Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

‘The End of Trust’ – On Sale in Bookstores and Free to Download Now! Do you need some stimulating reading material for this long holiday weekend? Here’s a great option: the latest issue of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The End of Trust . This is a collection of essays and interviews about technology, privacy, and surveillance, featuring many EFF authors—including EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, Special Advisor Cory Doctorow, and board member Bruce Schneier. The End of Trust is on sale online and in bookstores now, but it’s also free to download <link> under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license . In addition to essays from EFFers, contributors include anthropologist Gabriella Coleman examining anonymity, Edward Snowden tackling blockchain, and EFF Pioneer Award winner Malkia Cyril zeroing in on the historical surveillance of black bodies. EFF has read and reviewed every piece of The End of Trust , and it’s a smart, thought-provoking, and entertaining issue. We ...

With the right equipment and some basic understanding, it’s not hard to determine which connections are heating up The previous posts in this series on power connections discussed the importance of tight connections , how and why they tend to get loose over time, and the dangers that arise when this happens. In this post, we explain how thermal imaging can be used to locate power connections in need of tightening without shutting off power. Finding hot spots The fact that loose power connections heat up is bad for safety and efficiency, but it does make it possible to locate a problem connection from a safe distance without making contact—and usually long before a failure occurs. Thermal imaging technology has come a long way in recent years. Today small, handheld infrared cameras, as shown in Image 1, enable users to quickly obtain a more accurate temperature reading by simply pointing at an object. Software typically provides an enhanced, color-coded image so users can very ea...

The distribution of electricity has become one of the most prevalent yet underlying needs of the 21st century, and one doesn’t need to be an expert to state the reason why. After all, without the benefits afforded by electrical energy, the functioning of households across the world will be hampered extensively, if not shut down completely. After all, electrical appliances are essentially what provide modern individuals with a bevy of luxuries required to go about with their day-to-day lives – luxuries that are taken for granted. So, utilising surge protection devices has become a mandatory goal as of now. There are four major things that you should keep in mind when it comes to the concept of surge protection . Staying up-to-date is important Electrical power systems need to be continuously innovated upon so that any hurdles related to the issue of surge protection can be negated considerably. There are a number of smart electrical components and technologies littered across the g...

It doesn’t take an expert to bring notice to the fast pace at which technology is developing in the 21st century, which mandates the need for industries to figure out the best course of action that can be taken to streamline these business processes. One such manner in which businesses can achieve this goal is by adopting the widely revered SCADA software. It’s a technology that is seeing widespread adoption across multiple industries, due to the ease in management afforded by adopting this service. If you’re one of the many people who work in the manufacturing sector, then the chances are that you are also adopting SCADA systems in your business. However, keep in mind that this is easier said than done – several factors need to be kept in mind before one can even think about adopting this particular form of software. Here are three basic facts you need to know about SCADA systems. What does it mean? This full form of SCADA is Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. This system ...

Building a state-of-the-art healthcare facility is no easy task. Creating one inside a building that was never meant to be a hospital in the first place? That’s even harder. But that’s where the story started for Grand Medica, in Novokuznetsk, Siberia. Providing every patient with the highest quality medical care required the development of a fully connected facility. Connected to quality care The design and construction teams knew th ey wanted an effective, integrated system — one that covered all the needs of a healthcare facility and would prove flexible enough to support future upgrades and modernization. They found everything they needed in EcoStruxure for Healthcare . “When we were choosing our electric and power supply equipment vendor, we talked with all the industry leaders in Russia,” said Chief Engineer Andrey Sergeev. “Schneider Electric offered us the best and most comprehensive terms for delivery, installation, project management, and cost-effectiveness. Grand Medica ...

Court Rules That EFF’s Stupid Patent of the Month Post Is Protected Speech A federal judge has ruled that EFF need not obey an Australian injunction ordering EFF to take down a “Stupid Patent of the Month” blog post and never speaking of the patent owner’s intellectual property again. It all started when Global Equity Management (SA) Pty Ltd (GEMSA)’s  patent  was featured as the June 2016 entry in our Stupid Patent of the Month blog series. GEMSA wrote to EFF accusing us of “false and malicious slander.” It subsequently filed a lawsuit and obtained an injunction from a South Australia court purporting to require EFF to censor itself. We declined and filed a suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California seeking a declaration that EFF’s post is protected speech. The court agreed, finding that the South Australian injunction can’t be enforced in the U.S. under a 2010 federal law that took aim against “ libel tourism, ” a practice ...

EFF’s Newest Case: Why We’re Helping to Unseal Court Records in Washington Federal Court Consider this: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has been going around talking about “responsible encryption” for some time now — proselytizing for encryption that’s somehow only accessible by the government—something we all know to be unworkable. If the Department of Justice (DOJ) is taking this aggressive public position about what kind of access it should have to user data, it begs the question—what kind of technical assistance from companies and orders for user data is the DOJ demanding in sealed court documents? EFF’s client The Stranger , a Seattle-based newspaper, has filed a petition with one court to find out. What’s at Stake? In a democracy, we as citizens deserve to know what our government is up to, especially its interpretation of the law. A major reason we all knew about the government using the All Writs Act—a law originally passed in 1789—to compel Apple to design a backd...

Will Congress Bless Internet Fast Lanes? As the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gets ready to abandon a decade of progress on net neutrality, some in Congress are considering how new legislation could fill the gap and protect users from unfair ISP practices. Unfortunately, too many lawmakers seem to be embracing the idea that they should allow ISPs to create Internet “fast lanes” — also known as “paid prioritization,” one of the harmful practices that violates net neutrality. They are also looking to re-assign the job of protecting customers from ISP abuses to the Federal Trade Commission. These are both bad ideas.  Let’s start with paid prioritization. In response to widespread public demand from across the political spectrum, the 2015 Open Internet Order expressly prohibited paid prioritization, along with other unfair practices like blocking and throttling. ISPs have operated under the threat or the reality of these prohibitions for at least a decade, and continue ...

While quality of service, reliability and offering a full menu of services are all important factors when selecting a colocation provider, there’s no getting around the fact that at some level cost matters. It only makes sense, then, for colo’s to try to keep their own costs down, in part by using various data center efficiency technologies. As it turns out, customers are receptive to colocation providers that use technologies such as data center infrastructure management ( DCIM ), fresh-air cooling, prefabricated data center modules and more. This fact came through clearly from a recent 451 Research survey of some 450 decision-makers responsible for selecting colocation services, which aimed to shed light on factors that are driving colocation demand. DCIM as the most popular efficiency technology. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (65%) said they’d be more likely to use a provider that used DCIM to monitor its facility while only 16% said DCIM would make them less willing to go wit...

By Rachel K. Carson, MarCom Intern for Process Industries   Did you know that millennials have overtaken Gen-X’ers to become the largest demographic in the American workforce? Employers everywhere are currently experiencing a “workforce transformation”; a generational shift of millennials, that are more than entering the workforce, they are dominantly taking it over. In 2015, Millennials (ages 18 to 34) surpassed Gen Xers (35 to 50) as the largest demographic in the US workforce. Welcoming the millennials into the mining field The age of the incoming amateur professional is radically changing the dynamic between mining corporations and the way jobs are functioned. Just as the abundance of readily available information has inflated the expectations of the industry’s customers, it has also inflated the expectations of their current and future employees. Therefore, it is more imperative than ever that mining companies are conscientious about this change and how the wealth of infor...