Archive for May, 2018

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BMO and CIBC-owned Simplii Financial Pwned…. Tens Of Thousands Of Customers At Risk

Posted in Commentary with tags , on May 29, 2018 by itnerd

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.

 

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Sonos Introduces Speaker Sets

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 28, 2018 by itnerd

There are a lot of things you wouldn’t have just one of: socks, friends, potato chips. They’re always better when you have more than one. This is true of Sonos speakers too. The real magic happens when you live with it in more than one room. But there are still a lot of people who are only listening on one speaker, in one room.

There will be 8 different sets ranging from two to four room sets with Sonos Ones and home theater sets with Playbase and Playbar. Speaker sets start at $469.

Starter sets for your whole home:

  • 2 Sonos Ones: $469 (vs. $498 separately)
  • 3 Sonos Ones: $679 (vs. $747 separately)
  • 4 Sonos Ones: $899 (vs. $996 separately)
  • 2 Sonos Play:5: $1,169 (vs. $1,298 separately)

Home theater:

  • 3.1 set-up: $1,649 (vs. $1,798 separately)
  • 5.1 set-up: $2,118 (vs. $2,296 separately)

For more information go to sonos.com

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Review: 2018 Mazda CX-5 GT – Part 1

Posted in Products with tags on May 28, 2018 by itnerd

Marginal gains.

That’s the philosophy of Sir Dave Brailsford who used to run Great Britains cycling program and currently runs Team Sky which is one of the world’s top cycling teams. He has a philosophy called marginal gains. In short, if you take an entire cycling event and break it down into its individual pieces, and then figure out how to make a marginal gain in each individual piece. Even if that gain is 1%, when you add it all up you’ll make a big gain overall. Team Sky takes this philosophy in the way they choose their equipment, work with their athletes, and even in their choice of support cars and trucks. It sounds very detail oriented and kind of obsessive. But the fact is that it works for Team Sky as they’ve won five Tour De France titles, One Vuelta a Espana title, and a Giro d’Italia title among other major wins in cycling’s biggest races. And they’ve only been around since 2010.

Mazda is a company that believes in marginal gains. And that’s reflected in the 2018 Mazda CX-5 GT which I reviewed a year ago, and it scored an IT Nerd award. Mazda isn’t the type of company that sits on its laurels as they’ve made a major improvement to the CX-5 for 2018. But I will get to that improvement in part 2 of this review. Instead, let’s have a look of the exterior of this 2018 model that I have this week:

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It looks the same from a distance as the 2017 model. And that’s not a bad thing as it got lots of compliments during the week that I had it. Mazda has a winning formula with the Kodo design language, thus why change anything? Though there is one thing that I’d like to highlight:

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The 19″ wheels on this GT trim look sharp and generated as much attention as the whole vehicle did. Good call on Mazda’s part to include them on this trim level.

My review of the 2018 Mazda CX-5 GT will be done in five parts:

  • Exterior
  • Engine, transmission, handling, fuel economy, and driving comfort
  • Interior
  • Technology in the vehicle
  • Wrap up

The next part of this review will cover the engine, transmission and driving comfort. And it is here that I will tell you about the one major change for 2018 that will matter to anyone who is in the market for a compact SUV. Tune in tomorrow to find out what that is which fits in with the definition of marginal gains.

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Guest Post: 3 Ways Failing To Secure Your Business Data Can Prove Costly

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 26, 2018 by itnerd

By Penny Garbus

Every day, businesses across the country hum along efficiently, their operations supported by enormous reams of data that most employees – and bosses – take for granted.

Need to check inventory? Want to make sure a customer paid a bill? That information and much more is stored somewhere in a computer, always at the ready in time of need.

Except when it’s not.

Sometimes things go awry – a hacker, a system crash – that cause a business to lose critical data, and that can be devastating to the bottom line. Worst-case scenario: The business goes out of business.

“If you’re a business owner and you’ve not thought of data in relation to your financial well-being, don’t feel bad; you’re not alone,” says Penny Garbus, co-founder of Soaring Eagle Consulting Inc. (www.SoaringEagle.guru) and co-author of Mining New Gold – Managing your Business Data.

“Sometimes people are so busy running their businesses that they don’t have time to worry about the bits and bytes of their data and how relevant it is to longevity of their business.”

But they should, she says. Without data protection processes and procedures in place, the business could face serious consequences.

Garbus says data is like gold: It can be traded, it’s the base for creation of products, and if you lose it, you lose money.

