by SHANE SINNOTT

Hot damn. That fucker, Honourable Minister Jim Prentice, just introduced the copyright bill I was talking about last week! If this thing passes, we could be looking at a $500 fine for downloading copyrighted songs and movies. Which is horseshit, because c’mon, everyone downloads copyrighted songs and movies. Why else are we all paying $40 a month for an Internet connection? Sigh. I’d so rather pay $10 a month for my Internet (which is what it should cost) and the other $20–$30 to various subscription services that let me download stuff, but until the music industry realizes that they’re sitting on an untapped pipeline of cash drawing directly from the Internet providers, it isn’t going to happen. And so here we are—I suppose we should get while the getting’s good.

So there’s a lot of hoopla over the new Coldplay album (released June 17, and on which EMI has bet the farm). Everyone is saying it’s really good, especially when you consider that Coldplay is crap. I used the link tinyurl.com/68a89b to download “Vida la Vida” off the new record, and was like, “Yeah, okay, it isn’t that bad.” And then I got “Violet Hill” (tinyurl.com/6qe5q7) and was like, “No, it’s bad.” But I offer it to you in any case, friends, to be the judges—and remember, EMI is counting on you.

Finally, there’s been a lot of traffic “shaping” going on by Internet providers lately, which is a sneaky way of saying they’re deliberately slowing down bit-torrent connections, making your downloads take ages and rendering it almost useless. This throttling used to be done only at schools and other places where Internet access is free, but recently Bell has admitted to throttling all its bit-torrent traffic, and it’s likely Videotron and the rest will start doing so soon. If you go to tinyurl.com/2yywxd, there’s a pretty straightforward step-by-step guide to setting up your bit torrent to work over what’s called an SSH connection, which usually gets around any throttling and firewalls. After all, you’re paying for an Internet connection that you should be able to do whatever you want with, and this little trick will let you do that.