Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

Massachusetts Court Blocks Warrantless Access to Real-Time Cell Phone Location Data There’s heartening news for our location privacy out of Massachusetts this week. The Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest court, ruled that police access to real-time cell phone location data—whether it comes from a phone company or from technology like a cell site simulator—intrudes on a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Absent exigent circumstances, the court held, the police must get a warrant. In Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Almonor , police had a phone carrier “ping” the cell phone of a suspect in a murder case—surreptitiously accessing GPS functions and causing the phone to send its coordinates back to the phone carrier and the police. This real-time location data pinpointed Mr. Almonor’s phone to a location inside a private home. The state argued it could warrantlessly get cell phone location data to find anyone, anytime, at any place as long as it was less than six hou...

End the NSA’s Invasive Call Detail Records Program Once and for All Over nearly two decades, the NSA has searched millions of Americans’ telephone call records—all without a warrant or, for the vast majority of these calls, any suspicion of wrongdoing. It’s time to end the mass telephone Call Detail Records (CDR) program once and for all. Please join us in urging Congress to support the Ending Mass Collection of Americans ’ Phone Records Act ( S. 936 , H.R. 1942 ). Take Action Tell Congress to End the CDR Program Under the CDR program, the NSA has collected information about millions of Americans’ phone calls. While these records don’t contain the actual contents of telephone calls, they do include phone numbers and call times and length—more than enough information to provide the NSA a clear picture of our social relationships, interests, and affiliations. If the NSA knows that you called a suicide hotline at 1:00 in the morning , does it matter that the agency doesn’t have t...

The Tillis-Coons patent bill will be a disaster for innovation In recent years, we’ve made major progress getting courts to give full effect to Section 101 of the U.S. Patent Act. That’s the section that defines, and limits, what can get a patent. Section 101 is critical in making sure that only inventions —technological advances attributable to human efforts—can be patented. Now, key Senators are looking to undo all of that progress and drive the patent system into uncharted territory. Senators Tillis (R-NC) and Coons (D-DE) are pushing ahead with a proposal that will upend more than a century of case law and make the patent system far worse for small innovators and ordinary consumers in the software and health care industries.  Who will benefit most from the proposal? Companies that make money from aggressively licensing and litigating patents, especially in the fast-growing fields of artificial intelligence and medical diagnostics. And, of course, the patent lawyers and l...

Asset Reliability is my number 1 tip for getting started with Asset Performance Management. Asset Performance is a hot topic in industrial automation right now. With so much capital invested in plant assets it’s understandable you want to maximize return. And thanks to the IIoT solutions now available there is so much more you can do to manage this. For example, a fully integrated and comprehensive Enterprise Asset Performance Management solution can boost return on your capital, improving OpEx management and profitability. If you do invest in this type of technology, my top tip is to make Asset Reliability your first priority . Let me illustrate what I mean by this with some scenarios from everyday life: Your home entertainment system is set up with everything you could ever want – surround sound, a big screen smart TV, and premium streaming service, all connected and synced. But on movie night it always takes half an hour to get it to play. It’s early morning. You rush out ...

With a global population trajectory of 10 billion by 2050 , and the majority concentrated in urban areas, studies are estimating that $3.3 trillion of investment will be needed in infrastructure annually through 2030. Given that buildings currently account for 40 percent of global energy consumption , a massive number of new buildings will have an equally massive impact on the environment. In light of these predictions, it’s critical that we find ways to make buildings even more energy efficient than the greenest structures are today. In my last post , we looked at how Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology is greatly contributing to this effort by helping designers include energy modeling as part of the design workflow, as well as helping improve efficiency and reduce waste in all steps of construction. In this post, we’ll have a closer look at what is still needed from all stakeholders – from equipment manufacturers to designers to owners – to make energy modeling even more...

The 4 th Industrial revolution is taking hold. Technology start-ups are disrupting traditional business models. We are living in a VUCA world where technology is evolving by the second, smartphones are making information available anytime, anyplace; social media is impacting and changing consumer behaviors by the second. And being digital today no longer means digitizing processes; it is now a measure of how well an organization is adapting to the disruptive and rapidly changing digital landscape. Supply chains are one of the most impacted by this rapidly changing scenario. The VUCA world is amplifying the volatility and is pushing companies to be agile. The higher the volatility, the higher the risk. This poses a unique opportunity for organizations to restructure their supply chains to be a differentiator, and be enabler for the business. Companies which have been able to adapt their supply chain to this scenario are the ones who are creating unique value propositions. An inte...

The digital world is about to get faster and more populated. All the major carriers have announced 5G rollouts, public road testing of autonomous cars has been approved in some areas, drone deliveries are happening; augmented and virtual reality is changing the interactive experience; cities, homes, and industry are getting smarter. As many more millions of connected things hit the market, the  cell tower edge  will be a huge enabler; and we’re equipping it. https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/64rmiygs4x?dnt=1#?secret=SgNcjuNGv2 The perfect definition of edge computing is constantly debated, but its function and importance are abundantly clear. The IoT effect has created the need for more compute, network and storage closer to the end user, to meet the demand for staggering bandwidth and allow critical decisions to be made at the source, while at the same time ensuring low latency. That criticality can only be served through edge computing. If we think of edge computing as...

Improved fracking technology in oil and gas fields is creating an unprecedented boom in natural gas production, exerting tremendous pressure on natural gas prices globally. As recovery of Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) from the gas streams drives revenues for natural gas processing plants, any favourable market climate for encouraging production may adversely affect supply-demand equilibrium.  Excess NGL may drive prices down in the short term. Any shifts in market values of NGL and natural gas may impact the fractionation spread, affecting the profitability of the gas processors. To stay ahead of the game, optimizing recovery of Natural Gas Liquids is imperative for gas processors to sustain and profit in this competitive market. As the optimal processing conditions of NGL extraction –either ethane recovery or rejection mode- is highly dependent on the current pricings of Natural Gas and NGL components, incorporating economic data into process models and optimization objective functio...