Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

Government Fights to Trap EFF’s NSA Spying Case in a Catch-22 The U.S. government admits—and, of course, it’s common knowledge—that the NSA conducts mass, dragnet surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans’ communications. It has done so via a series of different technical strategies and legal arguments for over 18 years. Yet the Justice Department insists that our legal fight against this spying is bound by a Catch-22 : no one can sue unless the court first determines that they were certainly touched by the vast surveillance mechanisms of the NSA, but the court cannot decide whether any particular person’s email, web searches, social media or phone calls were touched by the surveillance unless the government admits it. Which, of course, it will not do. At a federal court hearing last month in Oakland, California for our Jewel v. NSA case, we took on this circular argument. EFF Special Counsel Richard Wiebe reviewed the vast trove of direct and circumstantial evidence show...

California’s Attorney General Wants to Empower People to Protect Their Privacy. Sacramento Legislators Should Listen. California’s lawmakers took a much-needed step last year by passing the California Consumer Privacy Act as a foundation for consumer privacy rights. Now they need to step up to make sure it can work as intended. One of the major issues identified by the California Attorney General (AG) Xavier Becerra is that the limited resources the legislature has provided the AG to protect consumer privacy means the CCPA’s goals — and the privacy rights Californians want and deserve — will be undercut before the law goes into effect next year. In response, California’s Senate Judiciary Committee this week passed Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson’s bill, S.B. 516, which would give the AG’s office much-needed support to enforce the law, including by allowing every Californian to act as their own privacy enforcer with the right to challenge companies that violate their privacy in court. 94...

Original article promoted on  CNBC April 2019. Smart factories could add up to $1.5 trillion to the economy Whether you call it Industry 4.0, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), or  Smart Manufacturing , the power of technology is being felt throughout the industrial world and fundamentally changing value chains and production methods. Indeed, so great is the change that Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Institute predicts that smart factories could add as much as $1.5 trillion to the overall output of the industrial sector in the next five years. This is because of the turbo-charge effect of smart technology, which is enabling factories to produce more while lowering costs. According to Capgemini, some industries may almost double their operating profit and margin. What does smart mean? The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines this new landscape as “fully-integrated, collaborative manufacturing systems that respond in real time to meet cha...

EFF Statement on Assange Indictment and Arrest While the  indictment of Julian Assange centers on an alleged attempt to break a password—an attempt that was not apparently successful—it is still, at root, an attack on the publication of leaked material and the most recent act in an almost decade-long effort to punish a whistleblower and the publisher of her leaked material. Several parts of the indictment describe very common journalistic behavior, like using cloud storage or knowingly receiving classified information or redacting identifying information about a source. Other parts make normal communication tools like Linux and Jabber seem suspect. And while we are relieved that the government has not chosen to include publication-based charges today, if Assange is indeed extradited, the government can issue superseding indictments. It should not do so. Leaks are a vital part of the free flow of information that is essential to our democracy. Reporting on leaked materials, inc...

The U.S is 23rd in the world for last mile fiber . So how can we get ahead, be ready for 5G , and make cities smarter? A network infrastructure accessible to all must be deployed. If we build it, the innovators will come. Panelists Stefan Bewley from Altman Vilandrie & Co., Igor Skochilo from DH Capital, Keith Kaczmarek from Inphase Wireless, Jack Demers from Netly Fiber and Rich Lee from Pureport and I considered this future during a panel session I hosted at Metro Connect . A Shared Infrastructure for 5G is Necessary The current network is generally thought of as advanced. In reality, we don’t have a great deal of dense fiber deployment. Cost is seen as an obstacle, but that’s a bit of a misnomer. Fiber is not pricey, construction is. To overcome the expense and the usual political and regulatory issues, the panelists agreed, deployment should be done once, with enough foreseeable capacity for all providers over the next 30 years. This approach is the opposite of what we are...

In the world of electronics, there are multiple cases and situations where unforeseen mishaps can take place. These disasters can lead to drastic damage and destruction of physical structures such as offices, homes, schools, industries, etc. A prominent case of such an accident is during a short-circuit or any other type of electrical blunder (electric cable faults), when high-fault current flows through the equipment as well as the power network grid itself. This high current potentially damages the equipment connected in the system and the networks permanently. In order to safeguard these devices from damage, these fault currents must be removed from the grid as fast as possible. Even once it is removed, the system must be restored to its normal working conditions quickly in order to supply a reliable quality of power. In order to ensure timely disconnection and reconnection of various parts of a power system network for protection and control, there must be a unique type of device ...

