going to do a video streaming site. It’s true. It’s in the works being done right now and as usual we put a bit of Pirate Bay mentality behind every project we do.”

And it’s exactly that ‘Pirate Bay mentality’ that, in our opinion, is going to make this site a winner. Think YouTube without Google constantly pulling down copyrighted videos.

Some clever TorrentFreak readers and TPB fans managed to locate the URL of the upcoming YouTube competitor. It is: thevideobay.org.

Correct. But for the moment, all you can see is:

only open for beta- and dev-testers.
some is live, most is not. we will open for public when done.

Stay tuned.

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Also See:
sit back and relax – Tribler or Joost?, May 2, 2007
Torrentfreak – The Pirate Bay to Launch YouTube Competitor, May 18, 2007

f your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

Created by Pablo Soto (below) of Blubster fame, it’s mp3 only – no movies, no videos, only music. And that’s why it’s so popular with people who want to keep their searches for sounds simple and uncluttered.

Then comes Soto’s Piolet. It’s based on the MP2P protocol with nods to both Gnutella v0.4 and the UDP protocol.

Both applications are now firmly in place and if you’re wondering why you haven’t heard anything from Soto lately, here’s why: he’s been working on Omemo, “the natural next step in P2P evolution,” as he described it to p2pnet, adding:

“Resource sharing is in the heart of the internet, it was the foundation of content sharing. And Omemo creates this new wave of P2P 2.0.”

From the site, “Conceptually, Omemo is a virtual storage device. The Omemo software creates a P2P network that brings together the available free space on the hard drive donated by each user, to create a unique and immense virtually limitless drive.

“The resulting storage unit will appear accessible in each user´s system as if it were a the local hard drive, a CD or a pen drive, with access speeds higher than those of an FTP server.

“Working anonymously, the drive enables users to add and organize their own content, which will form part of a live multimedia library managed by the users themselves.”

Omemo is almost ready to roll and if you’re interested in becoming a beta tester, head over to the sign-up area.

Stay tuned.

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If your Net access is blocked by goverment restrictions, try psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.