Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

Why the Whole World Should Be Up in Arms About the EU’s Looming Internet Catastrophe In exactly one week, the European Parliament will hold a crucial debate and vote that on a proposal so terrible , it can only be called an extinction-level event for the Internet as we know it. At issue is the text of the new EU Copyright Directive, which updates the 17-year-old copyright regulations for the 28 member-states of the EU. It makes a vast array of technical changes to EU copyright law, each of which has stakeholders rooting for it, guaranteeing that whatever the final text says will become the law of the land across the EU. The Directive was pretty uncontroversial, right up to the day last May when the EU started enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a seismic event that eclipsed all other Internet news for weeks afterward. On that very day, a German MEP called Axl Voss quietly changed the text of the Directive to reintroduce two long-discarded proposals — “Artic...

The NSA Continues to Blame Technology for Breaking the Law In late June, the NSA announced a magic trick—hundreds of millions of collected call records would disappear. Its lovely assistant? Straight from the agency’s statement: “Technical irregularities.” These “technical irregularities” are part of a broad and troubling pattern within the NSA—it has repeatedly blamed its failure to comply with federal laws on technical problems purportedly beyond its control. EFF has a long history of criticizing Congress for giving the NSA broad authority for its surveillance programs, but allowing the NSA to flout what limits Congress has put on the programs because of vague “technical” issues is wholly unacceptable. If the NSA can’t get its technology in order, Congress should question whether the NSA should be conducting mass surveillance at all. For example, the NSA is currently required to report numbers called “unique identifiers” in a transparency report compiled annually by the agency...

Disruptive innovation has arrived to support our next generation power grid. These innovations provide increased opportunity for intelligence and connectivity for the management of power distribution in our power critical facilities. In truth, connectivity and intelligence have long been available; intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) are the nervous system to any electrical network – relays, circuit breakers, meters, PLCs and RTUs all work together today. The disruptive innovation that is poised to revolutionize our power grid involves analytics , machine learning, digital twins, cybersecurity, and pervasive sensors to monitor conditions in more detail and in more resolution than ever before. The fact is, as facilities are built or updated, innovative technologies are inherently installed. Schneider Electric Chairman/CEO, Jean Pascal Tricoire has committed to developing a future range of products that is “ 100% Connectable ”, meaning connectivity and intelligence will truly be possi...

As a child I was always fascinated with patterns and in particular, their impact on people.  Whether it’s the repetitive beat of a drum inspiring us to dance or our early learnt abilities to distinguish the key features of cat from dog, patterns are clearly essential for human beings, both to socialize and to navigate a complex world. With its ability to recognize very complex patterns in unstructured or semi-structured data, artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to change the data center in major ways. I explored some of the possibilities and the overall potential impact of AI in the data center during a session at Schneider Electric’s recent Innovation Day event for cloud and service providers. Artificial Intelligence: Then and Now AI has certainly been around for a long time but, until now, its application was more theoretical. Unless you happened to be operating a super computer, processors were too slow to create meaningful results. That meant the early applications were o...

Great design and engineering used to take equal parts of science, smarts and hard work, with a good dose of inspiration. Certainly, technology – from slide rules to today’s advance CAD and 3D modeling tools – were there to make the grunt work of calculations, and drafting endless design tweaks and changes easier, faster and more precise. But at the center of the design process were always people – the designers, engineers and specifiers working to solve real-life challenges that affect people’s work and lives. Over the years as we’ve moved from “traditional” design methods ( design to spec with high quality ) to “design thinking” approaches ( user-centric and empathetic design ), to emerging “computational design” technologies ( a computer language-like approach to harnessing massive data and computing capacity to create millions of iterative solutions ) – yet at each stage the role of “human” insight and creativity has shifted. Computational Design – Evolutionary or Revolutionary? T...