Archive for December 12, 2019

EQ Bank Partners With TransferWise To Shake-Up International Money Transfers

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 12, 2019 by itnerd

EQ Bank is changing the game again and is announcing a partnership with TransferWise, the global technology company for international money transfers, shaking up how Canadians send money overseas. The result is fully transparent, remarkably fast international money transfers that are up to 8x cheaper for EQ Bank customers.

Working with TransferWise for Banks, EQ Bank has integrated TransferWise’s API directly into their infrastructure. This integration allows EQ Bank customers to send money right from their Savings Plus Account at the real exchange rate, paying only a small, transparent TransferWise while being able to earn 2.30 per cent interest until the moment they hit send.

As a leader in digital banking, and the first Canadian bank to move its core system to the cloud, this partnership marks another significant step for EQ Bank in driving innovation in financial services.

While Canada is on the cusp of delivering open banking, partnerships with fintechs, improving digital technologies and investing in agile cloud architectures, will be critical in delivering first-class services across Canada, paving the way for more sophisticated ways for Canadians to bank.

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Why I Am Now Using DNS.Watch As My DNS Provider…. At Least For Now

Posted in Commentary on December 12, 2019 by itnerd

Yesterday I came home to discover that my Internet wasn’t working properly. The symptoms that were being presented were that some websites would work, and others were inaccessible. On top of that if a website did work, there was a chance that the content would not display properly. My suspicion was that the DNS or Domain Name System server that I was using was not working properly.

A quick tutorial on what DNS is. DNS is a system which translates the domain names you enter in a browser to the IP addresses required to access those sites. You need to have access to a DNS server if you want to do anything on the Internet and your ISP will provide you with access to theirs. But that may not be a good thing for reasons that I will get to in a minute.

As a troubleshooting step, I removed the Cloudflare DNS service that I had been using instead of my ISP’s DNS service and replaced it with the DNS service provided by Rogers which is my ISP of the moment. By doing that all my problems went away.

Now a word about why I don’t use the DNS service provided by Rogers. A few years ago Rogers was caught doing DNS redirection. Meaning if you mistype an address in your browser, Rogers DNS service will take you to a search page with ads. Besides having unwanted ads displayed, it’s also a security risk that I wrote about here. It was a pretty shady thing for Rogers to be doing as ISP’s in my opinion shouldn’t be doing stuff like that, and I haven’t trusted them enough since then to use their DNS service full time. But to be fair to Rogers, they weren’t the only ones doing this sort of thing as Bell was caught doing something similar to what Rogers was doing. The result was that I have used public DNS services. I started off using OpenDNS. Then I moved to Level3’s DNS service when OpenDNS got bought by Cisco and they wanted you to register to use it. More recently I had been using Cloudflare’s DNS service as that was the new cool thing to use. But last night forced me to move again because of the issues that I was seeing.

Since I refuse to use the Rogers DNS service under any circumstances as I don’t know if they still do DNS redirection, I have at least for now moved to DNS.WatchDNS.Watch for the following reasons:

  • DNS Neutrality — The servers do not censor any DNS requests. This differs to some ISPs around the world who actively censor what you can and cannot access.
  • Privacy Protection — The company does not log any DNS queries. It is not recording any of your actions. By contrast a typical ISP DNS server may log your history, and some don’t even anonymize the data collected.
  • Data is not for sale — The company as far as I am aware does not have any business deals in place with ad networks or other institutions that have an interest in learning about your online habits.
  • No ISP DNS Hijacking — This goes back to the sorts of things that Rogers and Bell have been caught doing. DNS.Watch doesn’t do that at all, which is a good thing for you. 
  • It support IPv4 and IPv6 addresses — That way you future proof yourself seeing as IPv4 addresses are running out.
  • DNS.Watch supports DNSSEC — This system is used by many sites to ensure that the data you receive is legitimately from the real site and not from a hijacked domain or other trickery

The only weakness of DNS.Watch is that their setup instructions aren’t the best as they don’t have instructions for setting up your average consumer grade router to use it. For experienced users, that’s not a big deal as they’ll figure it out. But for the average user it can be a bit of a challenge to set up and DNS.Watch should really address that.

I’ve been using it for the last few hours and it seems very quick and responsive. For the present time I am going to stick with it and see how it performs. But I am going to look at my options for a public DNS service to see which is the best one. In the meantime, I would love to know what happened last night to Cloudflare’s DNS service. I’ve talked to a couple of people and they had issues with it as well. But I can’t find anything online that speaks to what happened. Thus some clarity on that would be nice to get so that I can pick the best public DNS service for me.

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Review: ASUS AiMesh AX6100 Wi-Fi system

Posted in Products with tags on December 12, 2019 by itnerd

Mesh WiFi has been a thing for a while now. And to be frank, ASUS is kind of late to the market. But that’s not a bad thing. That’s a very good thing based on my experience with their AiMesh AX6100 Wi-Fi system which I have been testing over the last few days.

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I got two of these nodes from ASUS which kind of have the vibe of their gaming routers. Except that they don’t look as over the top as those. That’s a good as this opens this WiFi mesh router to more people, and they’ll look good in more places. The AiMesh AX6100 Wi-Fi system has a lot going for it that frankly puts other mesh WiFi products to shame. Let’s start with this:

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It comes with four gigabit ports. Plus a gigabit WAN port for your router.

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You also get a USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 port as well. All of that allows you to connect storage devices, printers, wired computers, etc. That gives you a number of use cases for this mesh WiFi system. And what’s cool is that both nodes are identical so you can connect either unit to the modem supplied by your Internet service provider via an Ethernet cable.

The real star of the show from a specifications perspective is that it is a Wi-Fi 6 mesh WiFi system. And rather than simply offering Wi-Fi 6 for the people who have iPhone 11’s and Galaxy S10’s, Wi-Fi 6 can be used for wireless backhaul functions between the two nodes. And that works incredibly well. I’ll give you details on that in a second. But let me get to the setup process first.

Set-up was insanely easy using the ASUS Router app (available for iOS and Android). The app recommends placing the two units within a few meters of each other during the initial pairing process, after which you can place them farther apart. In my case, I put one in the living room of my roughly sub 1000 sq foot condo and the other in the bedroom. For what it’s worth, ASUS says a pair of these routers provides wireless coverage of up to 5,500 sq feet.

Once I set things up, I went about my testing and found that this setup produces some of the fastest speeds that I have seen from a mesh WiFi setup. I clocked an average download speed of 550 Mbps to 600Mbps on my MacBook Pro running 802.11ac placed in the bedroom in my condo. By comparison, other brands of mesh routers I had previously tested weren’t even in the same star system when it came to speed in the same scenario. I was blown away by this result. And for what it’s worth, it is possible to connect these two nodes by gigabit Ethernet. So in a bigger house it is possible to use that for backhaul functions which may be better in that use case as a wired connection would be more stable than a wireless one. Having said that, I had no issues with the wireless setup that I tested.

The AX6100 comes also bundled with a couple of extras:

  • AiProtection Pro which a suite of home network security tools powered by Trend Micro that defends your connected home devices from cyber threats, and has parental controls to restrict Internet access or block inappropriate content from children.
  • WTFast which promises lower latency and less lag while gaming by funneling gaming traffic through optimized network routes

In terms of price, expect to pay $550 CDN or so for the two pack that I tested. Each additional node is about $270 CDN. If you need a mesh WiFi system, this is the one to get at present.

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