Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

To Search Through Millions of License Plates, Police Should Get a Warrant Earlier this week, EFF filed a brief in one of the first cases to consider whether the use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology implicates the Fourth Amendment. Our amicus brief , filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Yang , argues that when a U.S. Postal Service inspector used a commercial ALPR database to locate a suspected mail thief, it was a Fourth Amendment search that required a warrant. ALPRs are high-speed, computer-controlled camera systems . Some models can photograph up to 1,800 license plates every minute, and every week, law enforcement agencies across the country use these cameras to collect data on millions of license plates. The plate numbers, together with location, date, and time information, are uploaded to a central server, and made instantly available to other agencies. The data include photographs of the vehicle, and sometimes of its drivers an...

The U.S. Desperately Needs a “Fiber for All” Plan We have a real, coming broadband access crisis in the United States. Data from the government and independent analysis show that we are falling behind the world. This crisis comes from the fact that fiber-to-the-home deployment, the alternative to your gigabit cable monopoly (if you even have that choice), is languishing and slowing down across the board. In contrast to the United States, countries around the world are aggressively modernizing their telecommunications infrastructure. They are actively pushing fiber across the board, with advanced Asian markets like South Korea and Japan already finished, and countries in the EU heading towards universal access. China is predicted to have more than five times (around 80 percent of households totaling at 193.5 million homes) the U.S. number of fiber gigabit connections by 2023 . The big difference between the United States and the rest of the advanced economies around the world is...

This Could Be It: Key Polish Political Party Comes Out Against Article 13 With only days to go before the final EU debate and vote on the new Copyright Directive (we’re told the debate will be at 0900h CET on Tuesday, 27 March , and the vote will happen at 1200h CET ), things could not be more urgent and fraught. That’s why today’s announcement by Poland’s Platformy  Obywatelska —the second-largest party in the European People’s Party (EPP) bloc—is so important. Platformy Obywatelska  has said that it will vote to block the entire Copyright Directive unless Article 13—a ground-breakingly terrible Internet law that will lead to widespread filtering of all Europeans’ Internet speech, images, and videos—is stricken from the final draft. EPP, a coalition of European national political parties, is the key backer of Article 13 and the largest party in the European Parliament. Without its support, Article 13 is very unlikely to make it through the final vote. The...

In the fast-moving data center business, the formula for colocation providers’ on-going success consists of providing customers compute infrastructure that is quickly deployed, scalable and reliable, without compromising safety, quality or tying up excess cash flow. The traditional “stick built” approach to constructing data centers – which involves many months of serial planning, scheduling, and inefficient construction cycles – is less realistic for staying competitive and meeting business demands. In order to address these time-to-market and construction challenges, more and more colocation providers are turning to modern, modular data center approaches. Also referred to as prefabricated modules or skids, the concept of modular building blocks of power, cooling and compute capacity has been around for more than a decade. However, as business demands have evolved during the current era of the Internet of Things and Big Data, interest in these modular building blocks of data cent...

Originally constructed in 1948, Odessa Memorial Healthcare Center, a 25-bed critical-access hospital opened its doors in 1950 in the small farming and retirement community of Odessa, Washington—just 72 miles west of Spokane. As the only local hospital for 30 miles around, Odessa Memorial serves 2,500 citizens in Odessa and the surrounding area. Over the years, Odessa Memorial expanded its capabilities, adding a rooftop helipad and a nursing home. By 2006, though, the pneumatic control system had outlived its useful life, and the hospital needed a cooling system. Expanding with minimum cost impact Schneider Electric met with hospital officials and proposed a performance contract that would help finance the necessary improvements. In addition to incorporating system design, construction, and commissioning, this turnkey solution guarantees the energy savings typically generated by replacing or upgrading building systems. A performance project is funded in a variety of ways, includi...