Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

2019 in Review In November’s landmark opinion in  Alasaad v. McAleenan , a federal judge ruled that suspicionless electronic device searches at U.S. ports of entry violate the Fourth Amendment. The Alasaad opinion was the perfect way to end 2019—the culmination of two years of hard work by EFF, ACLU, and our 11 clients. In another sense, it was a culmination of our decades of work explaining to the public and the courts that you don’t lose your rights when you go online or use digital tools. Every time policymakers or private companies tried to undermine your rights online, we were there. Looking back over 2019, there were so many moments when powerful forces tried to bargain away our digital rights. Both in the U.S. and around the world, authorities used increasingly sneaky word games to undermine our right to secure, private communications. They used new terminology like “ghost” and “client-side scanning” to obscure the fact that they were simply pushing to undermine end-t...

Recidivism Risk Assessments Won’t Fix the Criminal Justice System The First Step Act of 2018 ( S. 3649 ) is now federal law. The criminal justice reform law has been widely hailed as long overdue, and rightly so. But as we turn to its implementation, we urge policymakers to take care with the central provision of the bill that calls for the development of a risk assessment system for inmates. Ostensibly intended to ease mandatory minimum sentences for some drug-related crimes, the centerpiece of First Step gives the Attorney General just seven months to develop and publish a risk and needs assessment system to determine how likely each inmate is to commit another crime or engage in “violent or serious misconduct.” The risk assessment system will then be used to classify inmates as minimum, low, medium, or high risk of committing another crime in the future. The tool may be no more advanced than a simple survey akin to an online quiz. Or it might use machine-learning algorithms ...

Big Wins for Privacy and Free Speech: 2018 in Review As 2018 draws to a close, we’ve gathered together some of EFF’s key legal wins this year. Some of these wins are only stops along the way to a larger goal, but each is hard fought, whether we’re serving as counsel or amicus curiae. Every one of these victories helped move the needle of law in the direction of protecting your privacy and freedom of expression. EFF Helps Protect Against Location Tracking Carpenter v. United States : When the United States Supreme Court quotes you in upholding privacy, that’s a big win. The Supreme Court cited EFF’s amicus brief in its landmark Carpenter decision in June, holding that that the Fourth Amendment protects cell phone location information. In an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court recognized that location information, collected by cell providers like Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon, creates a “detailed chronicle of a person’s physical presence compiled every day, every moment ov...

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 ...

Habitat for Humanity has a vision for the world “where everyone has a decent place to live.” My team and I recently had the privilege of helping realize this goal for one family in Nashville, Tennessee. A bunch of data center professionals may not be experts in building a home, but we were happy to be part of an organization that fosters independence and offers new life chances for deserving families. As I reflected on my Habitat experience, it became clear how the process of building a home is similar to a basic data center design – there are key lessons that can be applied to both scenarios. Schneider Electric has supported Habitat for Humanity since 2000, donating over $38 million in product and funding $8.3 million to help cover the cost of land, infrastructure, and building materials for projects. Through an automated registration process, the company also makes it easy for us as employees to volunteer. This has resulted in thousands of hours given to countless home sites over ...

Now that edge computing has emerged as a major trend, the question for enterprises becomes how to migrate the data center management expertise acquired over many years to these new, remote environments. Enterprise data centers have long provided a strong foundation for growth.  They enable businesses to respond more quickly to market demands. However, this agility is heavily dependent on the reliability and manageability of the data center.  As data center operational complexity increases, maintaining uptime while minimizing costs becomes a bigger challenge. In order to maintain a high level of resiliency, existing data center best practices must now be exported to the emerging edge computing environments. In edge settings, reliability and manageability are by no means assured. The majority of workers located in edge environments (think retail store clerks, for example) lack data center or IT experience.  Yet edge IT environments have a direct impact on corporate prof...

Helena Sannicolo works as Marcom Director for Northern Europe at  Schneider Electric .  In this blog article she shares what helped her to succeed in professional life and develop her career from Marketing Manager in Sweden to a zone director. The keys to my success Business mindset has been an important part of my life ever since I was a small child growing up with my parents, two brothers, and sister. My parents owned a gasoline station, a grocery store and a small hamburger restaurant. I worked at the gasoline station from the age of thirteen during weekends and school breaks. It was a long time before the buzzword “customer journeys” appeared. Through my job experience I learned so much about the importance of solving customer’s pain points. It was an essential part of my life at that time and it gave me a solid ground to understand sales and marketing processes. I have always had the mindset to “act like an owner”, it empowers me and helps me to make decisions. Sinc...

