Posted in Commentary on December 31, 2023 by itnerd
At this time of year I like to look back over the past 365 days and pick out the stories that really got my attention. This year the planet returned to normal…. More or less. Having said that, here’s what happened in tech this year:
Twitter Goes Into A Death Spiral Because Of Elon Musk: The number one story this year had to be Elon Musk taking Twitter on a suicide mission that it will not recover from. Whether it’s because Elon drove away all those who would be willing to pay to advertise on the platform due to his decisions or his actions, throwing away years of brand equity by renaming Twitter to “X”, letting Twitter turn into a hellscape of racism among other evils, or it’s because of the fact that the EU along with FTC are looking to give him a legal beat down, 2024 is likely to be one where Elon gets what’s coming to him. Not to mention that Twitter will go from dying to dead.
Rogers Merges With Shaw: The unpopular merger between Rogers and Shaw happened this year. As part of this Freedom Mobile who was owned by Shaw had to be sold to Videotron. Now that might have made the Canadian government happy, lots of consumers were not happy as the assumption was that Rogers would find new and creative ways to screw their customers over. It’s a cynical view, but 2024 will illustrate if that view is correct or not.
Bell Decides To Hold Canadians Hostage To Get A Better Deal From The CRTC: In the latter half of the summer, I started to hear rumblings that Bell was slowing down their fibre rollout for whatever reason. Something that as I have said previously was giving them a competitive advantage against Rogers. Now I wrote a story about this where Bell told me that they had “nothing to announce” at that time. But that changed a couple of months later when Bell announced that they were cutting spending and blamed the CRTC for it due to a decision from the CRTC that Bell didn’t like. Effectively Bell was holding Canadians hostage to get the CRTC to fold up like a cheap suit. And that is pretty low. Bell really needs to check themselves because this is the sort of thing that might bite them in 2024 as consumers don’t like to be held hostage.
Rogers Has Email Issues That Are Still Ongoing: What started as a general outage with Rogers Internet offering that happened back in March has evolved into a situation where users of Rogers email service (in other words they have a @Rogers.com address) can’t get their email on any device or application that they choose. And that has dragged on for months without resolution, and frustrated their customers to no end. This is happening in part due to the fact that Rogers requires users to create App Specific Passwords via Rogers Member Center on each program or device that an email address is used on. The creation of new app specific passwords doesn’t work and existing app specific passwords appear to have been deleted in many cases. That pretty much breaks your applications that rely on them. Rogers has blamed everyone from Microsoft, Apple, to the tooth fairy for these issues. And they’ve also suggested that the workaround for this which is using their webmail portal is an acceptable workaround. Which it isn’t if you’re used to using a real email client like Microsoft Outlook. Let’s see if Rogers cares enough about their customers to fix this in 2024. In the meantime, your best bet is to take this advice and not use the email provided by your ISP.
Casetify Becomes Copy And Pastetify: Phone case maker Casetify gets caught in hysterical fashion copying the work of competitor Dbrand. The TL:DR on this is that Casetify literally copy and pasted the designs from Dbrand’s teardown skins onto their own cases. And when I say literally, I really mean it. Here’s the story that I wrote about this here. What made it worse is the fact that Casetify responded to this by saying that they are a “bastion of originality” which is laughable. And everybody on the planet called them on it. And then they were caught also stealing stuff from iFixit. The net result is that Casetify is getting sued, and sued big by Dbrand. Honestly, Casetify needs to get taken to the cleaners here legally. So, while I order a new Dbrand skin for my MacBook Pro, I will be watching Casetify getting pwned in court 2024. Because they deserve to get pwned.
Apple Gets Gets Caught Violating A Pair Of Patents: Late in the year, the ITO has nailed Apple for violating a pair of patents held by a company by Masimo that are related to the blood oxygen sensor in the Apple Watch. That caused sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 briefly. The whole thing is due to go back to court in the new year. But it will be interesting to see if Apple simply fights this for as long as they can, or if they simply pay off Masimo to make this go away.
AI Is A Thing: Whether it’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot, or Grok, AI became mainstream in a big hurry this year. Both for good and bad reasons. That means that 2024 is going to see more use of AI. Both for good and bad reasons. And that’s scary.
Threat Actors Pwn All The Things: 2023 beat 2022 in terms of the scale and effects of hacks. And that is frightening because it leaves us all unsafe. So much so that it is difficult to not be directly affected by a threat actor pwning something or some company. In 2024 this needs to change or there is truly no hope for us.
