Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

(Don’t) Return to Sender: How to Protect Yourself From Email Tracking Tracking is everywhere on the Internet. Over the past year, a drumbeat of tech-industry scandals has acclimated users to the sheer number of ways that personal information can be collected and leaked. As a result, it might not come as a surprise to learn that emails, too, can be vectors for tracking. Email senders can monitor who opens which emails, when, and what device they use to do it. If you work for a business or a non-profit that sends mass emails, maybe you’ve used tools to perform this kind of tracking before. Even if you have used them, this might be the first you’ve heard of it — because unfortunately, in email marketing software, tracking is often enabled by default.   There are a lot of different ways to track email, and different techniques can lie anywhere on the spectrum from marginally acceptable to atrocious. Responsible tracking should aggregate a minimal amount of anonymous dat...

The Federal Government Offers a Case Study in Bad Email Tracking The U.S. government sends a lot of emails. Like any large, modern organization, it wants to “optimize” for “user engagement” using “analytics” and “big data.” In practice, that means tracking the people it communicates with—secretly, thoroughly, and often, insecurely. Granicus is a third-party contractor that builds communication tools to help governments engage constituents online. The company offers services for social media, websites, and email, and it boasts of serving over 4,000 federal, state, and local agencies , from the city of Oakland to the U.S. Veterans Administration to HealthCare.gov. In 2016, the company merged with GovDelivery , another government-services provider. It appears that parts of the federal government have been working with GovDelivery, now Granicus, since at least 2012 . Last October, we took a closer look at some of the emails sent with Granicus’s platform, specifically those from the...

An Update on Facebook’s Smear Campaign Against Critics Back in late November, the New York Times revealed that Facebook had paid a corporate PR firm called Definers Public Affairs to develop and peddle a smear campaign aimed at some of its Open Society Foundations-funded critics, including members of the F reedom From Facebook coalition .  In response, we asked three basic questions of Facebook, all aimed at the same issue: what did Facebook do with the smear campaign information on the Facebook platform itself ? Did Facebook promote the smears on its platform? Did Facebook develop different versions to target different audiences, including Congressional staffers and other influencers, as it does for key advertising customers? And, most important, what is the boundary between Facebook’s own policy interests and the operation of the platform? Just before the holiday break, Facebook answered our questions in a telephone call with two of its legal and communications staff. Th...

Apple Says Patent Troll Case Should Be Dismissed Because [REDACTED] but the Public Should Know Why At EFF, we review court dockets to monitor the conduct of the most active patent trolls. But when court records are redacted or sealed, it can be impossible for EFF and other members of the public to know what is going on. Today we filed a motion to intervene in Uniloc v. Apple seeking public access to key briefing about whether Uniloc should be able to bring the case at all. Uniloc is one of the most active patent trolls in the world, and filed more than 170 lawsuits in 2018. It is the patent owner that sued Austin Meyer for offering his X-Plane flight simulator on app stores. That suit led to a documentary called The Patent Scam (available on Amazon Prime ). Since then, Uniloc has been a big purchaser of patents, and various Uniloc entities have filed hundreds of patent suits. In 2017, Uniloc filed a wave of patent litigation against Apple and other defendants. In some of th...

Over the last few years, our society’s consumption of video content has never been higher. YouTube users alone watch 46,000 years of videos on an annual basis. Now, video is extending beyond the domain of humans. More and more machines are watching video and are interpreting the data they “see” to drive business decisions by using industrial edge applications. Emerging technologies that enable integrated video analytics (IVA) are impacting a broad set of applications across a wide variety of environments including buildings, hospitals, vehicles, and factories. In the case of manufacturing, video analytics applications are helping to increase throughput, reduce energy consumption, and improve overall product quality. The great enablers of these kinds of benefits, high definition video cameras, are providing information in such detail that real time decision-making is significantly enhanced. Examples abound of how IVA is impacting people’s lives. The U.S. Department of Homeland Sec...

It’s difficult to say whether it’s the expectations of 5G or the implications of 5G creating the greatest buzz in the data center market right now. Ultimately, the network will transform the world. The first step in this transformation is dependent upon telcos adapting to support the skyrocketing demand for connectivity and capacity. In fact, 5G will fail without this edge connectivity and not-yet-imagined applications won’t come to be. The Call for Connectivity Almost all major carriers have announced 5G rollouts or trials. The GSMA estimates that 5G could account for as many as 1.2 billion connections by 2025 — a profound impact on both the mobile industry and its customers. Even before that, Cisco says that by 2020 video could account for 90 percent of internet traffic. This insatiable demand for content streaming is driving investments in fiber to increase bandwidth. Cloud adoption, mobile communication, and big data analytics are also creating the need for high-capacity an...

