Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

Ring Throws Customers Under the Bus After Data Breach Just a week after hackers broke into a Ring camera in a child ’ s bedroom , taunting the child and sparking serious concerns about the company’s security practices, Buzzfeed News is reporting that over 3,600 Ring owners’ email addresses, passwords, camera locations, and camera names were dumped online. This includes cameras recording private spaces inside homes. This stunning new leak could potentially provide criminals and stalkers with access to view live video feeds from inside and around thousands of Ring customers’ homes, see archived videos, and get the precise location of all Ring devices attached to the compromised account by studying the orientation of the footage and location information attached to each camera.  Ring has claimed that this attack was the result of credential stuffing, a technique where attackers gather usernames and passwords compromised in another data breach and try them on other websites. R...

Global NGO Community Demands a Stop to the Sale of .ORG Over 500 organizations and 18,000 individuals have signed a letter urging the Internet Society to stop the private equity takeover of the Public Interest Registry (PIR) , the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain. It’s rare that EFF, Greenpeace, Consumer Reports, Oxfam, the YMCA of the USA, and Human Rights Watch all speak out about a single issue, but the sale of .ORG affects every corner of the NGO sector. Take Action Stand up for .ORG The sale of PIR comes on the heels of a major change to the .ORG Registry Agreement (RA), the contract that outlines how the registry will be managed. The 2019 RA gives the registry owner significant new powers to set policies that would directly harm NGOs, including the power to set new enforcement processes to censor organizations’ speech as well as the ability to raise registration fees without a limit. While ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers...

Digitization is about much more than just technology. It’s also about collaboration and people . If you already understand this, you’re off to a good start. As our Industrial Automation EVP Peter Herweck recently acknowledged , seeing a digitization project through to the end isn’t always so simple. One of the reasons for this is because it’s not just a matter of implementing technology. It involves organizational and structural changes, and if you don’t plan for them, it could fail. That’s why at Schneider Electric we’re focused on how we can help companies with these challenges as well providing technology solutions. This is part of our vision for the Schneider Electric Exchange, which has already shown success since it was launched in April 2019. We expect it will build into an even greater hub for innovation in years to come. How Exchange is helping meet the challenges of digitization A project needs to have the right people on board from the beginning in order to succeed. This...

Facebook’s Latest Scandal Shows We Need Stronger Privacy Laws Facebook, the world’s largest social media company, has shown yet again that it does not deserve our trust. A New York Times investigation revealed that Facebook shared its users’ private data, without its users’ consent, with other tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Netflix. The Times report revealed that Facebook parceled out deeply personal information from its users to other companies without first asking if that was alright. Facebook users’ private messages went to Netflix, Spotify and the Royal Bank of Canada. The names and contact information for their friends went to Sony, Microsoft, and Amazon. Yahoo even got a real-time feed of what users’ friends were up to—without telling either the user or their friends. Press investigations have exposed, time and again , that Facebook and other tech companies too often will choose their profits over your privacy . This underscores the need for stronger pri...

Before and After: What We Learned About the Hemisphere Program After Suing the DEA As the year draws to a close, so has EFF’s long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Agency about the mass phone surveillance program infamously known as “ Hemisphere .” We won our case and freed up tons of records . (So did the Electronic Privacy Information Center .) The government, on the other hand, only succeeded in dragging out the fake secrecy. In late 2013, right as the world was already reeling from the Snowden revelations, the New York Times revealed that the AT&T gives federal and local drug enforcement investigators access to a phone records surveillance system that dwarfs the NSA’s. Through this program, code-named Hemisphere, police tap into trillions of of phone records going back decades. It’s been five long years of privacy scandals, and Hemisphere has faded somewhat from the headlines since it was first revealed. That was long enough for of...

Hearing Thursday: EFF Asks Court to Require FBI Disclosure of National Security Letter Recipients Who’ve Been Released From Gag Orders Bureau Is Improperly Withholding Information in FOIA Case San Francisco, California—On Thursday, December 20, at 10 am, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will urge a federal judge to order the FBI to release the names of national security letter ( NSLs ) recipients that are no longer under a bureau gag order blocking them from speaking out. The hearing is in EFF’s Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit against the Justice Department seeking records that will shed light on whether the FBI is complying with a federal law mandating that it review and lift NSL gag orders that are no longer needed. NSLs are secret, warrantless demands for customer information that gag telecom and Internet providers from telling anyone—customers, the public, or employees—that they have turned over to the government their customers’ personal information, such ...

I recently co-hosted a Schneider Electric International Colocation Club webinar intended to help companies plan for the future and deal with the rapid growth in the colocation industry. I was glad we left about 20 minutes for questions at the end because it gave us a chance to hear what’s on the minds of those who are in the trenches, and discuss some of the trends, challenges and best practices we’re seeing in the colocation space globally. My co-host was Steve Wallage, Managing Director of BroadGroup Consulting , who has more than 25 years of experience in IT consulting, the last 12 focused on global data centers. Read more about his bio in a previous blog post. Colocation Industry Predictions and Trends Many of the questions focused on the trends we’re seeing and our thoughts on how things may play out. One colocation provider asked whether scalability is as important in second-tier markets as it is in the major colocation centers. The answer was a definitive “yes.” We’re se...

