Files vanishing off Google Drive, Russia adds Meta’s spokesperson to its wanted list, self-driving cars and their struggle for public acceptance, and Japanese startups test cash bonuses to woo employees back into the office.

These and more top tech stories on Hashtag Trending.

I’m your host James Roy.

Google Drive users took it to support forums after they found months of their work mysteriously vanished off the service.

One user claimed that their storage reverted to how it was in May 2023 and attempts to recover files remained unsuccessful.

Other users reported that synchronization had simply stopped working, so the cloud storage was out of date. Others claimed that they could get some of their information back by fiddling with cached files.

However, a message purporting to be from Google warned users to leave things alone until engineers come up with a solution.

That issue is still rumbling, although here’s yet another stark reminder that your files are not necessarily safe just because they’re stored in the cloud.

OVH suffered a disastrous fire in 2021, leaving customers scrambling for backups, and Google also has had its fair share of odd outages over the years.

Bleeping Computer advises its readers to backup important files locally or use a different cloud service until the problem is resolved.

Source: The Register; Bleeping Computer

Last year, Russia added Meta to its list of “terrorists and extremists” and has now decided to put the company’s spokesperson, Andy Stone, on its ‘wanted’ list.

The row between Russia and Meta started when Meta announced it was limiting the reach of Russian state-sponsored media on its platforms, when Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine.

When Russia’s invasion began, Stone announced temporary changes to Meta’s hate speech policy to allow for “forms of political expression that would normally violate (its) rules, like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders’”.

But Stone also maintained that “credible calls for violence against Russian civilians” would remain banned.

Anyway, this led to Russia blocking access to Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, and other Western platforms. The sites are only now available in Russia via VPNs.

Russia also formally barred Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from entering the country.

Source: Axios

Robotaxis has had a bad rap over the last few months, and quite deservingly so, whether it be for jamming up the road or hurting pedestrians.

General Motors-owned Cruise had to pull its entire U.S. fleet of 950 driverless cars off the road after a series of such fiascos.

And paradoxically, the big promise of self-driving cars remains safety and making transportation accessible to everyone.

But how do you actually get people to trust self-driving cars, especially after a series of fiascos.

John Krafcik, former CEO of Google’s self-driving car project, Waymo, tells Axios that there are no shortcuts when it comes to the rollout of safe autonomous vehicles.

He said, “With technology as important as this one, we’ve always thought we need to make sure we launch with care and consideration so that it gains traction, that the technology endures, and that it delivers its full potential to the world.”

Advocates president Cathy Chase added that the way you build trust is to be transparent. 

Both Waymo and Cruise have published studies claiming their driverless vehicles are safer than human drivers, but safety experts flag the lack of evidence and limited data in their studies.

Chase says that AV companies should be candid: “‘These are the limitations of the vehicle. These are our concerns. This is what we’re trying to overcome, but she says, “We don’t see that.”

Source: Axios 

The UK’s National Cyber Security Agency (or NCSC) and US’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (or CISA) have published an official guidance for securing AI applications.

Lindy Cameron, CEO at the NCSC said the guidelines seek to “ensure that security is not a postscript to development but a core requirement throughout.”

The guidelines adopt a secure-by-design approach, ideally helping AI developers make the most cyber-secure decisions at all stages of the development process. They’ll apply to applications built from the ground up and to those built on top of existing resources.

The guidelines would also look at the secure deployment of an AI system, like protecting the infrastructure, including access controls for APIs, models, and data.

And the final section of the guidelines covers how to secure AI systems after they’ve been deployed, encompassing maintenance and operations.

The guidance document is being endorsed by 17 countries, including Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and more.

Source: The Register 

California’s Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) is also preparing to put guardrails on AI.

The agency published draft regulations which would include opt-out rights, pre-use notice requirements, and access rights, which would enable state residents to obtain meaningful information on how their data is being used for automation and AI tech.

AI-based profiling could even fall within the scope of the planned rules. So, there could be big implications for U.S ad tech giants like Meta which has a business model that hinges on tracking and profiling users to target them with ads.

And that’s assuming the draft regulations survive the usual consultation process. 

Source: Tech Crunch

Tech companies, from the likes of Amazon, IBM, Meta, TikTok and even remote work poster child Zoom, have been determined to get their employees to come back to the office.