Indian Scammers Run Wild: I have spent way more time than I ever have coming to the rescue of people who have been scammed or almost scammed by scammers based in India. And the problem is getting worse in my opinion. At the same time, I’ve been spending time working with community groups here in Toronto to educate people in terms of not getting scammed. Because I believe education is part of the solution to this problem. The real solution is for India to do more to make the country less hospitable to scammers. Or put another way, they need to put these people in jail for a very long time. While I would like to see that happen in 2024, I am not holding my breath and I am preparing to deal with a lot of more riding to the rescue.
And now for some stats. The top ten countries that visited my blog in 2023 are:
In all almost just over 1.41 million page views were served up this year. And that’s despite the fact that I have largely stopped cross posting on Twitter in 2023 except when I want to get a brand’s attention. Instead, I’ve moved to cross posting on Mastodon. Thus proving that Twitter is less relevant than ever before. Sorry (not sorry) Elon Musk.
And in terms of the top ten stories that were viewed this year:
I find it interesting that seven of the top ten stories are related to Bell and their Internet service. Clearly there is a lot of interest from users and want to be users of Bell’s Internet service. Perhaps Bell should take note of that. Particularly of #10 where a Bell tech took out my service and I had to fight to get it back online on the same day. Which only seemed fair to me as I was taken offline due to Bell. Which is another way of saying that Bell needs to work on their customer service. Of the rest of the stories, I find it interesting that a Roku story related to Apple Fitness+ made the list. It’s interesting because this was a story from 2 years ago. That implies that people are still finding out about this feature. Two stories about fraud made the list along with a story about a broken ASUS Zen WiFi XT8 update made the list. Thus it shows the diversity of what readers are interested in.
Now if you have something that you think that should be on this list, leave a comment with your thoughts as I am interested in hearing what you think.
So since switching to Freedom Mobile, I’ve had the chance to do some basic speed testing of their 5G speeds. But before getting to what speeds I got, let me throw this out there. I wrote this some time ago about the fact that up to a certain point, the speed that you have doesn’t matter as nothing can really leverage that speed. So all of these telcos who are advertising how fast their mobile speeds are really doesn’t matter because nothing on your phone can leverage this speed. Having said that, I am sure that there’s a certain amount of bragging rights for a telco if they have the fastest speeds around.
Now with that out of the way, here’s what I got during my brief testing of Freedom Mobile’s speeds. This is an example of a speed test result that I got:
I also did testing in a variety of places around Toronto and got speeds as low as 47.9 Mbps downstream in downtown Toronto, and as high as 112 Mbps downstream in Central Etobicoke. And these speeds that I am seeing are more than enough to stream a video or do a video call for example. Pages on the web browser of your choice will load fast as well. Thus I doubt that you’re going to be lacking anything. And keep in mind that Freedom Mobile is in the process of expanding their 5G network over the next two years beyond their current footprint of Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and surrounding areas. So while you shouldn’t purchase a product or service based on what might happen in the future, I think it’s safe to say that if I did these tests two years from now, these speeds will be faster. How much faster is still an open question though.
Finally, let me touch on coverage briefly as I am going to go down that rabbit hole after I have had a chance to do more testing. Freedom Mobile has its own 5G and 4G LTE networks. But while that coverage is in areas like the Greater Toronto Area, most of the Golden Horseshoe, and in a lot of places like Barrie, Kitchener, and the like, is still being built out for the most part. For example Peterborough and Ottawa for example have 4G LTE service only. Meanwhile Toronto and Barrie for example have 5G service. For everywhere else that isn’t covered by Freedom Mobile 5G or 4G LTE networks, the company relies on their “nationwide” network which means that Freedom Mobile customers roam onto Bell, or Rogers. You can get a look at Freedom Mobile’s coverage here. But it pays to check what their coverage in relation to where you tend to go is before you sign up to see if it will meet your needs.
So why does coverage matter? If you’re in a 5G area like I am, you’re more likely to get faster speeds than you would in a 4G LTE area, or on their “nationwide” network. But that remains to be tested. Which I will be doing over the next few days. Stay tuned for that.
So on Wednesday night we switched to Freedom Mobile. We’ve had no issues so far and I’ve done some basic testing on their 5G speed that I will report on tomorrow. But we’ve found out that we can get more for our money with a little legwork. Here’s what we were quoted when we signed up:
30GB of data in Canada and US for $34 a month for 2 years.
