Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

EFF’s DEF CON 26 T-Shirt Puzzle In August, EFF unveiled our ninth limited edition DEF CON exclusive member t-shirt. Like previous years, the design of this year’s shirt was inspired by the conference’s theme, 1983 . That number isn’t just the year before 1984. It was also the year a brilliant artist named Keith Haring had his work featured in the Whitney Biennial and in the video for Madonna’s Like a Virgin. Haring is one of the most impactful visual artist of the 1980s — he defined the look and the politics of that period for many people. Our shirt design is an homage to Haring and his playful, yet sometimes sinister, view of human nature. As thanks for supporting our work, we included a secret puzzle hidden within the shirt’s design for our members to solve during the conference. Read on for a walkthrough of the puzzle, or try your hand at solving it! (Warning: spoilers ahead!) defcon26-shirt.png If one follows the white arrows throughout the design, an aspiring...

California’s Net Neutrality Law: What’s Happened, What’s Next Over the weekend, Governor Jerry Brown signed S.B. 822, which guarantees strong net neutrality protections for citizens of California. Within hours, however, the federal government announced its intention to sue California for stepping in where the feds have abdicated responsibility. What happens next is going to be full of procedural issues and technicalities. First, some background. Millions of Americans opposed the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision to abandon its authority to enforce net neutrality, competition, and privacy under its Restoring Internet Freedom Order. An expected response to a widely condemned federal act is for the states to take action themselves. And they did. To date, thirty state legislatures have introduced bills that would require their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to maintain net neutrality as a matter of law. Four of those states (Washington, Oregon, Vermont, and now C...

The Devil Is in The Details Of Project Verify’s Goal To Eliminate Passwords A coalition of the four largest U.S. wireless providers calling itself the Mobile Authentication Taskforce recently announced an initiative  named  Project Verify . This project would let users log in to apps and websites with their phone instead of a password, or serve as an alternative to multi-factor authentication methods such as SMS or hardware tokens. Any work to find a more secure and user-friendly solution than passwords is worthwhile. However, the devil is always in the details—and this project is the work of many devils we already know well. The companies behind this initiative are the same ones responsible for the infrastructure behind security failures like SIM-swapping attacks , neutrality failures like unadvertised throttling, and privacy failures like supercookies and NSA surveillance. Research on moving user-friendly security and authentication forward must be open and v...

Organizations need resilience in the face of an increasingly broad and unpredictable risk landscape. This is especially true when it comes to energy and sustainability. Investors and customers alike recognize the effects of climate change and related weather events. And the pressure these and other groups are applying to drive change can no longer be ignored. One risk that is particularity salient for companies is global warming and resource scarcity, as environmental changes inevitably affect some facet of every business’s operations. What’s the risk? Global warming, extreme weather events, and resource scarcity trends are interconnected. They combine to amplify risks for future food, water and energy demands. Consider: Extreme weather caused by climate change impacts the seasonal availability of water and intensifies both flood cycles and droughts. This, in turn, reduces agricultural productivity and causes global food production to  decrease by 2%  for every decade of ...

EFF Urges Ninth Circuit to Let Criminal Defense Teams Vet Forensic Software You shouldn’t be convicted by secret evidence in a functional democracy. So when the government uses forensic software to investigate and build its case in a criminal prosecution, it should not hide that technological evidence from the defense. In an amicus brief filed today EFF urged the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to allow criminal defendants to review and evaluate the source code and developmental materials of forensic software programs used by the prosecution, to help prevent the wrong people ending up behind bars, or worse, on death row. The Constitution requires that defendants be given the opportunity to review, analyze, and confront the prosecution’s evidence. But in the information age, prosecutors are increasingly relying on evidence produced by proprietary forensic software programs–marketed and distributed by private companies to law enforcement–to establish key elements of their case, whi...