Japanese startups, meanwhile, are taking it back to the basics: with small bonuses for in-person working.

Osaka-based Agileware says it is offering employees ¥2,000 or roughly $13 for every day they show up to the workplace, while privacy tech firm Acompany has decided to award developers and those who “handle other tasks” about  ¥1,000 or about $6 for showing up after lunch for a half day of in-office work.

Agileware is also offering employees an extra $3 to go out to lunch with their colleagues, though both bonuses are reportedly limited to 10 days a month and require four hours to be spent in the office. That’s still $168 if employees take full advantage of the monthly deal. It might pay for meals, give employees a bit of face time together and, perhaps, a mental health boost.

Meanwhile in the West, Amazon, Meta, IBM and others have threatened to stifle employees’ career advancement if they do not come back to the office.

Wonder which approach works best…

Source: The Register 

And that’s the top tech news for today.

Hashtag Trending goes to air 5 days a week with a special weekend interview show we call “the Weekend Edition.”

You can get us anywhere you get audio podcasts and there is a copy of the show notes at itworldcanada.com/podcasts 

And while we cover cybersecurity stories that we think are of general interest, you can keep really up to date on cybersecurity with our podcast featuring security journalist Howard Solomon. It’s called CybersecurityToday.  It’s rated as one of North America’s top 10 tech podcasts.

I’m your host James Roy.  Have a Terrific Tuesday!

The post Hashtag Trending Nov.28- Files disappear from Google Drive; Meta’s spokesperson on Russia’s wanted list; Japanese tech startups woo employees back into the office with cash bonuses first appeared on IT World Canada.

Today, at Google Cloud Next 2023, Google announced that it is expanding the capabilities of Vertex AI, upgrading its own foundation models and is adding new third-party models to its Model Garden, including Meta’s Llama 2, Anthropic Claude 2 and more.

Upgrades to Vertex AI

Vertex AI, Google’s cloud-based platform for building, training and deploying machine learning models, received a series of upgrades to let it keep up with the generative AI boom.

This comes after the company made generative AI support generally available on Vertex AI in June, giving customers access to Google’s large generative AI models and tooling, including PaLM 2, Codey APIs, Text Embedding API and Imagen.

Today, it announced that Vertex Search and Conversation is now generally available,  allowing developers to ingest data, add customizations, or build a search engine or chatbot “with a few clicks”.

This product will have additional features including multi-turn search, which supports follow-up questions without starting the interaction over, and conversation and search summarization, as well as grounding, which roots generative AI outputs in enterprise data. 

The addition of Vertex AI extensions to Search and Conversation can retrieve information in real time and act on behalf of users across Google and third party applications, while Vertex AI data connectors help ingest data from enterprise and third-party applications such as Salesforce, Confluence, and JIRA.

Further, Google introduced two new products for Vertex AI focused on data science and machine learning engineering.

First is Colab Enterprise, announced in public preview today, enabling data scientists to accelerate AI workflows with access to Vertex AI platform capabilities, integration with BigQuery for direct data access, and even code completion and generation.

Second is a new MLOps Framework for predictive and generative AI to help customers navigate challenges around enterprise-readiness. It includes features that allow developers to tune models based on their specific needs, evaluate the quality of their models, as well as avoid data duplication and preserve data access policies.

Upgrades to Google’s foundation Models

Google announced upgrades to PaLM 2, Google’s large language model. That includes the general availability of 38 languages in PaLM and the possibility for customers to ground responses with their own enterprise data. 

The new version of PaLM 2 for text and chat also supports longer question-answer chats, with 32,000-token context windows, enough to include an 85-page document in a prompt. 

Further, Google announced that output from its code generator model, Codey, will be improved in quality by 25 per cent in major supported languages, for code generation and code chat.

Also, Google improved the visual appeal of its text-to-image foundation model, Imagen, and its recently added capabilities such as image editing, captioning, and visual questions and answering.

Notably, Google announced it is testing a digital watermarking feature to give customers the ability to verify AI-generated images produced by Imagen. This new experimental feature is powered by Google DeepMind SynthID, which, Google says, embeds the digital watermark directly into the image of pixels, making it invisible to the human eye, and very difficult to tamper with, without damaging the image. 