$10 for our Apple Watches
$4 for visual voice mail
Now relative to what we were getting from TELUS which was 6GB for $70, this was a good deal from Freedom Mobile. But it turns out that Freedom Mobile had an even better deal. They had a special on Boxing Day that gave you 50GB for the same price. And that deal was extended to the entirety of Boxing Week apparently. Now to be clear, my wife and I are extremely unlikely to burn through 50GB in a month. But seeing as it’s not costing us any more than 30GB, we figured that there is no downside here. So why not grab this deal?
Here’s how we got it.
First you need to be able to log into your Freedom Mobile account via login.freedommobile.ca. Or put another way, if you just switched over, you should make sure that you set this up immediately.
Once you log in, you’ll hit this page:
You have to make sure that you pick the right phone number in the top right if you have multiple lines. Then you need to click “Change My Plan”. That takes you to this page:
If you look at the right side of this screen shot, you’ll see the “Boxing Week Offer” of $34 a month which is normally $44 a month for 50GB of US and Canada data. Click on it and choose it. That will take you to a page that will prompt you to agree to the terms and conditions and accept these changes. If everything goes right, you’ll get a text message within 10 seconds from 611 saying that you’ve changed your plan.
Now if you’re not able to make this change via their website, you can reach out to Freedom Mobile on Twitter from 9AM to 1 AM Eastern Time, or by WhatsApp at +1-647-700-2435. Or you can Message FreedomMobile on FaceBook. Or you can do any of the following:
Dial 611 from a subscribed device on Freedom Mobile
Dial 1-877-946-3184 from any North American phone
Dial +1-647-700-2435 from any phone outside North America
NOTE: I did not see any mention of any additional charges when I did this. So I assume that there are none. But that’s an assumption and not fact. If anyone has additional insight on this, please let me know in the comments below.
You might want to hurry as I suspect by Saturday or Sunday, this deal will be gone. To be clear, I’m not shilling for Freedom Mobile. But I am interested in making sure that you get the best deal that you possibly can during this holiday season.
As large language models and generative AI become the next big platform chefs and the new form of communication between business and their customers, new cyber risks will become prevalent. These advanced tools are susceptible to sophisticated attacks such as prompt injection where attackers can manipulate the model to extract sensitive information or generate unauthorized content. Instances like these highlighted in recent media coverage show the need for security protocols for AI communications, especially as large financial institutions such as Morgan Stanley integrate these technologies into client-facing services like wealth management advising.
In 2024, the widespread adoption of SaaS applications will present significant cybersecurity challenges as businesses become increasingly dependent on systems like Workday, Salesforce, and Google Drive to run every part of their business effectively. There will be a heightened focus on cybersecurity tools that will help protect these environments from high-risk scenarios where attackers gain access to customer’s sensitive data and help employees respond to incidents faster.
CISOs begin to treat regulation as an opportunity instead of a burden – The White House National Cyber Security Strategy got a surprising reaction from many CISOs; many felt it didn’t go far enough. Usually, the thought of the government introducing new regulatory changes makes the industry nervous. But as many CISOs have experienced unless there is a law on the books they can show to the board – see GDPR as an example – some companies will opt out of approving the budgets necessary to protect the business. CISOs can leverage new rules, such as the SEC’s recent cyber disclosure laws, to start putting a tangible price tag on the cost of fines from non-compliance with incident reporting and disclosure included with the increase in cyber risk.
CISOs become more guarded as the level of accountability rises – CEOs are required to sign off on their company’s financial statements. The days are not far off when CISOs must sign off on a company’s cybersecurity program. They will have to attest that the company is secure and that they are doing everything they are required to do to exercise due care in the protection of their computer assets and company, customer, and partner data. This will extend to the security of technology that can cause physical harm, including loss of life, like OT assets in industrial organizations or IoT assets in healthcare, like medical devices. When this happens, there will be a shift in the role of the CISO. To not be the sole name in a lawsuit, CISOs will need new reporting structures and safeguards. We may even start to see the role of CISO and CIO merge to make those responsible for information systems also in charge of security. In this new role, CISOs can’t be overruled for budget requests by the CIO, and CIOs can better implement a secure-by-default approach across the organization.
With the evolving SEC regulations and increased scrutiny on the board level, security leaders will be held more accountable for their roles. Board members must manage cyber risk as part of fiduciary/oversight responsibilities. This will require stricter and quicker reporting as well as a deeper understanding of materiality. To support the requirements, tabletop exercises can be a valuable resource. The new SEC rules also mean it’s crucial to prepare your team’s IR capabilities and invest in training.
