corporate nonsense in my intertubes

I've decided to join in on a long standing Canadian tradition and just flat out hate Rogers. The @home merger only annoyed me a bit when they thrashed my pop3 settings for a few days and I missed a few dozen emails. The Yahoo thing sucked a fair bit more when they nuked everyones 10MB free webspace and announced that customers were graciously being given free Yahoo space instead. I dropped their cable TV service when bittorrent took over the universe. I dropped my cable Internet when Rogers started throttling torrent traffic. Fine I get it, bandwidth ain't free. I may not have as many dollars to vote with as some but I'm happy to give mine to a worthy constituent. But having removed myself from all that I still have quite a few months (>20) remaining on my cell phone service contract.

Recently I got it in my head that I wanted to shoot videos on my cell and upload them to youtube. Its all automagic and such like now right? Except for some reason none of my videos are showing up when I spend my precious cents / kilobyte uploading them over GPRS. So I try sending a clip to my gmail account to make sure everything is working. What I receive looks like this ...
Crappy spam ridden notification message that doesn't even contain the video! You have to follow it TWO clickthroughs, hit a radio box and then a download button to be fed a zipped 3gp file! Thats not unacceptable, its downright offensive.

So then I get start thinking 'well screw these assholes, I'll host my own MMS gateway and relay the pics to youtube from home'. I try a few test configurations and what do you know ... Rogers blocks outgoing MMS traffic on their cellular network unless you send it through their pay to use server (better rates available if you upgrade your plan). Picture messages sent to email come with the same array of cruft. Would be mobloggers behind the Rogers curtain are of course encouraged to use Rogers own substandard "mypix" service complete with stock pictures of very hip looking young people having fun. Sorry governer, the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

On a related note if you dig MMS stuff you should check out the Peffisaur. Composite photographs assembled from random picture messages the world over, cool!