Here are just three ways in which a failure to secure data can prove costly to a business:

  • Impact on sales. A sales team may be so dependent on data to do its job that a breach could mean sales goals aren’t met. That in turn affects the bottom line of the company. The longer it takes to reconstruct the data, the more money is lost.
  • Lawsuits and fines. Sometimes regulatory agencies require that certain records be kept. If a business loses that information, it could face potential fines or lawsuits. “Lawsuits and regulatory agencies can make your life a nightmare if you fail to understand, develop and follow processes that protected regulated data,” Garbus says. Customers also could sue if a system malfunction causes a business to fail to live up to a contract.
  • Ransomware. On occasion, malicious hackers infect your computers with software that blocks access to everything until you pay a ransom. “The ransoms are usually $1,000 and most companies pay the money,” Garbus says. Unfortunately, even paying a ransom is no guarantee a company’s data will be freed because on occasion the perpetrators demand even more money, she says. The situation can get even worse. “Sometimes the attacker has so completely destroyed data files and infected hard drives that they are unable to get the data back,” Garbus says. “The cost can run into thousands or even millions of dollars to get the company up and running again.”

“Any business that hasn’t already done so should begin a self-analysis to design data protection processes and procedures,” Garbus says. “You need to define your needs and then talk with your IT staff to ensure that the data recovery and protection strategies match those needs.

“But remember that this is not an insurmountable problem. If you take the right steps you can save yourself a lot of costs and headaches down the road.”

 

About Penny Garbus

Penny Garbus, co-founder of Soaring Eagle Consulting Inc. (www.SoaringEagle.guru), is co-author of Mining New Gold – Managing Your Business Data. She has been working in the data-management field since leaving college when she worked as a data entry clerk for Pitney Bowes Credit. She later ran the training and marketing department of Northern Lights Software.

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Buy A Low Cost Android Phone, And Get Pwned For Free

Posted in Commentary with tags , on May 25, 2018 by itnerd

More than 100 different low-cost Android models from manufacturers such as ZTE, Archos, and myPhone ship with malware pre-installed, researchers at Avast Threat Labs reported on Thursday. Users in more than 90 countries, including the U.S., are affected by this, the researchers said:

The malware, called called Cosiloon, overlays advertisements over the operating system in order to promote apps or even trick users into downloading apps. The app consists of a dropper and a payload. “The dropper is a small application with no obfuscation, located on the /system partition of affected devices. The app is completely passive, only visible to the user in the list of system applications under ‘settings.’ We have seen the dropper with two different names, ‘CrashService’ and ‘ImeMess,'” wrote Avast.

The dropper then connects with a website to grab the payloads that the hackers wish to install on the phone. “The XML manifest contains information about what to download, which services to start and contains a whitelist programmed to potentially exclude specific countries and devices from infection. However, we’ve never seen the country whitelist used, and just a few devices were whitelisted in early versions. Currently, no countries or devices are whitelisted. The entire Cosiloon URL is hardcoded in the APK.”

Well. That’s not cool. These companies need to explain why their phones ship with this stuff. Or better yet, I say that governments should say that if this stuff is on phones when they ship, then they can’t be sold. But I suspect that neither is going to happen and consumers will have to fend for themselves by sticking to iOS or the Samsungs or LGs of the world and avoiding this low end market entirely.

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Amazon Echo Recorded A Woman’s Voice And Sent It To Another Alexa

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 25, 2018 by itnerd

This is a total #Fail.

According to KIRO 7, a family from Portland suddenly received a phone call from a person on their contact list telling them to “Unplug your Alexa devices right now, You’re being hacked.” This person, who was an employee of the husband, stated that he had received audio recordings of conversations that took place in the family’s home. He was able to prove this by telling the family what they had just been talking about. Here’s the scary part. When the family reached out to Amazon, they were able to confirm that this happened.

Scary.

Now the article lacks details about how this happened. But if I were to make a guess, I would say that since this thing is always listening to you, it likely heard and misinterpreted something that made it send the conversation to the third party. But that’s just a guess. Amazon would really do the world a favor by describing what happened and how it will stop this from happening again in the future.

Well, they sort of did that:

Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like “Alexa.” Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a “send message” request. At which point, Alexa said out loud “To whom?” At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, “[contact name], right?” Alexa then interpreted background conversation as “right.” As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.

The problem is that the device would have said something if that were true to confirm the intent of the people who were speaking. Thus unless these people were clueless, there’s is no way they would have not noticed this. Amazon needs to come up with a better answer than this.

