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Handover Phist is now offering home and small business computer and networking services in the Tri-Cities. Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, and Port Moody.
Not since former vice-president Al Gore “invented” the Internet has technology been as hot a talking point in the corridors of power in Washington.
President-elect Barack Obama has raised it to a new level, to the point where aides say he wants to become the first American President to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office.
He also wants to be the first president to have a national tech czar.
In addition to his BlackBerry addiction, the Facebook groups and iPhone application that helped him get elected and his decision to broadcast the weekly presidential radio addresses on YouTube, Mr. Obama has pledged to make issues of net neutrality, copyright protection, online privacy and cybersecurity hallmarks of his presidency.
The question is, who's going to handle that file?
Wall Street wants to know who's taking over as Treasury Secretary and other prestige posts in an Obama administration, but the tech community is abuzz over who will get the nod for a new cabinet-level post of chief technology officer.
Some say Mr. Obama will choose an academic with a background in Internet and technology policy issues, such as Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig – who founded the school's Center for Internet and Society – or Edward Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.
Others believe Mr. Obama will draw from the corporate community to demonstrate his commitment to funding green technology research, computer science education and high-tech job creation programs.
Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt and Xerox Corp. CEO Anne Mulcahy are both on the president-elect's transition team, but neither are likely to want to the post. Observers say Google “Chief Internet Evangelist” Vinton Cerf – known in some circles as the “father of the Internet” – and John Doerr, a long-time Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is good friends with Apple Inc. boss Steve Jobs, are more likely choices.
“He wants to be the Internet president,” said Tom Keenan, a University of Calgary professor who teaches computer science and environmental design.
BOSTON — The music industry's courtroom campaign against people who share songs online is coming under counterattack.
A Harvard Law School professor has launched a constitutional assault against a federal copyright law at the heart of the industry's aggressive strategy, which has wrung payments from thousands of song-swappers since 2003.
The professor, Charles Nesson, has come to the defence of a Boston University graduate student targeted in one of the music industry's lawsuits. By taking on the case, Dr. Nesson hopes to challenge the basis for the suit, and all others like it.
Dr. Nesson argues that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group – the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA – carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court.
Repair work to the world's biggest particle collider may take until early summer and cost at least 25 million Swiss francs, or $25.6 million Cdn, its operator said Monday.
Fixing an electrical failure that shut down the Large Hadron Collider in September is likely to take longer than initial estimates, according to a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by the French acronym CERN.
Spokesman James Gillies is now estimating the restart of the massive physics experiment will be at the end of June or later.
"If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer," he said.
The collider, which lies in an underground facility near Geneva, Switzerland, is designed to push protons, using a ring of super-cooled magnets, to speeds and energies never before reached under controlled conditions, and crash them into one another to create and detect a host of new particles.
Built at a cost $3.8 billion and with a total expected cost of over $9 billion, it is expected to be the most powerful tool yet for physicists hoping to uncover the secrets behind the laws of the universe, both on the tiny scale of quantum mechanics and the huge domain of galaxies and black holes.
The ambitious project has been plagued, however, by a number of delays even before its brief running in September.
The collider was shut down after nine days of operation on Sept. 19 when the meltdown of a small electrical connection caused the release of a large amount of liquid helium into the 27-kilometre long tunnel, CERN officials said.
The magnets in the collider are cooled at temperatures near absolute zero to make them superconductive and thus better able to accelerate the particles to high speeds, but this means they must be warmed to normal temperatures before repair work can begin, a process that takes about a month.
OTTAWA — The global credit crunch has now become a full-blown and rapidly deepening financial crisis that central banks are scrambling to contain, analysts say.
With the U.S. Federal Reserve taking more extraordinary measures over the weekend to mitigate the crisis and set financial institutions on a more stable footing, markets are on edge, with a wary eye on the U.S. dollar, financial stocks, and credit conditions around the world.
“It is very important for everyone to understand that we are making the transition from crisis prevention to crisis management,” said David Rosenberg, chief North American economist for Merrill Lynch.
The Bank of England also moved quickly Monday morning, offering £5-billion in three-day securities to grease the wheels of the British banking system.
Friday's bailout of Bear Stearns, through a unique combination of help from J.P. Morgan Chase and the Fed, was followed on the weekend by a sudden announcement from the Fed of more flexible lending arrangements for brokerages.
The Fed also announced an inter-meeting cut in its discount rate — not its key interest rate, but one that helps determine the price at which financial institutions can access credit.
Then, on Sunday night, J.P. Morgan Chase said it would buy Bear Stearns for the rock-bottom price of $2 (U.S.) a share.
The DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet.
The non-participation of Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market, was the biggest stumbling block to the viability of the project. These are two of the most important companies in recent history - what's being decided now is whether they will be walled-garden, data-horders or truly open platforms tied into a larger ecosystem of innovation with respect for user rights and sensible policies about data. The Representatives
Google will be represented by Brad Fitzpatrick, the inventor of LiveJournal and one of the primary minds behind OpenID, the concept of the Social Graph and the Google-led OpenSocial platform. Facebook will be represented by Benjamin Ling, who today runs the Facebook platform. Ling defected from Google three months ago, where he ran Google Checkout, to join Facebook. Also joining the workgroup is Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, probably the catalyst for all of this after his company scraped Robert Scoble's Facebook account and set off a huge debate about Data Portability and privacy.
