The artificial pancreas -- a device which monitors blood glucose in patients with type 1 diabetes and then automatically adjusts levels of insulin entering the body -- is likely to be available by 2018, conclude authors of a new paper.
from ScienceDaily Headlines http://ift.tt/299kZ2e
via IFTTT
June 28, 2016 at 10:43PM: Milking won't stop until Canadian online shoppers speak up: Neil Macdonald - Politics - CBC News
In the hot lobbying firefight going on at the moment over the government's systematic stifling of international online shopping by Canadians, one important voice is absent: consumers.
This is not terribly unusual. Farmers seldom ask the cow for permission to milk it.
But Canadian consumers seem largely unaware that a significant matter of their economic self-interest is being decided by others, quietly and behind closed doors.
In the Canadian order of things, access to consumers is controlled by government, which grants pretty much exclusive privileges to Canada's business sector, in return for guarantees of stability and an unshaken status quo.
That is especially so with e-commerce, at least where the massive American and European marketplaces are concerned. So strictly is international online shopping controlled, and penalized, that Canadians seem to have largely given up trying.
Once Canada Customs tacks on protectionist duties and sales taxes and customs brokers add their fees, the package often becomes so expensive as to render the purchase pointless, which of course is the point.
If a Canadian buys something worth more than $20 Cdn from a U.S. website, a federal customs agent will intercept it, open it, delay it, add federal and provincial sales taxes, and, depending on the origin of the merchandise, perhaps pile on some duty charges. ( Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
Further, the Canadian threshold for taxing and applying duty to imports, known as de minimis, is a mere $20, the lowest in the developed world (the Americans don't tax or apply duty to any package worth less than $800 US, more than 40 times the Canadian limit).
This pax canadiana, designed mainly for the benefit of Canadian retailers and, they would argue, their employees, has been around forever, but a loose coalition of Americans and Canadians has for years been demanding that Canada open its online consumer market.
The group includes small and large Canadian businesses that buy and sell mostly with Americans, courier companies, big online retailers, resellers like Amazon and eBay, and even powerful American politicians.
"Canada's low de minimis threshold represents an unnecessary trade barrier between our two countries," wrote 12 U.S. senators in a letter to then-Canadian ambassador Gary Doer last year.
eBay Canada has been lobbying the federal government to raise its $20 threshold for charging Canadians cross-border duties and taxes on goods purchased online from the U.S. (REUTERS)
Now, the coalition believes it is close to success, perhaps as early as this autumn's budget update, but believes the key is galvanizing Canadian consumers.
"Either we start behaving like a trading bloc or we don't," says Maryscott Greenwood of the Canadian-American Business Council, which recently put up an online petition, sponsored by Liberal MP Sonia Sidhu (who has an Amazon facility in her Ontario riding), demanding that Canada "dump the duties and taxes."
The council says it has so far collected more than 1,000 signatures from Canadians, but lobbyists like Greenwood also know that Canadian consumers, unlike Americans, are relatively quiescent, and many seem to have accepted that being Canadian means paying more taxes and higher prices for just about everything.
Bruce Cran, president of the Consumers' Association of Canada, says his group simply cannot afford a seat at the Ottawa table, but is delighted to lay out the CAC position: it wants the Canadian de minimis threshold raised to at least $800, which is the American level, and which is also the amount of merchandise a Canadian can physically bring back across the border after 48 hours in the U.S.
In the past, says Cran, CAC had the ear of Stephen Harper's finance minister, Jim Flaherty, even though the Conservatives ultimately did nothing about the de minimis threshold. (A spokesman for interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose could not articulate the party's current position on the issue.)
Stepping gingerly
Nowadays, Cran says, his group is ignored, and business groups are allowed to speak for consumers.
"How does that make sense?"
That's not to say there aren't free traders in cabinet. International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland, for one, is seen as supportive of a sharp increase in the Canadian import threshold.
International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)
But the government, knowing the Retail Council of Canada's resolute opposition to any change in the status quo, and the fact that the RCC represents businesses employing 1.9 million workers, is stepping gingerly.
The RCC complains that unlike American retailers, Canadian merchants must collect sales taxes for Ottawa and the provinces, which puts them at an unfair disadvantage.
"We are listening to both sides intently," says Daniel Lauzon, spokesman for Finance Minister Bill Morneau.
"While we're broadly supportive of streamlining custom processing and importation requirements, when it comes to waiving duties and taxes, we need to carefully consider the impact that would have on Canadians and on Canadian businesses," he wrote later, in a magnificent bit of boilerplate echoed by Chrystia Freeland's spokesman.
Ad hoc
Andrea Stairs, CEO of eBay Canada, says the status quo is ad hoc and shambolic.
"There is no effective de minimis level right now," she says.
Canadian travellers are given a different limit than Canadian online shoppers. And while courier services faithfully turn every shipment over $20 to a customs broker, Canada Post is more haphazard, taking in shipments from the U.S. Postal Service and "literally dumping parcels on a conveyor belt" for Canada Customs to peruse.
As a result, consumers who insist a purchase be sent by post instead of courier can easily find a shipment worth much more than the $20 threshold on their doorstep, unopened, untaxed, with no duty or broker's fee added.