Increased budgets for cyber talent development and retention – Cybersecurity talent and development in the cyber workforce will receive more financial support. There is still a disconnect between open jobs and the cyber shortage as people coming out of school with degrees lack hands-on experience required by employers.
Impact of AI – The cybersecurity landscape will significantly change with more of an emphasis on human-centric defense strategies and advanced technologies. AI and machine learning (ML) will become important in identifying and mitigating threats, which will allow practitioners to focus more on strategic decision-making, creating a level playing field with threat actors. Using virtual environments will see improvements in user experience while the importance of human elements such as training and awareness will become more recognized.
Open source, software bill of materials – Given that a significant portion of code in products is from open source libraries, this will remain a substantial attack surface. We will continue to see attacks targeting vulnerable libraries and weak points, like SolarWinds, Log4j, Citrix bleed, and other similar breaches. Attacks will focus on where they can have the greatest impact
Skills gap in cybersecurity – While there is no lack these days of entry-level cyber candidates, there is a lack of mid-level or the next step above entry-level candidates. Companies will have to shift more resources toward their own workforce development and training programs to enable their entry-level people to fill those gaps. Hopefully, there will be an emphasis on internal training and development programs to bridge this skills gap.
Posted in Commentary with tags Apple on December 29, 2023 by itnerd
Clearly Apple is not counting on the courts to rescue Apple from the Apple Watch patent mess that they find themselves in. According to a report, here’s what Apple is working on:
Winning the brief stay fulfilled one part of Apple’s multi-pronged approach to recover from the ITC’s decision. Apple’s plans for a comprehensive solution to the patent fight also include redeveloped software now submitted to a US customs agency, that could allow it to sell non-infringing versions of the devices as soon as Jan 12, all while continuing to appeal the ITC loss.
This is an interesting approach. I say that because Masimo’s CEO has said that the patents that Apple violated are hardware patents. Perhaps I am missing something, but how do you fix a hardware issue with software? I guess we’re going to find out because if Apple isn’t going to pay off Masimo, and if they lose in court on appeal, this software fix is their only option.
Posted in Commentary with tags Hacked on December 29, 2023 by itnerd
Millions of people across the U.S. had their information exposed in a ransomware attack on Austin-based ESO Solutions, a provider of software to hospitals and emergency medical services.
In documents filed with state regulators, ESO Solutions said it “detected and stopped” a “sophisticated” ransomware attack on September 28. They subsequently discovered on October 23 that the hackers had in fact accessed and taken client health PPI located on one of the impacted systems. The data theft occurred before the gang encrypted “some of its computer systems.”
“This incident impacted data belonging to patients associated with ESO’s customers, including certain personal information and medical treatment information. This information included names, dates of birth, injury type, injury date, treatment date, treatment type and, in some cases, social security numbers,” ESO stated in the breach notification and posted on their website.
ESO told regulators in Maine that 2.7 million people were affected by the data breach. They were able to restore systems and operations thanks to having backups. The company also notified the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) as well as several state attorneys general.
The Maine AG notification confirmed the following healthcare providers as impacted in the ransomware attack:
Mississippi Baptist Medical Center
Community Health Systems Merit Health Biloxi
Merit Health River Oaks
ESO EMS Agency
Forrest Health Forrest General Hospital
Alaska Regional Hospital
HCA Healthcare Alaska Regional Hospital
Memorial Hospital at Gulfport Health System
Providence St Joseph Health (Providence Kodiak Island Medical Center)
Providence Alaska Medical Center
Universal Health Services (UHS) Manatee Memorial Hospital
“Ransomware attacks on hospitals have become a serious threat to public health and safety. These attacks not only disrupt the delivery of essential medical services, postponing critical surgeries and treatments and putting patients’ lives at risk, but also compromise the security of sensitive patient information. The impact of these attacks can be, as they can leave hospitals struggling to recover their data and regain control of their systems. Whether the ransom is paid or not, the costs in dollars and lost patient care severely cripple these already struggling institutions.
“Hospitals and healthcare organizations are particularly attractive targets for cybercriminals, and their reliance on technology to manage everything from patient records to surgical equipment makes them uniquely vulnerable. This is compounded by their limited resources to invest in cybersecurity measures. But with ransomware continuing to be a significant threat to these organizations, investments must be made to contain these attacks, eliminating the need to resort to a complete shutdown of IT systems, and healthcare services.”