As an aside, could this happen with other smart home speakers? Inquiring minds want to know.

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Review: Apple Watch Series 3 GPS + Cellular

Posted in Products with tags on May 25, 2018 by itnerd

As many of you know, I’ve become a huge fan of the Apple Watch. Partially for the fitness functionality that’s present which has helped me to be far more disciplined when it come to staying active, and partially for the fact that I can discreetly see and respond to notifications, texts, and emails. Recently, I became the new owner of an Apple Watch Series 3 GPS + Cellular which promises all of that while leaving my phone behind. There was just one problem. My cell phone carrier at the time was Rogers, and I’ve documented extensively that Rogers does not support the Apple Watch because they don’t for whatever bizarre reason support the eSIM standard. Nor do they have a timetable that they are willing to share in terms of when they will support the eSIM standard. Thus after hoping that they would get on board with that in short order, I gave up on Rogers and went to Telus who does support the Apple Watch and the eSIM standard and I haven’t looked back. More on that experience in a bit.

Now the Apple Watch Series 3 GPS + Cellular looks and feels exactly like the Apple Watch Series 3 with GPS. And if you want to see what the Apple Watch Series 3 with GPS is capable of, I reviewed it a few months ago here. But there are two major differences between the GPS version and the GPS + Cellular version. The first difference is that the GPS + Cellular version has a red dot on the digital crown. I guess that’s there so your friends or potential thieves know that you have the GPS + Cellular version of the Apple Watch. I for one would have prefered if they made both versions look the same so that it flies under the radar a bit more. The second difference is that there is 16GB of storage in the GPS + Cellular version rather than the 8GB in the GPS version. That I suspect is there to either load music onto the Apple Watch so that you can say go for a run with just the watch and a pair of Bluetooth headphones, or it’s there for use with Apple Music so you can stream music if you have a data plan with enough data to support that.

Now over to the one question I am sure that you have. Is this device truly independent of the iPhone? In short, no. The long answer goes something like this. The Apple Watch has always required you to pair it to an iPhone for it to fully work. And you could always leave the phone behind and still get notifications and the like on your Apple Watch as long as the Apple Watch could connect to WiFi and the iPhone was connected to WiFi or cellular. Now the WiFi in question has to be 2.4 Ghz WiFi, and it can’t use anything fancy like certificate based authentication, and it has to be a WiFi that your iPhone knows about. But assuming you get past all that, this use case works. For example, I have left my iPhone in the car downstairs in front of my condo to run upstairs to get something and I’ve been able to get notifications, send messages, use Siri, etc. The inclusion of LTE support in the Apple Watch takes this to the next level as the Apple Watch no longer has to rely on WiFi to do any of this. Though it will flip to WiFi if it can connect to it to save you a few bucks on your cell phone bill. But it means that you’re always connected without having to carry your iPhone with you.

But there is a catch.

If your iPhone is off or not connected to cellular or WiFi, only iMessage and phone calls can be received or sent via your Apple Watch Series 3 GPS + Cellular. Text messages won’t work. Also, voice mail won’t work, and e-mail won’t work. So it’s not completely an independent device. But even with that caveat, there is a lot a value in this. My wife for example hates carrying her phone on a run. So in her use case, she could use an Apple Watch Series 3 GPS + Cellular along with the Strava Apple Watch app to record her run without having to take her iPhone. But if she runs into trouble or decides to bail on the run, she can still make a phone call.

Speaking of phone calls, taking a phone call on the Apple Watch works really, really well from an audio quality perspective. Both ends of the conversation are really clear. Though I am going to point out that doing what I call the “Dick Tracy” thing is going to earn you either some strange looks, or a lot of questions, or in some cases both. Also, taking phone calls on a regular basis on the Apple Watch Series 3 GPS + Cellular hammers battery life. And so does using the watch exclusively on cellular. Now Apple does promise “all-day battery life”, and you will get that. But to give you some perspective, when I didn’t use the Apple Watch to take phone calls and my iPhone was with me at all times, I was left with 70% to 75% battery life at the end of the day. If I did take a couple of phone calls, or I did use the watch extensively on cellular, the battery life I was left with was closer to 30% to 35% at the end of the day.