Safari in Arms Race Against Trackers – Criteo Feels the Heat Criteo is an ad company. You may not have heard of them, but they do retargeting, the type of ads that pursue users across the web, beseeching them to purchase a product they once viewed or have already bought. To identify users across websites, Criteo relies on cross-site tracking using cookies and other methods to follow users as they browse. This has led them to try and circumvent the privacy features in Apple’s Safari browser which protects its users from such tracking. Despite this apparently antagonistic attitude towards user privacy, Criteo has also been whitelisted by the Acceptable Ads initiative . This means that their ads are unblocked by popular adblockers such as Adblock and Adblock Plus. Criteo pays Eyeo , the operator of Acceptable Ads, for this whitelisting but must comply with their format requirements. But this also means they can track any user of these adblockers who has not disabled Acceptable A...

Stupid Patent of the Month: Motivational Health Messaging LLC Gets a Patent on Sending Uplifting Texts Have you ever sent a motivational text to a friend? If you have, perhaps you tailored your message to an activity or location by saying “Good luck in the race!” or “Have fun in New York!” Now, imagine doing this automatically with a compuuuter . What a great invention. Actually, no. That’s not a good invention, it’s our latest Stupid Patent of the Month. U.S. Patent No. 9,069,648 is titled “Systems and methods for delivering activity based suggestive (ABS) messages.” The patent describes sending “motivational messages,” based “on the current or anticipated activity of the user,” to a “personal electronic device.” The patent provides examples such as sending the message “don’t give up” when the user is running up a hill. The examples aren’t limited to health or exercise. For example, the patent suggests sending messages like “do not fear” and “God is with you” when a “user enters...

Diego Gómez Is Safe, but Threats to Curiosity Still Abound Threat of Imprisonment for Columbian Scientist Demonstrates the Far-Reaching Implications of Copyright Policy In 2011, Columbian graduate student Diego Gómez did something that hundreds of people do every day: he shared another student’s Master’s thesis with colleagues over the Internet. He didn’t know that that simple, common act could put him in prison for years on a charge of criminal copyright infringement . After a very long ordeal , we can breathe a sigh of relief: a Columbian appeals court has affirmed the lower court’s acquittal of Diego . How did we get to the point where a student can go to prison for eight years for sharing a paper on the Internet? Diego’s case is a reminder of the dangers of overly restrictive copyright laws. While Diego is finally in the clear, extreme criminal penalties for copyright infringement continue to chill research, innovation, and creativity all over the world, especially in cou...

No company likes downtime, but some have far less tolerance for it than others – and are more than willing to pay to mitigate their downtime risk. The job for electrical contractors and others involved in uninterruptible power supply ( UPS ) deployment design is to determine what each customer’s level of risk tolerance is and design accordingly. It all starts with the cost of downtime for your customer. While it will vary by industry, nearly all large enterprises (more than 1,000 employees) report that a single hour of downtime costs more than $100,000, according to a survey by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) . Eighty-one percent of enterprises surveyed said the costs exceed $300,000 per hour while 33% said downtime costs $1 million per hour or more. ITIC found some vertical industries for which downtime costs more than $5 million per hour, including: banking/finance; healthcare; manufacturing; retail; and transportation and utilities. Even many small and mids...

Enhancements in digitization-driven connectivity have empowered the oil & gas industry by providing unparalleled opportunities for value creation through new levels of data capture and analysis. As the applicability of digitization across all areas of the vast global oil & gas enterprise become more and more apparent, forward-looking managers are reinventing many of their key upstream, midstream and downstream processes. According to the World Economic Forum, digital transformation in the oil & gas industry could unlock approximately $1.6 trillion of value for the industry, its customers and wider society. In order to understand some of the tangible business benefits of digitization, it is easier to focus on one specific, but important area as an example of the productivity (and profitability) gains that can be realized. In this case, an analysis of the area of operational power stability can provide us with a clear picture.  More specifically, consider a focus on the...

While managing facility operations for large data centers certainly takes specialized skills in a range of disciplines, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Given that Schneider Electric has more than 800 people managing facility operations for some 100 large data centers around the globe, it’s fair to say we’ve learned a great deal. In fact, I recently viewed a webinar that a colleague of mine presented on the topic, “Lessons Learned from Running the World’s Largest Data Centers.” In this post, I’ll pass along at least a few of those lessons (and invite you to check out the webinar for the rest). Most of the lessons we’ve learned fall into one of five general categories: Competency Standardization Risk management Tracking and reporting Operation and maintenance costs Competency In terms of competency, the main issue is that most companies have expertise that lies in areas other than managing data centers, a topic we covered in this previous post . That’s as it sh...