Andrea Stairs, CEO of eBay Canada, says packages worth more than the $20 Canadian threshold are more likely to have taxes and duty added if they're sent via courier rather than by post. (Canada Post)
Like the coalition behind the online petition, eBay badly wants the de minimis level raised. So does Amazon, but neither e-commerce giant is ready yet to use the power and reach of their websites to appeal directly to Canadian customers, which, says one lobbyist involved in the effort, "would mean game over by tomorrow morning," but which would also annoy the government.
"We've preferred working with the government to get it to move," says Stairs. "And we've done some scholarly work." (That's a reference to a recent C.D. Howe-reviewed study that basically concluded the government spends dollars to collect dimes for the sake of protecting retailers.)
Lauzon, the finance minister's spokesman, says the government intends to consult Canadians "widely" about the issue in the months to come.
And almost certainly, the subject will come up during the Three Amigos summit this week. The U.S. takes every opportunity to press for a de minimis increase.
But the reality is plain: unless Canadian consumers speak, and loudly, the milking machine will remain in place. There is no force more powerful than the status quo.
from CBC News http://ift.tt/29bqJrB
via IFTTT
June 22, 2016 at 01:04AM: Bright white LED street lights make you blue
from TreeHugger http://ift.tt/28NESqp
via IFTTT
June 13, 2016 at 01:38AM: BlackBerry: We're Here To Kick Ass And Sell Out Users To Law Enforcement. And We're (Almost) All Out Of Users.
Back in mid-April, it was discovered that Canadian law enforcement (along with Dutch authorities) had the ability to intercept and decrypt BlackBerry messages. This level of access suggested the company had turned over its encryption key to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. BlackBerry has only one encryption key for most customers -- which it maintains control of. Enterprise users, however, can set their own key, which cuts BlackBerry out of the loop completely.
BlackBerry CEO John Chen -- despite publicly criticizing Apple for locking law enforcement out of its phone with default encryption -- refused to provide specifics on this apparent breach of his customers' trust. Instead, he offered a non-denial denial, stating that BlackBerry stood by its "lawful access principles."
The matter was left unsettled… until now.
A specialized unit inside mobile firm BlackBerry has for years enthusiastically helped intercept user data — including BBM messages — to help in hundreds of police investigations in dozens of countries, a CBC News investigation reveals.
This unit, which cracks open BlackBerries for nearly anyone who comes asking, is very proud of its work.
One document obtained by CBC News reveals how the Waterloo, Ont.-based company handles requests for information and co-operates with foreign law enforcement and government agencies, in stark contrast with many other tech companies.
"We were helping law enforcement kick ass," said one of a number of sources who told CBC News that the company is swamped by requests that come directly from police in dozens of countries.
Go team! While these sources remain generally upbeat about throwing customer privacy and security to the wind, the official word from the company is less enthused. In fact, it's nonexistent.
In response to questions from CBC News, a BlackBerry spokesperson said it "will not address the questions given the extremely sensitive nature of this process."
This unadvertised service is apparently so popular BlackBerry has streamlined the process. It offers government agencies a list of boxes to check for what kind of information they'd like retrieved from a phone (including the ominously vague "other"), as well as the option to declare any request "exigent."
It also asks that the requesting party sign off on some boilerplate saying the request is legal in the requester's country and that it is not being done to "control, suppress or punish… political or religious opinion."
Of course, BlackBerry is not a government agency so it really can't do anything if someone "perjures" themselves by signing the form and moving directly towards suppression, punishment, etc. The best it can do is not allow that entity to make any more requests. I'm guessing this almost never happens because the quoted sources seem like a bunch of overly-cheery do-gooders. Policing the police would require BlackBerry to second-guess the government entities it seemingly can't wait to assist.
"Narco trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping, crime against children, knowing you are stopping those things … how do you not love doing something like that?" said the insider.
Yup. [Insert whatever the Canadian equivalent of "'Murica!" here.]
In its hurry to help supposed good guys track down alleged bad guys, the Canadian branch of BlackBerry's "full give" operations is skirting around statutes meant to protect locals from inappropriate demands made by foreign countries.
Christopher Parsons, a research associate at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, who has studied the privacy practices of tech companies, is worried by the secrecy of BlackBerry's process and its potential for abuse.
[...]
He said BlackBerry is allowing foreign police to bypass the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, a diplomatic agreement that allows Canadian officials to review requests from foreign police and consider whether they are legal under Canadian law.
But, as Parsons points out, law enforcement agencies are probably thrilled to have someone on the inside willing to violate treaties with the drop of pre-printed form. Adhering to MLAT may result in significant delays, whereas approaching BlackBerry directly sets its team of super-secret gofers in motion immediately.
Of course, the major downside here is that very few criminals are likely still using BlackBerries. Most of the company's customers are enterprise users and they have the ability to lock down their phones so tight not even BlackBerry can get into them. But for all the panicked talk about going dark, BlackBerry's special ops unit says it's still surprised at how many criminals are unaware the company is basically the local PD at this point.
The nails were already in the coffin for BlackBerry. Each new exposure of its highly-proactive law enforcement assistance is only going to hasten the dwindling of its user base.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
from Techdirt http://ift.tt/1XjvLmN
via IFTTT
June 8, 2016 at 02:06PM: Kootenay Savings Credit Union staff vote in favour of strike action | The Castlegar Source
from Kootenay Savings Credit Union staff vote in favour of strike action | The Castlegar Source http://ift.tt/1uNKhWy
via IFTTT
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)