From http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/implementation/archives/bell-canada-suffers-major-hosting-outage-10432 :

On Sunday evening (July 9th) it would appear that one of Canada’s largest shared hosting operators – Bell Canada – had a major outage to their shared web hosting infrastructure.  Their shared web hosting environment consists of 4 very large servers.  Two of those servers are known as bellhosting and the other two are known as bellwebhosting.  It would appear that somehow a routing block was created in the core router resolution of the bellhosting pair which caused 100s of websites to disappear including any associated e-mail and ftp services.

The duration of the outage was close to 24 hours before all sites were returned to service.

Today, I’ve got my new free testing modem from Bell. I still don’t get the catch for this business: they shipped me a new modem to use their service for free for 2 months. At least, this is what they say.

There was a sale agent in my building trying to sell or offer (??) Bell Internet connections. I told him I already have an ISP and I won’t change it. Not that is the best possible, but I have other reasons. I don’t need other net connection, I won’t keep it, I won’t be their customer. And still he insisted to get this free modem and try it for 2 months. It was easier just to accept this free gift than to argue.

My question regards this business model. What can it bring to the company, in this case Bell? Really don’t know, because as I said, I won’t keept this modem, even if works fine. They spent money with the modem and cables, money for shipping it and surely other costs, including free net connection, which is not quite free for them. What they get? Nothing. For sure.

Maybe there is somebody to explain to me this business model and what’s the catch.

Interesting article in The Globe And Mail: Phony jobs websites closed:

“Toronto — Canada’s Competition Bureau says it has shut down two Edmonton-based websites that duped job seekers around the world with promises of lucrative salaries, but oilcareer.com is already back online and open for business.

[…] 

It took five years of complaints from Internet users and persistent work by anti-scam websites to convince the agency to act.”

Five years to act? That’s canadian.