“The threat of cyber attacks on the healthcare sector is greater than it’s ever been, and this includes all downstream providers, as was the case with ESO Solutions. Attackers often consider these supply chain providers to be easier targets than the hospitals themselves.
“The numbers show empirically that the growth of successful Ransomware Attacks on all healthcare providers is growing faster than any other industry. This is in part due to a shift to the threat landscape. Ransomware attacks have seen a 700% increase in the last year in double extortion. The threat actor not only encrypts the data and then extorts you for the decryption key, but they also exfiltrate the data and threaten to release it if you don’t pay a ransom. This attack on ESO Solutions saw attackers first exfiltrate the data and then perform encryption of systems.
“A patient’s complete medical history is among the most sensitive data to a person that exists. The tried-and-true preventive solutions are still a must. Next gen endpoint security, Multifactor Authentication, Zero Trust and the like. However, no defensive stack can be 100% effective. With a determined threat actor and such a sprawling attack surface it is not “if” you’ll be hit it’s “when”. Instead of just relying on prevention to stop an attack they also need to plan for the inevitable. They need to have Ransomware Containment, that can contain Ransomware Attack once it starts hitting the critical infrastructure, they need disaster plans, business continuity plans and air-gapped backups.”
This is bad. And in 2024 it is highly likely that we will see events like this, or worse. And that is beyond bad.
Here’s some inside info on how things work on this blog. My wife works with me to run this blog as I often am too busy working with my clients to get content online. So she will sometimes post stories for me. Especially if it’s breaking news. She also monitors the Twitter and Mastodon accounts and sometimes she will post stuff on those platforms as well. Recently, she had a conversation with some of her friends about how much their telco costs were, and the fact that getting a better deal from whomever your telco happens to be at that moment is next to impossible. That prompted her to post this on Twitter:
Serious question.
Why is it that Canadian telcos like @Bell , @Rogers, and @Telus value your business and give you great deals AFTER you leave them rather than while you're still with them?
So my wife took this conversation to her DM’s, and after some back and forth she got what she thought what was a commitment to get a call back from the TELUS loyalty group within three business days. The thing was that three business days passed and nothing happened. Thus she posted this:
Several days ago, @Telus said that someone would be phoning me to "go over options" to see if we can lower our bill. But that hasn't happened. That's very disappointing and I'm having my partner look at another carrier to save money. https://t.co/HNzA2cJPs6
TELUS to their credit, did try to call her twice after that was posted. Once she was in a meeting so she wasn’t able to take the call. The second time she picked up the phone but there was nobody on the other end. What made matters worse is that when she checked her voice mail, she found out that their loyalty department is outbound only as that information was in the voice mails that they left. Meaning that you can’t call them back. While I get why they do that, which is to avoid being flooded by people who want to lower their cell phone bills, it’s a #Fail as it creates this sort of situation where a customer who does want to work with a telco being unable to get in touch with said telco. Thus the customer left frustrated and starts seeking other options as a result. And that’s when she highlighted to me what our cell phone bill was with TELUS:
Each of our iPhones cost us $70 a month and that gave us 6GB of data.
Each iPhone has Visual Voicemail which costs $5 a month.
Each of our Apple Watches were $10 a month with a bonus of 1GB of data.
So the net result was $85 a month for each our phones with TELUS. That isn’t cheap, and we don’t get a lot for our money seeing as we were only getting 6 – 7 GB of data. That started a discussion between us as to where we could save money. Because let’s be honest. Everything is more expensive these days. Which means that people are going to look to save money wherever they can. And if Canadian telcos were smart, they would work to help their customers to save money rather than have them bolt to another carrier and then have to try to get them back later. Now I get why telcos do this. Their shareholders only care about churn (the number of people who leave a telco which should be less than 1% per quarter), average revenue per user, and the number of customers a telco acquires in a given quarter. The retention of customers isn’t top of mind with telcos unless their churn rate skyrockets. But I would argue this. The best customer for a telco to have is the one they currently have because they already have them. And if it costs them a couple of bucks via a better deal to keep them, then that is a better option in my mind versus having them leave and either offer a “winback” deal to get that customer back, or acquiring a new customer from another telco via a promotional offer of some sort to entice them to switch.
