Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

TSA’s Roadmap for Airport Surveillance Moves in a Dangerous Direction The Transportation Security Administration has set out an alarming vision of pervasive biometric surveillance at airports, which cuts against the right to privacy, the “right to travel,” and the right to anonymous association with others. The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 , which included language that we warned would provide implied Congressional endorsement to biometric screening of domestic travelers and U.S. citizens, became law in early October. The ink wasn’t even dry on that bill when the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published their Biometrics Roadmap for Aviation Security and the Passenger Experience , detailing TSA’s plans to work with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to roll out increased biometric collection and screening for all passengers, including Americans traveling domestically. This roadmap appears to latch on to a perceived acceptance of biometrics as security keys wh...

Facebook’s Sexual Solicitation Policy is a Honeypot for Trolls Facebook just quietly adopted a policy that could push thousands of innocent people off of the platform. The new “ sexual solicitation ” rules forbid pornography and other explicit sexual content (which was already functionally banned under a different statute ), but they don’t stop there: they also ban “implicit sexual solicitation” , including the use of sexual slang, the solicitation of nude images, discussion of “sexual partner preference,” and even expressing interest in sex . That’s not an exaggeration: the new policy bars “vague suggestive statements, such as ‘looking for a good time tonight.’” It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that asking “ Netflix and chill? ” could run afoul of this policy. The new rules come with a baffling justification, seemingly blurring the line between sexual exploitation and plain old doing it: [P]eople use Facebook to discuss and draw attention to sexual violence and exploitation. ...

Guest Blog By Peter Hogg, Talent Acquisition & Mobility Manager, Schneider Electric UK&I This blog originally appeared on HR News UK Based on analyst predictions, today’s workplace is on the brink of disruption. New connected technologies, such as AI, machine learning and cognitive collaboration practices, promise to change the nature of the workplace as we know it. Yet, stories of burnout, stress, inflexible policies and hiring practises still make the headlines. As new technologies become more commonplace, can they help overcome workplace bias and facilitate a more flexible workplace with greater work-life integration? From my experience, it can, and it will. Nobody ever questions where an AI assistant or a machine learning algorithm is located, so why are we still so fixated on tying human work to a specific location? Especially in non-routine cognitive jobs where a candidate’s intellect, ideas and ways of thinking are all important? Are we not crippling the new...

  A typical residential location, whether a single-family home, apartment or condominium, relies on electrical power for an increasing number of devices, appliances and systems that are crucial to homeowners – making them prime prospects for uninterruptible power supply (UPS) or  backup power protection. As the  smart home market continues to expand, it is driving a growing need to be “always on” so residents can manage a multitude of functions from thermostats to lighting control while at home or even away via a smart phone. Modern homes also rely on power for everything from opening and closing blinds and garage doors as well as security systems. Of course, there are plenty of potential backup power applications even in older homes, whether it’s the entertainment system, major appliances, pumps or network equipment such as an Internet router. Regardless of the home environment, electricians can provide peace of mind and comfort to any home owner with power pro...

With over 25 years servicing the IT industry, Edmonton’s F12.net has witnessed a sea of evolving technology and constantly changing trends. But one thing has remained constant for the solutions provider: ensuring customers excel at their business by entrusting their IT needs to experts. F12 offers comprehensive managed IT programs include IT strategy, cloud services , disaster recovery planning, simplified employee onboarding, and next-gen cybersecurity . Launching a geo-redundant data center F12 decided that the ability to host client data and applications within data centers in Canada was not enough as more and more clients seek hybrid cloud options, with the ability to selectively host services. In early 2017, F12 decided to complement its existing Alberta based data center with a new, fully-hosted facility across the country in the Greater Toronto Area. To avoid disruptive outages for Canadian businesses F12 set out to launch a geo-redundant data center facility with reliable, c...

First, the bad news: In October, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the latest version of its Special Report on Global Warning , which describes a dire future without immediate and far-reaching action to reduce greenhouse gases — difficult when global emissions continue to rise . The report advises that the severity of climate-related risks climbs dramatically when planetary temperature rises beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius. Previous guidance, including the Paris Agreement and the thresholds set by the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), was based on a 2-degree Celsius rise. While a further reduction of .5 degrees doesn’t seem dramatic, it’s a change that will have considerable impact on the depth of and timeline for climate action. Companies and carbon emissions The economic and environmental implications of the IPCC report are ominous but mobilizing. So, now, the good news: the strategies and technologies needed to curb emissions already exist. Businesses ...

Adult Content Policies: A Textbook Case of Private Censorship Of the many reasons why social media platforms should resist pressure to “voluntarily” censor their users, one stands out: history shows that they will do it badly, taking down valuable and lawful content in the name of enforcing community standards. The result: practical speech discrimination.  Facebook’s adult content policy is a textbook example. Since its early days, the platform has banned nearly all forms of nudity. But from day one, it has created reporting processes that conflate mere nudity with sexuality, and sexuality with pornography , and has  applied different standards to feminine bodies than to masculine ones. And the same double standards seem to apply to advertisements. First, the conflation: Facebook’s advertising policy explicitly bans “nudity, depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative.” Thanks to this policy...

Part 1 of this 4-part series introduced ways in which increasing digitization might improve plant operations. Here we examine how IIoT can improve the productivity of reactive, preventive, predictive and proactive maintenance.  Reactive maintenance, in which things aren’t fixed until they break, is probably the most widely applied maintenance strategy. According to ARC, this is especially true for non-critical assets in which the overall impact of failure is minimal. While reactive maintenance does not add costs in the short term, it can potentially contribute to higher lifetime costs, including the cost of diagnosing, fixing, testing, etc., as well as the cost of downtime during the operation. IIoT, however, can improve reactive maintenance by enabling a more efficient, more informed response. Some estimates show that field operators spend only 2.5 hours of a 10-hour shift on work that adds value to the business, while the rest is taken by looking for information — probably tra...

