Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

Patent Progress and Its Discontents: 2018 in Review In 2018, technologists and users continued to be plagued by abstract, ridiculous software patents. The good news is there are more ways than ever before to fight back against those patents—some of them pretty effective. Unfortunately, patent trolls and abusive patent owners are working overtime to knock down those recent improvements, and bring the patent system back to the proverbial “bad old days.” Before the Alice v. CLS Bank decision— four years old as of last June —it could cost millions of dollars just to convince a court to invalidate a single abstract patent. That was true even when those patents clearly described aspects of everyday life, like running a contest , displaying a menu with pictures , or teaching a foreign language . Lobbyists for patent trolls and patent lawyers keep seeking to roll back Alice , promoting terrible legislation like the STRONGER Patents Act. Such proposals weaken our systems to challenge bad...

The Year Without the Open Internet Order: 2018 Year in Review In the waning hours of 2017, the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal the 2015 Open Internet Order, ending net neutrality protections for the millions of Americans who support them. The fallout of that decision continued all throughout 2018, with attempts to reverse the FCC in Congress, new state laws and governor executive orders written to secure state-level protections, court cases, and ever-increasing evidence that a world without the Open Internet Order is simply a worse one. The story surrounding net neutrality has always been one of the greed of the largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) versus the desires of the majority of people, the actual way the Internet is structured, and the ideal of a free and open Internet. Every win this year represented a win by actual people speaking out over big ISP money.  In the States The so-called “Restoring Internet Freedom Order” didn’t go into effect unt...

2018 in Review Your rights go with you when you go online. That’s the simple premise that has guided EFF’s work for 28 years. To make this premise real in 2018, we worked to ensure that law, corporate policies, and software are all hard-coded with the principles of free speech, privacy, and the right to innovate. When we were discussing what events we’d cover in this series of blog posts, there were so many moments when someone shrieked, “That was this year ?” Too often, we’ve seen that bad law and policy arise from misunderstandings about how law will interact with technology. A well-intentioned law can silence innocent people if lawmakers don’t understand how online platforms actually work. If there’s no one explaining how cell phone location information works, a court can make a decision that undermines everyone’s privacy. And users can be subjected to increasingly invasive monitoring by advertising companies if there’s no one building tools to help them defend themselves, or ...

As we head into 2018, there’s no shortage of trends facing folks who work in the facilities and data center arenas in commercial and industrial buildings. It’s always interesting, then, to take a look and try to predict how they will pan out in the coming year, and which technologies will play a starring role. This year, I expect companies will continue to see trends including the convergence of IT and OT (operational technology), as the two groups seek to work more effectively together to decrease costs, increase efficiency and reliability. Likewise, there’s little doubt the trends toward digitization and automation will continue unabated, as both bring significant business benefits in terms of creating opportunities and lowering costs. The more we digitize, of course, the more important it is that all these digital systems remain up and running, so business continuity will continue to be at the forefront. With that in mind, following are three enabling technologies that I suspect...