Now all of this sounds like we’re trashing TELUS. The fact is that we’ve had no problems with them to speak of in terms of service. As in being able use our iPhones and Apple Watches when we need to and where we need to. And the very few times we’ve called them, the customer service has been great. But the fact is that my wife and I simply need to pay less for our cell phone service. And clearly there are better deals out there to be had.
Enter Freedom Mobile.
Now we were willing to give Freedom Mobile a shot because there was zero chance we were going back to Rogers due to their massive outage that basically took down the country in 2022. And we were never going to bundle all of our services with Bell because we want diversity with our telco services. In other words, some of our services with one telco, and other services with another telco. That way if a Rogers type situation happens again, something should still work. Thus Freedom Mobile got a serious look from us. And they had a deal during boxing week that got our attention. Which was this:
30GB of data in Canada and US for $34 a month for 2 years.
$10 for our Apple Watches
$4 for visual voice mail
That’s $48 a month for each of our phones and Apple Watches. A net savings of $41 a month for each of us. And we get more for the money we do spend with Freedom Mobile in terms of far more data. After doing some research in terms of coverage and service quality on Reddit, we felt comfortable enough to pull the trigger on this. Yes we’d likely have to revisit this in two years, but that’s not a today problem. Saving money is today’s problem.
PRO TIP: If you’re going to pull the trigger on Freedom Mobile, your best bet is to go to a corporate location to get the best service based on the research that I did on Reddit. Now I will say that this isn’t 100% guaranteed as I will illustrate in a moment. But it’s truly your best bet as the consensus on Reddit is that dealership stores which may display Freedom Mobile signage aren’t owned by Freedom Mobile. Thus they apparently have been known to play fast and loose with the truth to make a sale.
Type in your location. Then on the left side, where the location results are, choose “warranty and repair”. That will isolate all the corporate stores as evidenced by this screenshot:
Now originally my wife and I went to the Sherway Gardens location as we had to do some other things in that mall. Thus it was one stop shopping. But when we started talking to the staff there, they said that Apple Watch plans are not something that Freedom Mobile offers and the only company that does is “TELUS and maybe Bell”. Even when I showed them Freedom Mobile’s website on my phone which clearly lists Apple Watch plans as an option, they denied it was even a thing. Thus we left and went to the Cloverdale Mall location. Which is where I posted this to Twitter:
Hey @FreedomMobile some free advice. The staff at yes Sherway Gardens location claims that you don’t offer Apple Watch plans. I know that’s not true and if we weren’t determined to leave @telus we would have pulled the plug. Instead we went to another location and it worked out.
Anyway, when we worked with the staff at the Freedom Mobile kiosk at Cloverdale Mall, they really worked with us to make sure that we understood everything before we did anything. And within 20 minutes, we had an account set up as well as two SIM cards. We went home and less than one hour after we got home our numbers were ported over from TELUS as we were notified of that via a text message that we got shortly after we inserted our Freedom Mobile SIM cards into our respective phones. At that point we were able to create an online account where we were able to add visual voice mail. Then we were able to use the Watch app on our iPhones to add a Freedom Mobile plan to our Apple Watches. Finally, we enabled WiFi calling on our phones to give more robust options in terms of cell coverage when we are on WiFi in an area with limited cell coverage.
Total time invested including driving from home to Sherway Gardens, then to Cloverdale Mall, then to home to finish setting up everything: Just under 2 hours
Other than the staff at the Freedom Mobile kiosk at Sherway Gardens who clearly didn’t have a clue about Freedom Mobile’s offerings, the process was pain free. One bonus is that Freedom Mobile waived our connection fees. That’s an extra $90 that we’re saving.
Now I really have to do some testing on Freedom Mobile’s coverage. But the thing that I noticed right off the top was that we were getting a strong 5G signal inside our condo. This was never the case with TELUS. I’ll be interested to see how that translates into coverage and speed in the areas that I travel. Thus I’ll spend the next few days doing some testing this with my iPhone 14 Pro and let you know what I find out. I’ll also report back on any issues that we have as I’m typing this less than 24 hours after we made the switch. While we’ve had no issues so far, it is possible that we might come across something negative (or positive for that matter) that is worth reporting on. Stay tuned for that as well. And if you have any questions on our experience, drop us a comment and we’ll do our best to answer them.
From the “Expect to see more of this coming soon” file comes news that that The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for using its work to train their AI models. The argument is that doing so infringes on their copyright:
The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.
The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.” It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times.
Microsoft declined to comment on the case. OpenAI did not immediately provide a comment.
