Month: February 2004

Moneris goes MPLS

Moneris (the guys in Canada that provides the services to your favourite retailer so you can pay with your credit and debit cards) are migrating their x.25 IP network to Bell Enterprise Group’s IP VPNe network, which uses Cisco MPLS technology. VPNe is a good thing because it will let Moneris to finely tune their bandwidth, set classes of service for different kinds of traffic, and basically get a more consistent, secure and reliable connection.

Moneris is used by a lot of big name retailers; everytime you swipe your card at places such as Shoppers Drug Mart, Staples, or Future Shop, you’re using Moneris. These clients can also migrate to VPNe, and seamlessly link up to Moneris’s private VPNe network through an Extranet VPN connection to exchange – and control the flow of – data easier. They will also still support their cheaper, dialup network for smaller shops.

How not to handle a cellphone

So Juice picked up a Nokia 6100 in Asia, unlocked it, and ported it to Rogers AT&T’s GSM network.

Samsung A500First problem: he paid $300 US for this phone. Certainly it’s a small colour phone, but Canada has many very fine phones of that calibre available (such as my new Samsung A500 from Bell Mobility), and at much lower prices to boot.

Second problem: He sat on it. Broke the LCD screen.

The warranty is probably only good in Asia, and even if it wasn’t, it is probably void because it is unlocked. Rogers won’t accept it since it is not a Rogers supported phone. And LCD screens, being the unavoidably fragile things they are, are usually not covered by warranties anyway.

Juice says only the screen doesn’t work, so he’ll keep using the phone. I imagine he will cancel the Call Display feature.

The other IP

The first stage of developing IP (intellectual property, not to be confused with that other IP thingy) consists of various “defensive” tactics, notable the tedious and confusing act of tracking existing patents. Obviously, if someone else has already patented something very similar to your invention, there is no point to continue on working on it. Not only that, but patent lawsuits are lengthy, expensive affairs. Ignorance isn’t an excuse that holds up well in court, either.

This means inventors have to sift through the records of the patent office. You can do it at, say, the US Patent Office for free, but it’s a pain. Most major corporations use a company called Delphion to handle all “prior art” searches. Two online IP databases have also appeared.

On a semi-related note, let’s consider the infamous SCO infringement lawsuit against the Linux community – and by extension, Linux’s corporate backers, such as the very large IBM, who, having more patents than most countries, is no stranger to intellectual capital management. At the moment, SCO has not produced any compelling evidence to back their claims that Linux contains proprietary code from SCO Unix. They have as much credibility as those guys from Yemen who claim they own Mars. So they are either very sure of themselves, or very dumb.

“At one point, McBride, explaining what he thinks is the Linux community’s efforts to damage SCO through Web site attacks, asked a student whether he was affected by the MyDoom.A e-mail virus, which targeted Outlook and Outlook Express users and installed malicious code used to launch a massive distributed denial of service attack [on SCO’s website].

“The student replied with a hint of humor in his tone: ‘No, I have Linux.'”

– from SCO Receives Poisonous Reception at Ivy