The rapid growth of renewable and distributed energy generation sites is a good thing. In fact, we need a lot more of these in our future. But this new model also creates an unintended consequence: as our distributed energy resources expand, it gets harder to measure the quality of our electrical power. To do this, one needs a tool known as a Power Quality Instrument (PQI), but not all power metering devices are created equal – read “Power Quality Instruments (PQI): An Overview,” which describes some new International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards that help electrical contractors and specifiers choose an appropriate PQI. Factors driving the need for PQIs The need for PQIs is a direct result of modernized electrical systems and the digitized equipment connected to them. Utility power distribution has expanded from a centralized generation model to include renewables, often on a smaller scale and far more distributed design. This new model fundamentally changes the el...

Urgent: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill According to reports published Tuesday evening by Politico, a group of surveillance hawks  in the House of Representatives is trying to ram through a bill that would extend mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. We expect a vote to happen on the House floor as early as tomorrow, which means there are only a few hours to rally opposition.   The backers of this bill are attempting to rush a vote on a bill that we’ve criticized for failing to secure Americans’ privacy. If this bill passes,we will miss the opportunity to prevent the FBI from searching through NSA databases for American communications without a warrant. Worse, nothing will be done to rein in the massive, unconstitutional surveillance of the NSA on Americans or innocent technology users worldwide. As we wrote , the bill, originally introduced by Chairman Devin Nunes before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “allo...

Stop the Newest Border Screening Bill Biometric screening, surveillance drones, social media snooping, license plate readers—all this and more would be required by new federal legislation to expand high-tech spying on U.S. citizens and immigrants alike at and near the U.S. border. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) introduced “the SECURE Act” ( S. 2192 ) on December 5. It borrows liberally from two other federal bills— H.R. 3548 and S. 1757 —that EFF opposed earlier this year. Those bills were respectively introduced by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) in the House of Representatives and Sen. John Coryn (R-TX) in the Senate. Sen. Coryn’s bill, called the Building America’s Trust Act, raises concerns about digital rights, many of which are likely to be ongoing issues in Sen. Grassley’s SECURE Act. Sen. Coryn’s bill would require that the Department of Homeland Security: Collect biometric information from all people who exit the U.S., including U.S. and foreign citizens. Collect DNA and ...

Decoder Pin, Red Ryder BB Gun with IoT, Edge, & EcoStruxure As the holidays approach, my kids are wishing for a myriad of gadgets but my wish list has one only item: a decoder pin like the one that nine-year-old Ralphie hopes to find each time he races to the mailbox in A Christmas Story . I love that movie and how Ralphie is sure that the prized decoder pin will provide insider knowledge into the Little Orphan Annie Secret Society. After a remarkable decade of transformation in our industry, I’d love nothing more for Christmas than to decode what is coming next. Our team recently glanced back at the last 10 years and realized that the term cloud computing did not exist before 2006. That was the year Amazon Web Services was announced and the term ‘cloud computing’ was created. Fast forward to today, about ten years later. The industry is talking about edge computing , renewable energy, driverless cars and making sure the passengers in those driverless cars will have the bandw...

Resolution on Transparency of Trade Negotiations Endorsed at U.N. Internet Governance Forum Meeting All this week, EFF is at the 12th annual meeting of the global Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva. Last year we co-organized the first ever main session of the IGF on trade and the Internet, recognizing how trade negotiations are incorporating an increasing number of Internet-related issues, many of which—such as copyright, domain name dispute resolution, and spam control—are already being dealt with in more transparent and inclusive fora. One of the key outcomes of that main session was the formation of a new IGF Dynamic Coalition on Trade and the Internet. This self-organized working group, currently led by EFF, carries on its work throughout the year, and reports back to the IGF annually. Although the Dynamic Coalition is new and its outputs do not have a formal status, its influence is already growing. For example, last month, the Dynamic Coalition was name-checked in t...

The first post in this series outlined the goals and standards for arc flash protection, while the second described the impact of an arc flash on medium voltage (MV) equipment and switchboards. Here, I’ll talk about some of the best practices panel builders need to follow to ensure that arc flash protection works. After all, the best way to ensure an arc flash has little effect is to make sure any arc flash and its impact are minimized. Follow the standard – That seems obvious but in practice can be challenging. Panel builders must adhere to the standard, and the switchgear equipment and component supplier(s) must do the same. The best approach is to work with suppliers that have the necessary expertise and certifications. Ensure arc flash mitigation is “designed in” – Bus and transformer differential protection can substantially reduce the potential for arc flash damage. For instance, replacing a transformer protecting fuse with a circuit breaker and fast arc flash protecti...