The lawsuit could test the emerging legal contours of generative A.I. technologies — so called for the text, images and other content they can create after learning from large data sets — and could carry major implications for the news industry. The Times is among a small number of outlets that have built successful business models from online journalism, but dozens of newspapers and magazines have been hobbled by readers’ migration to the internet.
OpenAI and Microsoft who have an alliance as Microsoft has invested in OpenAI are the prime targets for this sort of thing as they have the deepest pockets. But I fully expect other media companies to start filing lawsuits against any AI company that does anything similar to this. Oh, in case you were wondering, these lawsuits won’t likely include Apple which for the record wants to cut a deal to license content to train its AI models. Which is the correct thing to do in my opinion.
Posted in Commentary with tags Apple on December 27, 2023 by itnerd
In a plot twist that I am sure is making Apple very happy, an appeals court has paused the ban on Apple Watch sales in the US. Reuters has the details:
Apple scored a victory on Wednesday as a U.S. appeals court paused a government commission’s import ban on some of its popular Apple smartwatches following a patent dispute with medical-technology firm Masimo.
The tech giant had filed an emergency request for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to halt the order after appealing the U.S. International Trade Commission’s (ITC) decision that it had infringed Masimo’s patents.
The full decision is here. But here is the TL:DR. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has granted an interim stay from January 5, 2024 to January 10, 2024 while the court reviews Apple’s request for a full stay for the length of the appeal. The International Trade Commission in turn now has until January 10 to file its response to Apple’s request for a full stay while the appeal plays out. However, this does not mean that Apple can start selling Apple Watch 9 and Ultra 2 models immediately. That’s because US Customs And Border Protection has to take this court order and put processes in place to re-allow imports of Apple Watch products into the US. Assuming that things don’t come to a screeching halt again. But all things considered, this is still a win of sorts for Apple.
UPDATE: To clarify, Apple can now sell Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 until at least January 10, 2024 where another extension would need to be granted.
Posted in Commentary with tags Apple on December 26, 2023 by itnerd
To the shock of nobody, Apple is appealing the ban of the Apple Watch in the US. The company spoke to Reuters and had this to say:
An Apple spokesperson said the company has appealed the ban to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.
“We strongly disagree with the USITC decision and resulting exclusion order, and are taking all measures to return Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 to customers in the U.S. as soon as possible,” Apple said in a statement on Tuesday.
They can strongly disagree all they want. But they’re in a pretty bad spot. Clearly Apple who has a history of “Sherlocking” tech has got caught doing so. You have to wonder what Apple will do next if this appeal fails. I guess we’re about to find out.
2023: Year In Review
Posted in Commentary on December 31, 2023 by itnerdAt this time of year I like to look back over the past 365 days and pick out the stories that really got my attention. This year the planet returned to normal…. More or less. Having said that, here’s what happened in tech this year:
Twitter Goes Into A Death Spiral Because Of Elon Musk: The number one story this year had to be Elon Musk taking Twitter on a suicide mission that it will not recover from. Whether it’s because Elon drove away all those who would be willing to pay to advertise on the platform due to his decisions or his actions, throwing away years of brand equity by renaming Twitter to “X”, letting Twitter turn into a hellscape of racism among other evils, or it’s because of the fact that the EU along with FTC are looking to give him a legal beat down, 2024 is likely to be one where Elon gets what’s coming to him. Not to mention that Twitter will go from dying to dead.
Rogers Merges With Shaw: The unpopular merger between Rogers and Shaw happened this year. As part of this Freedom Mobile who was owned by Shaw had to be sold to Videotron. Now that might have made the Canadian government happy, lots of consumers were not happy as the assumption was that Rogers would find new and creative ways to screw their customers over. It’s a cynical view, but 2024 will illustrate if that view is correct or not.
Bell Decides To Hold Canadians Hostage To Get A Better Deal From The CRTC: In the latter half of the summer, I started to hear rumblings that Bell was slowing down their fibre rollout for whatever reason. Something that as I have said previously was giving them a competitive advantage against Rogers. Now I wrote a story about this where Bell told me that they had “nothing to announce” at that time. But that changed a couple of months later when Bell announced that they were cutting spending and blamed the CRTC for it due to a decision from the CRTC that Bell didn’t like. Effectively Bell was holding Canadians hostage to get the CRTC to fold up like a cheap suit. And that is pretty low. Bell really needs to check themselves because this is the sort of thing that might bite them in 2024 as consumers don’t like to be held hostage.