In an ideal world, a machine such as a coffee maker would typically only need to be programmed to manage the main functions of start, stop and make the coffee.  However, in reality a lot more can happen with this coffee maker during operation, for instance the water or coffee tank can often be empty or a cup can become jammed into the machine.  As with this everyday life example, unexpected event management is key for industrial machines, especially alarm management . And thus, it would not come as a surprise that there are several alternatives that can be adapted for use cases in industrial environments. Have a look at the different solutions presented below along with the pros and cons of each option and then determine which one you feel would work the best… Solution 1: Alarm Management through HMI Pro: Full list of alarms, details on the alarm content Con: Long programming, cost and sizes of the screen not compatible with the most compact machines, visibility near th...

For over a decade, city leaders around the globe have been seeking technology-enabled smart city solutions.  Despite the focus of conferences and the uber-solutions of many IT players, few cities are going ‘smart’ from the ground up, and those that do usually start with district or pilot programs. For existing cities, going ‘smart’ can be difficult.   Aging city infrastructure continues to be a challenge to reliability and connectivity of citizens, and cities are tasked with improving operational efficiencies of city systems with limited new budget.  Meanwhile the demand for reliable energy is growing due to the demands of a 24X7 society with a wide array of IoT-enabled devices connected to the grid.  The built environment, like hospitals, airports schools, office buildings, and more need to be sustainable and efficient and easily integrate with city systems as well. So how do cities challenged with the daunting task of implementing smart city technology reall...

The pace of change in the colocation market continues to accelerate, and it is absolutely critical that we all adopt new technologies to help us keep pace with this change. Software is the only choice to provide the transparency required to optimize data center operations throughout the lifecycle of these assets. That was one of the key takeaways from the recent Innovation Summit that Schneider Electric hosted in Hong Kong for some 1,000 customers. Front and center at the Summit was EcoStruxure , the Schneider Electric architecture for enabling the intelligent operation of buildings, power systems and data centers. For this audience, we focused on EcoStruxure’s data center capabilities. Attendees were able to kick the tires of EcoStruxure in the Innovation Hub area, and they appeared to immediately grasp that the technology is real, able to help optimize data center operations today. EcoStruxure leverages advancements in Internet of Things (IoT) technology to deliver innovations at...

“Selling” Patents to Sovereign Nations Shouldn’t Mean Bad Patents Can’t Be Challenged On September 8, 2017, the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company  Allergan   announced that it “sold” its patents relating to its eye drops drug “Restasis” to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. But this was not a usual “sale.” The Tribe doesn’t appear to have paid anything in exchange for becoming the legal owner of Allergan’s patents. Instead, Allergan paid the Tribe $13.75 million, and also agreed to pay the Tribe up to $15 million more each year in exclusive licensing fees. Last week, EFF and Public Knowledge explained to the Patent Office how Allergan and the Tribe’s deal doesn’t mean Allergan’s bad patents can’t be challenged. The reason that Allergan and the Tribe engaged in this deal is not a secret. Both Allergan and the Tribe [PDF] readily admit the deal was done to try to prevent Allergan’s patents from being revoked through a Patent Office procedure known as “inter partes ...

The FCC Still Doesn’t Know How the Internet Works Earlier this year nearly 200 Internet engineers and computer scientists sent a letter to the FCC that explained facts about the structure, history, and evolving nature of the Internet . The reasons we laid out in that letter for writing it then still apply to the draft now: Based on certain questions the FCC asks in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), we are concerned that the FCC (or at least Chairman Pai and the authors of the NPRM) appears to lack a fundamental understanding of what the Internet’s technology promises to provide, how the Internet actually works, which entities in the Internet ecosystem provide which services, and what the similarities and differences are between the Internet and other telecommunications systems the FCC regulates as telecommunications services. Unfortunately it looks like the FCC ignored the technical parts of that letter, because the FCC’s latest plan to kill net neutrality is still rid...

Schneider Electric’s recent Innovation Summit, held in Hong Kong, provided an ideal stage to talk about the company’s direction and solutions with customers and market influencers including journalists and analysts. The big news was the announcement of EcoStruxure IT , a cloud-based data center management solution which aligns with the company’s broader IoT enablement initiatives. One of the first reviewers to report on the new development was the analyst IDC, which published a 3-page opinion on September 29 th in an IDC Link entitled “Transforming Datacenter Management and Creating Smarter Datacenters: Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT.” Authors, Jennifer Cooke, Vernon Turner, Rob Brothers see the game-changing ability of EcoStruxure IT to shift data center management to proactive mode. EcoStruxure IT, a component of Schneider Electric’s broader EcoStruxure IoT-enabled architecture and platform, is a data center management-as-a-service ( DMaaS ) solution that enables monitorin...

By Rachel K. Carson (MarCom Intern for Process Industries) Adapted from IDC Perspective: Mining Industry Transformation written by Emilie Ditton. Change is hard. The truth is that many mining companies are still very hesitant about furthering their digital mining transformations in fear of cost, uncertainty, and mostly, fear of the unknown. However what mining companies need to know is that technology across the 3 rd platform – cloud, Big Data and analytics, mobility, and social as well as innovation collaboraters (ex: IIoT, next-gen security, cognitive processing, and AR/VR) are critical to reshaping operations. These technologies will reengineer processes and activities within the mining industry. Maturity through the transformation does not have to be all immediate. Many companies are slowly integrating the digitization transformation in hierarchy processes. Where are the majority of mining industry transformation investments made thus far? To get a more realistic and clearer...