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True,
dat.
Most
of the high-tech business is in Vancouver and Victoria, which are the biggest
cities in BC.
The
Vancouver Stock Exchange was scrapped after a decade of scams perpetrated on it;
in a nutshell, investors were not protected and disclosure rules were far more
lax than they are now. Most stocks that were listed were venture and
speculative, so folks should have known better. The VSE was succeeded by
the Canadian Venture Exchange, which hasn't had any scandals in, oh, the 5 years
or so that's it's been around.
Bandwidth is relatively cheap in Vancouver, and there was an explosion of
dot-com activity in the boom years, particular with colo-hosting. It was a
very attractive market and competition was fierce, but the margins were too thin
for many companies.
I'm
disappointed when I find that spammers are so easily hosted at some of these
"desperate" colo firms in my own backyard, but it's the market conditions.
They value the spammers' dollars more than the dollars of their more traditional
clients. At least one in Kelowna (about a 2 hour drive from
Vancouver).
Telus
and Shaw are the big DSL and Cable providers, respectively, and both do a lame
job of preventing security issues on those networks and their own email
servers. Sympatico is Telus in the west, and Bell in Eastern Canada.
Rogers was consumed by Shaw, but you still find Rogers Cable subscribers, which
are mostly business customers.
When I
started to get spam that was from overseas but spamvertised porn at my own
corporate provider, I complained to my sales guy and went up the chain.
They rapped the other customer on the knuckles, he changed his IP addresses and
the text of his message but not his modus operandi; in less than a a week or ten
days, they "fired that customer". SpamHaus and others had briefly
blacklisted large chunks of that provider (was Group Telecom (and 360 Networks
before that) which is now owned by Bell).
As far
as strip clubs and triple X webhosting goes, we're pretty liberal. Not as
liberal as Nevada mind you, but the government would rather make tax dollars
from those businesses than make them illegal. And folks from Amsterdam
would laugh themselves silly at the three or four blocks of downtown that
constitute our "naughty district".
Andrew
8)
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Title: Message
