Apple today announced that the HomePod will be available in Canada, France, and Germany beginning June 18. HomePod will be available to order in white and space gray through Apple’s online store, retail stores, and the Apple Store app on iPhone and iPad, or at select authorized resellers like Best Buy where available. Expect to pay $449 CDN for one.
Will you be ordering one?
Well this is confusing. First the Trump Administration punished ZTE to the point that ZTE was going to shut down. Then President Trump says he’s going to save ZTE because too many jobs in China have been lost. Now, President Trump put this out there:
Senator Schumer and Obama Administration let phone company ZTE flourish with no security checks. I closed it down then let it reopen with high level security guarantees, change of management and board, must purchase U.S. parts and pay a $1.3 Billion fine. Dems do nothing….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 25, 2018
This is part of a larger effort in the form of a bill that goes like this:
My head is spinning from all this flip flopping. I’ll just stick around and watch to see if this changes again.
Cybersecurity measures are constantly in the news thanks to widescale breaches and new government regulation, but at what cost to employee experience? The Citrix Cloud and Security Survey asked Canadians about their experiences with technology at work and found more than a third of working Canadians say security protocols make it harder for them to do their job remotely. This at a time when technology is supposed to be improving user experience by offering increased mobility and flexibility.
When workers feel technology or security protocols are hindering their work, there are two common results: employees will bypass protocol and use their own device to complete their work, or their productivity will decrease.
Other key findings from the survey include:
For deeper insights on the survey, click here [Warning: PDF].
Yesterday I mentioned that Mazda made one significant change to the CX-5 for 2018. And that change is under the hood:
This is the 2.5 L four cylinder Skyactiv engine that puts out 187 horsepower and 186 pound feet of torque. That’s slightly up in both categories from last year. But the engine also includes cylinder deactivation technology that automatically shuts down two of the cylinders in light-load situations such as when cruising at a constant speed. That means that in certain situations you’ll save some fuel, which given the price of gas these days is a good thing.
Here’s a video that illustrates how this technology works:
Now Mazda claims that you’ll consume 20% less fuel when cruising at 40 KM/h and 5% when cruising at 80 KM/h. Those are not earth shattering gains. In fact they fit the definition of the marginal gains I spoke of in part one of this review. The question is, do you notice it and do you see those fuel savings? Well, in terms of noticing it, I didn’t. The 2018 CX-5 behaved the same as the 2017 CX-5 from what I can tell thus far. Getting off the line was a non-issue. Passing transport trucks was effortless. So from that standpoint, the average driver won’t be able to tell if they’re running on four or two cylinders.
Now over to if this technology actually saves fuel. As I type this I am doing 8 L per 100 KM/s in mixed city and highway driving. Mostly the latter thus far. When I compare that the CX-5 that I drove last year, I was getting 9.9 L per 100 KM/s. And based on my notes, I was driving on mostly the same roads at the same times of day. So while it’s not an exact comparison, it does indicate that cylinder deactivation technology works. A couple observations that I have noted:
To me those are indications that that the cylinder deactivation technology is working. But I do expect the fuel economy to go up a bit as the week goes on. We’ll see how different it is versus last years model.
Other than that change, everything that I liked in the 2017 CX-5 I still like in the 2018 model. Body movement is well controlled, the suspension is on the firm side without beating you to death. It’s insanely agile at both city and highway speeds. And I actually get feedback from the steering wheel, which by the way has a very heavy feel to it that I liked. It feels sure footed because of the fact that it comes with a very good all wheel drive system, and tacked onto that is G-Vectoring Control technology which enhances steering response through subtle engine-torque manipulation. In other words, it’s a form of torque vectoring that makes things like lane changes and turns smoother for you and your passengers. And there’s that sport switch to make things more fun if you find a back road someplace that you want to have some fun on.
In part three, I will be taking a look at the interior which in typical Mazda fashion is a Class Above. Stay tuned!
The CBC is reporting that CIBC-owned Simplii Financial has warned on Monday morning that hackers had accessed the personal and account information of more than 40,000 of the bank’s customers. Then Bank of Montreal revealed that hackers had stolen data on up to 50,000 of the bank’s customers.
That’s not good. but it is actually worse than that.
The hackers have now gone to the media with threats of leaking the data that they stole when the banks apparently did not pay up a $1 million ransom for the data. CBC managed to take some data that the hackers served up to them and confirmed that it is real. So as a result, all these customers are now under threat of being pwned in epic fashion. This is not good to say the least that two banks in Canada have been pwned like this. These banks have a lot of explaining to do. And you have to wonder if other banks can be pwned like this.
Yahoo Hacker Jailed Big Time
Posted in Commentary with tags Yahoo on May 29, 2018 by itnerdThe computer hacker who worked with Russian spies was sentenced to five years in prison Tuesday for his role in a massive security breach at Yahoo. “U.S. Judge Vince Chhabria also fined Karim Baratov $250,000 during a sentencing hearing in San Francisco,” The Associated Press reports.
Baratov, 23, pleaded guilty in November to nine felony hacking charges. He acknowledged in his plea agreement that he began hacking as a teen seven years ago and charged customers $100 per hack to access web-based emails. Prosecutors allege he was “an international hacker for hire” who indiscriminately hacked for clients he did not know or vet, including dozens of jobs paid for by Russia’s Federal Security Service. Baratov, who was born in Kazakhstan but lived in Toronto, Canada, where he was arrested last year, charged customers to obtain another person’s webmail passwords by tricking them to enter their credentials into a fake password reset page. Prosecutors said Russian security service hired Baratov to target dozens of email accounts using information obtained from the Yahoo hack.
“Deterrence is particularly important in a case like this,” the judge said during the hearing. He rejected prosecutors call for a prison sentence of nearly 10 years, noting Baratov’s age and clean criminal record prior to his arrest. Baratov has been in custody since his arrest last year. He told the judge Tuesday that his time behind bars has been “a very humbling and eye-opening experience.” He apologized to those he hacked and promised “to be a better man” and obey the law upon his release. The judge said it is likely Baratov will be deported once he is released from prison.
Let’s be clear, there were some Russians that were indicted as part of this. However they were out of reach or prosecutors. That means that this guy was the fall guy. So this makes a great headline, but there are other parties out there that need to be punished.
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