Rogers Has Email Issues That Are Still Ongoing: What started as a general outage with Rogers Internet offering that happened back in March has evolved into a situation where users of Rogers email service (in other words they have a @Rogers.com address) can’t get their email on any device or application that they choose. And that has dragged on for months without resolution, and frustrated their customers to no end. This is happening in part due to the fact that Rogers requires users to create App Specific Passwords via Rogers Member Center on each program or device that an email address is used on. The creation of new app specific passwords doesn’t work and existing app specific passwords appear to have been deleted in many cases. That pretty much breaks your applications that rely on them. Rogers has blamed everyone from Microsoft, Apple, to the tooth fairy for these issues. And they’ve also suggested that the workaround for this which is using their webmail portal is an acceptable workaround. Which it isn’t if you’re used to using a real email client like Microsoft Outlook. Let’s see if Rogers cares enough about their customers to fix this in 2024. In the meantime, your best bet is to take this advice and not use the email provided by your ISP.
Casetify Becomes Copy And Pastetify: Phone case maker Casetify gets caught in hysterical fashion copying the work of competitor Dbrand. The TL:DR on this is that Casetify literally copy and pasted the designs from Dbrand’s teardown skins onto their own cases. And when I say literally, I really mean it. Here’s the story that I wrote about this here. What made it worse is the fact that Casetify responded to this by saying that they are a “bastion of originality” which is laughable. And everybody on the planet called them on it. And then they were caught also stealing stuff from iFixit. The net result is that Casetify is getting sued, and sued big by Dbrand. Honestly, Casetify needs to get taken to the cleaners here legally. So, while I order a new Dbrand skin for my MacBook Pro, I will be watching Casetify getting pwned in court 2024. Because they deserve to get pwned.
Apple Gets Gets Caught Violating A Pair Of Patents: Late in the year, the ITO has nailed Apple for violating a pair of patents held by a company by Masimo that are related to the blood oxygen sensor in the Apple Watch. That caused sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 briefly. The whole thing is due to go back to court in the new year. But it will be interesting to see if Apple simply fights this for as long as they can, or if they simply pay off Masimo to make this go away.
AI Is A Thing: Whether it’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot, or Grok, AI became mainstream in a big hurry this year. Both for good and bad reasons. That means that 2024 is going to see more use of AI. Both for good and bad reasons. And that’s scary.
Threat Actors Pwn All The Things: 2023 beat 2022 in terms of the scale and effects of hacks. And that is frightening because it leaves us all unsafe. So much so that it is difficult to not be directly affected by a threat actor pwning something or some company. In 2024 this needs to change or there is truly no hope for us.
Indian Scammers Run Wild: I have spent way more time than I ever have coming to the rescue of people who have been scammed or almost scammed by scammers based in India. And the problem is getting worse in my opinion. At the same time, I’ve been spending time working with community groups here in Toronto to educate people in terms of not getting scammed. Because I believe education is part of the solution to this problem. The real solution is for India to do more to make the country less hospitable to scammers. Or put another way, they need to put these people in jail for a very long time. While I would like to see that happen in 2024, I am not holding my breath and I am preparing to deal with a lot of more riding to the rescue.
And now for some stats. The top ten countries that visited my blog in 2023 are:
In all almost just over 1.41 million page views were served up this year. And that’s despite the fact that I have largely stopped cross posting on Twitter in 2023 except when I want to get a brand’s attention. Instead, I’ve moved to cross posting on Mastodon. Thus proving that Twitter is less relevant than ever before. Sorry (not sorry) Elon Musk.
And in terms of the top ten stories that were viewed this year:
I find it interesting that seven of the top ten stories are related to Bell and their Internet service. Clearly there is a lot of interest from users and want to be users of Bell’s Internet service. Perhaps Bell should take note of that. Particularly of #10 where a Bell tech took out my service and I had to fight to get it back online on the same day. Which only seemed fair to me as I was taken offline due to Bell. Which is another way of saying that Bell needs to work on their customer service. Of the rest of the stories, I find it interesting that a Roku story related to Apple Fitness+ made the list. It’s interesting because this was a story from 2 years ago. That implies that people are still finding out about this feature. Two stories about fraud made the list along with a story about a broken ASUS Zen WiFi XT8 update made the list. Thus it shows the diversity of what readers are interested in.
Now if you have something that you think that should be on this list, leave a comment with your thoughts as I am interested in hearing what you think.
Happy new year!
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