Additions to the Model Garden

Google is bringing Meta’s Llama 2 and TII’s Falcon into its Model Garden, and pre-announcing Claude 2 from Anthropic. Adding these models, Google says, will let enterprises match models to their needs and access full transparency into a model with Meta’s and Falcon’s open-source options.

Nenshad Bardoliwalla, who leads the product teams for Vertex AI at Google Cloud, announced during the opening keynote that Meta’s new Code Llama, unveiled last week, will also be available to all customers and partners in the Model Garden.

Developers and data scientists will also be able to tune these models with their own enterprise data with Colab Enterprise.

The post Google upgrades Vertex AI, foundation models, adds Meta’s Llama 2, Anthropic to portfolio and more first appeared on IT World Canada.

Government authorities have scored another — if perhaps temporary — win in the fight against cybercriminals.

Police in seven countries, including the U.S., said Tuesday they infiltrated and took down the infrastructure behind the Qakbot botnet, and then used that access to order infected computers to delete the malware.

The action, dubbed Operation Duck Hunt, represents the largest U.S.-led financial and technical disruption of a botnet infrastructure leveraged by cybercriminals to distribute ransomware, commit financial fraud, and engage in other cyber-enabled criminal activity, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement.

The malware was used by many threat actors, including ransomware groups, as initial weapons of IT system compromise.

The Qakbot malware [called QBot or Pinkslipbot by some cybersecurity companies] primarily infects victim computers through spam email messages containing malicious attachments or hyperlinks, the U.S. statement says. If a computer is successfully infected, Qakbot can deliver additional malware, including ransomware, to the infected computer. Qakbot has been used as an initial means of infection by many prolific ransomware groups in recent years, including Conti, ProLock, Egregor, REvil, MegaCortex, and Black Basta.

According to BlackBerry, Qakbot was discovered in 2008. After updated versions were made available in 2015, Qakbot gained new momentum among threat actors. in 2020, threat researchers noted that the release of a novel Qakbot strain resulted in a 465 per cent increase in its year-over-year share of cyberattacks. In 2021, Qakbot was leveraged in the prominent cyber-breach of JBS, which disrupted its meat production facilities and forced an US$11 million ransom payment.

RELATED CONTENT: Black Basta adopts Qakbot

As part of the takedown, the FBI was able to gain access to Qakbot infrastructure and identify over 700,000 computers worldwide, including more than 200,000 in the United States, that appear to have been infected with Qakbot.

To disrupt the botnet, the FBI was able to redirect Qakbot botnet traffic to and through servers controlled by the FBI, which in turn instructed infected computers in the United States and elsewhere to download a file created by law enforcement that would uninstall the Qakbot malware. This uninstaller was designed to untether the victim computer from the Qakbot botnet, preventing further installation of malware through Qakbot.

In addition to the U.S., authorities in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Romania, and Latvia participated in the coup. As part of the combined action, US$9 million in cryptocurrency was also seized. Also credited with helping are Zscaler, Shadowserver, the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance, and the Have I Been Pwned service.

Qakbot is a long-standing operation spanning more than a decade that has adapted and evolved with the times, noted Kimberly Goody, senior manager of Mandiant’s financial analysis unit. It initially focused on traditional banking fraud, and later pivoted to act as a foothold to support ransomware intrusions. “Any impact to these operations is welcomed, as it can cause fractures within the ecosystem and lead to disruptions that cause actors to forge other partnerships – even if it’s only temporary. Actors who were using Qakbot in ransomware intrusions, for example, may pivot to underground communities for initial access providers, resulting in more varied initial access tactics in the near term.”

Disrupting the Qakbot botnet of more than 700,000 victim computers is a great accomplishment for the FBI and their partners, said Chester Wisniewski, field CTO of applied research at Sophos. It will impose significant inconvenience on the botnet’s operators and dependent criminal groups. He added, “Sadly this will not stop Qakbot’s masters from reconstituting it and continuing to profit from our security failures. Any time we can raise the cost for criminals to operate their schemes we must take advantage of those opportunities, but this doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels, we must continue to work to identify those responsible and hold them accountable to truly disable their operations.”

The post Authorities take down Qakbot infrastructure, issue commands to delete the malware first appeared on IT World Canada.

With 8 in 10 Canadians already in support of digital identity, and the threat of cyberattacks on a meteoric rise, now is the time to decentralize digital identity technology both for the public and private sector, a recent report by ATB Ventures revealed.