Despite What Zuckerberg’s Testimony May Imply, AI Cannot Save Us Yesterday and today, Mark Zuckerberg  finally testified before the Senate and House, facing Congress for the first time to discuss data privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. As we predicted , Congress didn’t stick to Cambridge Analytica. Congress also grilled Zuckerberg on content moderation— i.e ., private censorship —and it’s clear from his answers that Facebook is putting all of its eggs in the “Artificial Intelligence” basket. But automated content filtering inevitably results in over-censorship. If we’re not careful, the recent outrage over Facebook could result in automated censors that make the Internet less free, not more. Facebook Has an “AI Tool” For Everything—But Says Nothing about Transparency or Accountability Zuckerberg’s most common response to any question about content moderation was an appeal to magical “AI tools” that his team would deploy to solve any and all problems f...

Facebook, This Is Not What “Complete User Control” Looks Like If you watched even a bit of Mark Zuckerberg’s ten hours of congressional testimony over the past two days, then you probably heard him proudly explain how users have “complete control” via “inline” privacy controls over everything they share on the platform. Zuckerberg’s language here misses the critical distinction between the information a person actively shares, and the information that Facebook takes from users without their knowledge or consent. Zuckerberg’s insistence that users have “complete control” neatly overlooks all the ways that users unwittingly “share” information with Facebook. Of course, there are the things you actively choose to share, like photos or status updates, and those indeed come with settings to limit their audience . That is the kind of sharing that Zuckerberg seemed to be addressing in many of his answers to Congressmembers’ questions. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Below the...

Solutions for a Stalled NAFTA: Stop Pushing So Hard on IP, and Release the Text The deadline for concluding a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), originally scheduled for last year, has continued to slip. An eighth and final formal round of negotiations was cancelled last week , and despite earlier optimistic plans  that the parties could announce an “agreement in principle” at the Summit of the Americas in Peru this Friday 13 April, these plans have since been abandoned . An over-optimistic negotiation schedule isn’t the only problem here. The other is that United States Trade Representative (USTR) is pushing a hard line on topics such as intellectual property that neither of the other negotiating parties find remotely palatable. As a result, although advances have been made in some other chapters, reports suggest that virtually the whole of the agreement’s IP chapter remains up in the air. In October 2016, as the Trans-Pacif...

Last month, we hosted our first Innovation Summit: Industry event in Chicago featuring expert speakers sharing insights on Industry 4.0 / IIoT, cyber security , and the value of connected products to the future of industrial automation. We welcomed in our OEM & end user customers, our distributor partners and even our friends from the media – more than 200 people in all – to discuss the on-going industry transition and how Schneider Electric is supporting customers as they take on the digital evolution. During the event, I was pleased by the dynamic among the audience. Many started the day unsure of how the Industrial Internet of Things , or IIoT, really can benefit them. However, they left the meeting with an understanding of both the IIoT concept and how they could easily apply digital, connected technologies to benefit their machines and their customers. In addition, we had the opportunity to share our EcoStruxure platform, explaining how its implementation is a direct compleme...

According to the research firm Markets and Markets , the Augmented Reality (AR) market will grow to nearly $61.4 billion USD by 2023.  Although this figure represents growth across all industries, manufacturing is one of the areas that will lead the charge into this new field of technology. We are seeing evidence of early adoption on the part of both machine builders and end users. Early pilots of new augmented reality tools are blurring the lines between the physical and digital worlds to enhance the user experience. Benefits like reductions in maintenance costs, increased production efficiency and uptime improvements are also beginning to accrue. The application of AR to machine maintenance is particularly compelling.  When employing traditional approaches, maintenance personnel spend 50% of their time during a maintenance call researching information required to fix the issue. Consequently, they devote only 50% of their time actually working on the equipment. An AR appro...

Today’s manufacturing environment is facing the challenge of rapid acceleration in both the speed-of-business and in the proliferation of new digitized technologies. These trends are impacting all of society and most workplaces. The amount of change taking place is breathtaking. Innovation is making its presence felt at all levels. Consider the fact that 48 percent of the organizations currently listed as Fortune 500 companies were not on the list in the year 2000. Innovators have displaced traditionalists and those that continue to succeed do so in large part thanks to their ability to reinvent themselves. Many of these technology innovations represent some clear manufacturing industry business growth opportunities. New digitalization tools support machine builders in particular by enhancing their visibility to installed base machine performance information. Cloud-based tools also make it easy to get started in the process of remote monitoring as machines can get linked to the cloud ...

Entries for the Catalog of Missing Devices, courtesy of EFF supporters like you The Catalog of Missing Devices is a tour through some of the legitimate, useful and missing gadgets, tools and services that don’t exist but should. They’re technologies whose chance to exist was snuffed out by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which makes tampering with “Digital Rights Management” into a legal no-go zone, scaring off toolsmiths, entrepreneurs, and tinkerers. We’re still adding our own designs to the Catalog, but we’ve also been honored by EFF supporters who’ve come up with their own additions. One such supporter is Dustin Rodriguez, who sends us these five great ideas for future entries. If you have great ideas for additions, send them to me and maybe you’ll see them here on Deeplinks! Software Scalpel – Load up the Software Scalpel and start slicing and dicing your favorite application that just has too many menus, too many options, and a cluttered i...