Now setting up the Apple Watch Series 3 GPS + Cellular on the Telus network was a breeze. Telus provides step by step instructions here. But the prerequisites are that you have to have a postpaid consumer Your Choice Plan or SharePlus Plan (Business plans aren’t supported at this time. Thus when I made the switch to Telus, I had to sign up as a consumer to get support for the Apple Watch). A Telus My Account log-in is also required. The setup on the Telus network took me five minutes and required no human intervention which is always a good thing. You’ll pay an extra $10 a month on top of whatever you pay Telus for your cell phone service to give your Apple Watch Series 3 GPS + Cellular LTE access. That may raise some eyebrows as Bell offers the same thing for $5 a month extra. But you do get 1GB data on top of whatever your data bucket happens to be as part of the deal which is something that Bell doesn’t offer you. I should also note that the Telus site that I linked to above has all sorts of handy tutorials that new Apple Watch users will find to be valuable. Kudos to Telus for doing that. Now I have yet to roam with it, but I have heard that it is either a non-issue or highly problematic depending on where you’re going. Thus I will update you on what my experiences with roaming are like when the time comes.

The Apple Watch Series 3 GPS + Cellular starts at $519 CDN. That’s $90 CDN more than the GPS version which makes it only a marginal price increase to get the ability to leave your phone behind when you go for a run and still be connected. If that’s your use case, then it’s money well spent.

 

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Review: 2018 Mazda6 Signature – Part 5

Posted in Products with tags on May 25, 2018 by itnerd

So I’ve come to the end of my week long review of the 2018 Mazda6 Signature and I walk away from this review very, very impressed. By that I mean that every aspect of this vehicle impressed me. The interior, exterior, driving experience, everything is above and beyond what one should expect from a mid sized car. The folks over at Toyota and Honda might want to take note because to be frank, they now have a competitor that they should really be concerned about. Besides the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord, you can cross shop it against the Nissan Altima, Hyundai Sonata, and Kia Optima to name a few competitors. None of which in my opinion match what this Mazda6 has to offer.

My final fuel economy was 9.1 L per 100KM’s which was outstanding since I didn’t make any attempt to drive in a fuel economy. Though I will note that my average fuel economy went up to 10 L per 100KM’s because I took a trip into downtown Toronto rush hour traffic. But a trip to the Oro African Methodist Episcopal Church which is a National Historic Site of Canada brought it back down:

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Given that there’s a really fun to drive 2.5L turbo engine under the hood, the fuel economy that I got this week is pretty impressive. Mazda has a winner in the mid sized class and anyone who drives it will likely be impressed enough to buy it rather than one of the usual market leaders. Especially in the Signature trim level which is class above. You can expect to pay $40,895 including freight for the Signature trim that I had this week. But the Mazda6 starts at $28,930 which is well in line with its competition.

For all those reasons do not be surprised if you start to see many more Mazda6’s on the roads than you are used to seeing in the not so distant future. Also, don’t be surprised if this vehicle ends up being an IT Nerd Award winner at the end of the year as it is a strong contender for that award. Again.

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VOTI Detection Awarded 5 Year Contract With Canada Border Services Agency

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 24, 2018 by itnerd

VOTI Detection, a leading technology detection company utilizing breakthrough 3D perspective to deliver enhanced threat detection, today announced that Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has selected VOTI’s latest Postal – Small Scale Imaging X-Ray Systems, a five-year supply contract, for use at CBSA International Mail centres.

By providing a 3D Perspective to operators, VOTI scanners deliver remarkably sharp and more revealing images than traditional x-ray screening technology as well as threat alert, material classification, dual energy imaging, the ability to manipulate and enhance images and more.

Initial deployments will be in Mississauga ON, Richmond BC and Montreal QC, in Canada. The contract includes provision of equipment, training, and initial warranty, as well as options for additional systems and ongoing maintenance service.

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Microsoft Fixes Windows 10 SSD Issue…. Many More Issues Still To Go

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 24, 2018 by itnerd

Windows 10 April 2018 Update has been a mess with multiple issues affecting users. One of which was an issue with users of Intel’s SSDs which was bad enough that Microsoft stopped allowing PCs with those SSDs to upgrade to the April 2018 Update.

Well apparently that’s been fixed. KB4100403, was released by Microsoft yesterday and in the notes is the mention of a fix concerning power regression on systems with NVMe devices from “certain vendors”. Which later on this release notes specifically mentions Intel and Toshiba.

But there’s a catch.

Users of the Intel SSDs are encouraged to wait until May 25th if they haven’t upgraded to the April 2018 Update to do said update. Users of Toshiba SSDs are encouraged to wait until June. And in both cases, only upgrade when the upgrade is offered to you. Just make sure you have a backup and all that good stuff first.

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