Evan Butler is a Global Marketing Graduate Trainee and Intern at  Schneider Electric ’s Foxboro Hub. He currently is a senior at Bryant University, pursuing a degree in Marketing with a minor in Legal Studies. In below blog article he shares what it is like to be a Global Marketing Graduate Trainee in the Foxboro office . Funky socks It’s 9 am as I walk into Cohasset for another day at SE. I walk up the bright green staircase to the second floor, where I enter Global Marketing and say good morning to my director Rudy. Down a bright blue hallway, I begin to make my way to my desk. I walk past the design team. About 20 iMacs, all filled with young talented designers who look a little bit older than me. I can see one guy wearing a hoodie and a Supreme snapback with his headphones in, grinding away. A young woman across from him has her incredibly detailed sketches pinned up on her work station. I like walking this way because the environment is so energizing to be arou...

In 2008 I was the product marketing manager for a mining-industry MES package called Ampla (still going strong today). In those days, we would focus on the relationship between people, technology and management systems as the “magic” that would lead to production improvement. I also use to particularly like the work of Ralph Rio from the industry analysts ARC, his  “Intersection of Lean and MES Best Practices” is still online. Ralph pointed out that a key issue with lean manufacturing implementations was “backsliding”.  This is illustrated by his chart below… The basic idea is that while you can do a lot with just the 2 “ingredients” of people and management systems (blue line), technology provides the mechanism that continues to drive improvement over time (green line).  With no technology to lock in the gains, improvements will inevitably deteriorate over time (red line). Everyone in the production game has seen this I’m sure. I was reminded of Ralph’s elegant ch...

EFF to Court: Don’t Let Trolls Get Away With Asserting Stupid Software Patents If trolls don’t face consequences for asserting invalid software patents, then they will continue to shake down productive companies. That is why EFF has filed an amicus brief [ PDF ] urging the court to uphold fee awards against patent trolls (and their lawyers) when they assert software patents that are clearly invalid under the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank (which held that an abstract idea is not eligible for a patent simply because it has been implemented on a generic computer). Our brief explains that the most abusive patent trolling tends to come from trolls that own abstract software patents. This case began when a patent troll called AlphaCap Ventures sued Gust , a company that connects startups with investors around the world. Claiming its patent covered various forms of online equity financing, AlphaCap Ventures filed suit against ten different crowdfunding platforms. Most ...

New York City Adopts Historic Policing Reform Prompted by a diverse grassroots movement, much of the country continues to debate important proposed policing reforms at the local level. Many local policing campaigns that EFF supports focus on ending the era of law enforcement agencies acquiring surveillance equipment in secret. The latest campaign to prove successful secured a new law advancing transparency in New York City not only in policy, but also on the ground: the Right to Know Act . Adopted in a two-part measure, the Right to Know Act responds to the experience of New Yorkers and visitors subjected to law enforcement stops, frisks, and searches of personal possessions including digital devices like cell phones and tablets. The City Council’s passage of the measures comes in spite of fear-mongering and falsehoods promoted by police unions. One part of the reform, supported by EFF and a litany of groups in New York (including some in the Electronic Frontier Alliance ), ...

As the colocation industry becomes commoditized, a premium offering with a high-level of touch gives larger companies — sometimes limited by more traditional models — back some of the data center control they lost, all while lowering TCO. This is the wholesale market Skybox Datacenters serves, and Schneider Electric is helping us do so. We operate three mission critical facilities in Texas — two are located at Houston One, a 12.5 MW, 20-acre private campus. The other is Legacy One, a 25 MW, 21-acre campus in Dallas. Our core focus is on companies that need more than 1MW. Schneider Electric’s approach aligns with our operating principles of transparency, customization and partnership. Power is notably one area into which we deliver transparency and, thereby control, to our customers.  Every output and display we see, they can see in their portals as well. We give them the entire picture. Typically, this type of business model would result in a higher TCO.  However, our fac...

Written by Guest Blogger, Jesse Gutierrez We have often heard, “Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.” At Schneider Electric we ask our employees to dance. Diversity and Inclusion is part of our heritage and our future. We want you all to be a part of it. So, why is D&I so important? Research shows D&I leads to positive business impacts via recruitment, retention, engagement, customer orientation, etc. D&I improves innovation and customer orientation x 2, employee engagement x 3 and reduces turnover intention by 2 (IBM Workforce Institute, 2013). Aside from this, D&I also makes a team 152% more likely to understand a client, when sharing their ethnicity. In other words, this acceptance of diversity and support of inclusion leads to empathy for our teams and for the customers we support and serve. In September of 2017, Schneider Electric’s Chicago Grid office launched a Diversity and Inclusion Business Resource Group (BRG) and t...