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Federal Communications Commission will investigate complaints that Comcast Corp. actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday.
A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data. Two groups also asked the FCC to fine the nation's No. 2 Internet provider $195,000 for every affected subscriber.
"Sure, we're going to investigate and make sure that no consumer is going to be blocked," Martin told an audience at the International Consumer Electronics Show.
In an investigation last year, The Associated Press found that Comcast in some cases hindered file sharing by subscribers who used BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing program. The findings, first reported Oct. 19, confirmed claims by users who also noticed interference with other file-sharing applications.
Comcast denies that it blocks file sharing, but acknowledged after the AP story that it was "delaying" some of the traffic between computers that share files. The company said the intervention was necessary to improve the surfing experience for the majority of its subscribers.
Peer-to-peer file sharing is a common way to illegally exchange copyright files, but companies are also rushing to utilize it for legal distribution of video and game content. If ISPs hinder or control that traffic, it makes them important gatekeepers of Internet content.
A University of Alberta researcher is calling on Canadian beer drinkers to go green and toss their energy-guzzling beer fridges, found in one of three households across the country.
"A reduction in the use of 'beer fridges' or a movement towards the use of newer and smaller energy-efficient models in Canada would lead to lower levels of energy use in the residential sector and, in some regions, lower emissions of greenhouse gases," says researcher Denise Young in the November issue of the journal Energy Policy. The study was commissioned by Natural Resources Canada.
Beer fridges tend to be older, vintage units that consumers keep to store beverages even after they've upgraded to a more energy-efficient model to store their food. In addition to costing the consumer as much as $150 a year to operate, the older appliances also place significant demands on energy resources, the study said.
According to the Canadian Appliance Manufacturers Association, a 1985 vintage fridge uses about 1060 kilowatt-hours of energy annually. By comparison, current Energy Star refrigerators use 380 to 440 kWh annually for large models and 275-300 kWh for smaller units.
Young suggests the energy savings would total 1,165.7 million kWh annually if a substantial number of Canadians threw out their beer fridges or upgraded to a newer model. The study notes the effect on greenhouse gas emissions would be insignificant in regions that rely on hydroelectric and nuclear electricity generation.
The study says financial incentives in Canada have not proved successful, while government-operated pickup programs have managed to educate and win over consumers.
To people who believe that computer hackers are nerds sequestered alone in a tiny basement typing away furiously on their keyboards, someone like Ira Winkler may come as a complete shock. Winkler began his career as an intelligence and security analyst for the U.S. National Security Agency and is now president of his own company, the Internet Security Advisors Group, and he spends more time smooth-talking receptionists and security guards than in front of a computer.
He has been dubbed a modern-day James Bond for his espionage-like tactics, which he uses in employ of major corporations as a "white-hat social engineer" — a hacker who breaks into a company both physically and technologically to test its security. Winkler was one of the keynote speakers at the first SecTor conference in Toronto on Nov. 20 and 21, which brought together numerous well-known white hats to share their thoughts and experiences with IT security professionals.
After his speech, Winkler spoke with CBCNews.ca about the dark art of hacking for the good guys.
Manalapan, NJ - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a Superior Court judge in New Jersey today to preserve the free speech rights of an anonymous blogger facing legal threats from local government officials.
The blogger, writing as "daTruthSquad" on a site hosted on Google's Blogspot service, has criticized a controversial lawsuit filed by the township of Manalapan, as well as the officials who decided to pursue the case. The township subpoenaed Google for "daTruthSquad's" identity -- as well as for any emails, blog drafts, and other information Google has about the blogger -- claiming that the defendant in the case is actually writing the posts. The defendant, however, has already sworn under penalty of perjury that he is not "daTruthSquad."
"Bloggers, as well as everyone else, have a First Amendment right to speak anonymously," said EFF Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "Litigants don't get a blank check to pry into the private lives of critics when they say things the litigants don't like. The fact that it is the government trying to abuse the discovery process makes this attempted invasion of privacy all the more repugnant."
In a motion to quash the subpoena filed today, EFF asked the court to block the township's attempt to uncover the identity of "daTruthSquad" and allow the blogger to continue to write about this or any other issue without being forced to identity him or herself.
"Attempts to intimidate critics into silence need to be confronted whenever and wherever they occur," said Zimmerman. "Governmental entities simply cannot be permitted to investigate critics because they dare to voice disapproval of public officials. It remains our sincere hope that the Township will abandon this intolerable legal strategy."
NEW YORK (AP) — Some users of the online hangout Facebook are complaining that its two-week-old marketing program is publicizing their purchases for friends to see.
Those users say they never noticed a small box that appears on a corner of their Web browsers following transactions at Fandango, Overstock and other online retailers. The box alerts users that information is about to be shared with Facebook unless they click on "No Thanks." It disappears after about 20 seconds, after which consent is assumed.
Users are given a second notice the next time they log on to Facebook, but they can easily miss it if they quickly click away to visit a friend's page or check e-mail.
"People should be given much more of a notice, much more of an alert," said Matthew Helfgott, 20, a college student who discovered his girlfriend just bought him black leather gloves from Overstock for Hanukkah. "She said she had no idea (information would be shared). She said it invaded her privacy."
The girlfriend was declining interviews, Helfgott said.
An Overstock.com Inc. spokesman said no one was immediately available for comment Wednesday.
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