Canada.com Email No More

As I was about to log on to my tertiary email account with canada.com, I recieved the following, rather disturbing message:

IMPORTANT NOTICE

canada.com’s new E-mail Service (the “Service”) is provided by Velocity Services, Inc. (“VSI”), a company located in and conducting its business from the United States. By registering for and/or logging on to the Service, you accept and acknowledge that the information processed or stored outside of Canada may be available to the foreign government of the country in which the information or the entity controlling it, is situated under a lawful order made in that jurisdiction and no longer falls under the jurisdiction of Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (“PIPEDA”) nor be subject to canada.com’s Privacy Statement. Please
read and accept VSI’s END USER TERMS prior to using the Service.

What does this mean? Well, essentially Canada.com, a subsidiary of CanWestGlobal, a Rupert Murdoch Enterprise, has sold its email to Velocity Services of the United States, a company that has no qualms violating people's privacy and turning over their personal information to the ever-growing gestapo that is the Bush Government in the United States.

As I value my privacy and believe that emails should be read by their intended recipients ONLY, and as this draconian measure is an overt violation of civil rights (regardless of whether they try to make it appear "voluntarily" or not, I advised them to delete my email account with Canada.com.

This probably means I'll have to update my MSN, which no longer operates with a valid email address.

I encourage any of you who use canada.com email or any other services provided by canada.com to boycott those services, as well as the newspapers and television stations owned by the Rupert Murdoch media empire.

ANTE ROCKSTAR: REVOLUTIONS

This is the story of my friends and family, Kevin, Tammie, Justin, Frances, Emma and Lucas.

WATCH.

EXPERIENCE.

LEARN.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

To those who have set themselves against this family, these heroes, some words of advice:

But regardless of what weapons they try to use to effect silence, words will always retain their power. Words are the means to meaning, and for some, the annunciation of truth.

- "V For Vendetta" , The Waichowski Brothers

The greatest weapon of the corrupt has always been ignorance. But Truth yearns to be free and it always finds a champion…

-"The Unearthing", Steve Karmazenuk

Welcome to prime time, bitch!

- Freddy Krueger

MUST SEE THIS MOVIE ON BIG SCREEN...

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

My New Toy...And a last F**K YOU! to Bell Canada.

Ahh...so I've been busy learning the ropes, features and abilities of my new phone, the Nokia 6265i:

'Tis a very cool, Matrix-y looking slider, and it has many distinct features...but if you must know, I'd rather have THIS one:

It is not, however, currently available in my neck of the woods.

But how, you ask, did I come by a new Nokia slider?

Well, the battery in my old phone was dying...so I went into the Bell World store on Ste Catherine's street downtown. I knew that I qualified for an upgrade, and there were a number of free phones I had my eye on...except that when I talked to the sales rep he told me that Bell no longer gave existing subscribers the free phones for free. The one I wanted I'd have had to pay a hundred bucks for.

I told them straight up to cancel my contract and I went across the street to Telus. For $29 and taxes I activated my new phone in store.

Of course, customer service and decent products have never been a hallmark of Bell Telephone. They fired their operators and replaced them with several miserable interactive menus...customer service was restructured to not focus on customer service...but on selling products.

Then the sales and service staff became call center drones, forced to sell on every call under pain of losing their jobs...and turnaround on new employees dropped from six months to three.

Then the layoffs began.

Bell's workforce continues to be culled, while their customer service is at all levels worsening. The products they provide, their rate plans, their product packages...all of it is sorely lacking. Speak to an actual live human being and most of the time they're surly, unhelpful or incapable of meeting your needs.

And now, more and more, they're not even Canadian.

Bell is outsourcing an ever-increasing number of customer service and call center jobs to slave-labour wage countries like India, putting hardworking Canadians out of a job, in order to save a few bucks. Are these savings ever passed on to consumers? No.

In fact, Bell continues to look for new and exciting ways to fleece its customers. Take for example the Network Service Fee, introduced in 2005: the cash-grab of $4.25 per month is a completely fictional and unjustified charge that was fraudulently put into being by Bell, with the other phone companies eagerly following suit. Shit, if you can bilk each and every one of your customers four and a quarter more every month, why the fuck not?

And in spite of all the profit-obsessed money grubbing going on at the expense of employee and customer alike, the elite douche bags who run Bell from their towers in Montreal and Toronto scratch their expensively coiffed heads and wonder how it's possible they keep losing customers.

Well, I've cut the cord, swine, from your company.

I'll pay what I owe...gradually and at my leisure.

But after that, you bastards will have seen the last of my money.