Victory! New California Law Requires Police Policy Transparency The people of California will now have more insight into how their local law enforcement agencies operate. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed S.B. 978 , which requires local police departments to publish their “training, policies, practices, and operating procedures” on their websites starting in January 2020. That opens up access to this information to anyone, not only journalists or activists with the time, money, or knowledge to request them. S.B. 978 , introduced by Sen. Steven Bradford, has long had EFF’s support because it helps inform everyone about how police officers are trained. Law enforcement agencies are adopting new policies about new policing technologies all the time, and the community benefits from understanding them. Newer surveillance technologies such as body-worn cameras, biometric scanners, drones, and automatic license plate readers have drawn significant public interest and concern. Posting p...

Written by Andrew Carmichael, Director, Client Services, Project & Development Services, APAC, Cushman & Wakefield. Businesses around the world today have their attention focused on two main battlefields. The war for customers and the war for talent . And the ammunition that is being used in both of those wars is data. Just as data is being used like never before to understand, engage, and sell to customers, so too is data being used by institutions to transform workplace strategy. With businesses today increasingly multi-national and multi-located, data is empowering them to achieve consistency in their businesses, in their vendor partners, and in their facilities management. But beyond efficiency, it is also redefining employee engagement, as well as creating new, holistic employee experiences. In this article we’re going to take a look at the origins of workplace strategy, and how data has transformed the workplace strategy conversation from efficiency, to engagement, to...

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana From a distributed IT and data center monitoring perspective, what if cloud-based data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software could help you determine whether current events are critical or unimportant based on historical data? Knowing the difference between a non-event, an emergency, and an outright crisis is vital to continuous and efficient operations. IT and Data Center Professionals must be able to differentiate between the thousands of alarms that can be activated at any time in a normal working day. Different level events must drive different actions Operators can face many challenging scenarios and must make quick decisions based on real-time data. They must learn to classify the impact of alarms to determine a proper response. Software with predictive analytics could take routine events – like an alarm firestorm – and prioritize which events are true emergencies. Other eve...

Victory! Gov. Brown Expands Access to the Internet for Youth in Juvenile Detention and Foster Care California Gov. Jerry Brown has a signed a bill into law that opens up the Internet for youth in state care. With A.B. 2448 , California now requires that all youth in juvenile hall be granted access to the Internet for educational purposes. Meanwhile youth in foster care are also ensured access to the Internet for social and recreational activities.   The success of this bill should be credited to its author, Assemblymember Mike Gipson, and its organizational sponsor, the Youth Law Center. Together they first introduced the measure in 2017 as A.B. 811, which was passed by strong majorities in the legislature, only to die by the governor’s veto pen . This time around, Gov. Brown signed the new bill, which was narrowed at his request.   EFF joined the effort early : we ran email actions and testified in favor of A.B. 2448 before a Senate committee. We also helped rally te...

New Witness and New Experts Bolster Our Jewel Case As We Fight Government’s Latest Attempt to Derail Lawsuit Challenging Unconstitutional NSA Spying EFF has presented its full evidentiary case that the five ordinary Americans who are plaintiffs in Jewel v. NSA were among the hundreds of millions of nonsuspect Americans whose communications and communications records have been touched by the government’s mass surveillance regimes . This presentation includes a new whistleblower and three additional expert witnesses—Professor Matthew Blaze , Dr. Brian Reid , and former Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission Ashkan Soltani —along with AT&T documents and witnesses we first revealed in 2006. We also marshalled key portions of the now massive amount of public admissions by the U.S. government and the most recent example of public judicial review in the Big Brother Watch case in Europe. The goal is to convince a federal judge that the NSA’s current claims of secrecy s...

Food and Beverage (F&B) industry supply chain efficiency is critical to both corporate profits and to the well-being of the customers who consume the manufactured processed foods.  People want to be assured that the food they eat contains what it says it does on the label and that the product poses no short or long-term health risks. F&B manufacturers are right to make food safety a top issue.  An Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty report published in late 2017 estimates that insurance claims for a product recalls reached an average of $9.5 million, with the F&B industry being the second most impacted, just behind the car industry. In fact, a trend is developing where consumers are demanding access to much more data surrounding the sources of raw materials that make up their foods and whether those materials are produced in a sustainable manner.  The press and social media are raising awareness levels when something goes wrong in the food and beverage ...