A future that relies on digital credentials, the report says, first needs citizens that are able to trust that their personal information is protected and that their digital credentials are under their control.

Building trust in digital identity amidst rising cyber threats firstly comes down to a user experience that is truly trustworthy, explained Chandra Rink, managing director, product & IP at ATB. That, she said, depends on the following  factors:

Ensuring individuals have full control over their personal data. The company, for instance, endorses a “Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI)” model, which is designed to reduce unintentional or undesigned sharing of personal data, ensuring that users can choose what data to share and with whom.
Regulatory oversight to ensure digital identity systems meet high privacy and security standards. In Canada, bodies like the Digital ID and Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC) help achieve this in digital identity solutions.
Consistency in the data-privacy language and approach used across the public and private sectors to make data protection more accessible to consumers.

Businesses in particular, she added, have a key role to play in building trust in digital identity, notably in detailing their specific data practices and educating users on how their data is stored, used and protected.

“Businesses that invest in digital identity systems are sending a clear message about their commitment to safeguarding customer data, which in turn, cultivates trust,” said Rink. “The consistency of this safeguarding – which is established every time they interact with their customers – grows loyalty and confidence over time. Consumers are ultimately reassured by consistency over time – a value proposition digital identity offers.”

Offering a better customer experience through digital identity platforms can also drive trust, while enhancing compliance and reducing cost, especially for businesses where account creation is the highest entry point of consumer risk, the report noted. 

Further, the government needs to quickly implement digital identity verification capabilities to foster trust among citizens, the report stressed. The technology, it added, is tasked to enable Canadians to use a single, proven identity across multiple public services, and at the same time reduce costs by eliminating the need for manual data entry and verification processes.

Canada currently ranks 7th in digital competitiveness, according to a 2021 World Economic Forum (WEF) report. That, the ATB report noted, indicates that “we have the potential to become a leader in the digital world but we aren’t there yet.”

Canada’s privacy laws are weaker than those in other G20 countries, and 72 per cent of Canadian companies currently allow third parties to access the data they collect from citizens, the report shows. Additionally, there are still approximately 32.1 million registered paper-based IDs in Canada, according to Statistics Canada.

Rink explained, “Canadian digital competitiveness will reside within its ability to support safe online transactions. This safety is propelled through consistent, value-add (digital identity-enabled) experiences for citizens; the practice of pan-Canadian trust standards across sectors; and a focus on enabling citizen-centered data ownership and agency.”

She added, “Learning from leading digital nations (while tailoring solutions to Canadian privacy needs) can expedite the progress through mirroring education and messaging for citizens which is simple, clear, and focused on their agency and data ownership.”

The post Interconnected approach between citizens, governments and businesses needed to drive digital identity adoption: ATB Ventures first appeared on IT World Canada.

Meta releases AI to create music from text, Microsoft makes some licensing concessions for non-Microsoft cloud providers, and researchers discover how to jailbreak added features on a Tesla.

These are the top tech news stories on today’s Hashtag Trending.  

I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and Tech News Day in the US.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has released the code and model weights for several AI tools designed to create sound from text-based prompts. The tools, collectively known as AudioCraft, include MediaGen, which creates music from text, and AudioGen, which generates sound effects based on written descriptions. A third tool, EnCodec, is a decoding engine that Meta is also making available to researchers. These tools could simplify the process of adding background audio to video games or digital worlds. However, Meta acknowledges that the system was trained predominantly on English metadata and lacks diversity in the types of music used.

Sources include: Axios

Intel’s Network and Edge group, which accounts for 11 per cent of Intel’s revenues, has seen a significant drop in sales this year, raising questions about the company’s efforts in the telecom sector. The group’s sales fell by a third in the first half of the year, and it reported a $487 million loss. This drop is attributed to customers reducing purchases to adjust to lower demands across product lines. Despite setbacks, Intel has expanded its relationship with Ericsson, with Ericsson committing to use Intel as a contract manufacturer of customized 5G chips based on 18A, one of Intel’s next-generation processes. However, the market for open and virtual RAN products has not grown as quickly as expected, and the broader market is currently in a slump.

Sources include: Data Center Knowledge

In an article titled “The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free?” Gregory Barber writing in WIRED discusses the concept of “local-first software”. This term refers to a new model of software development that prioritizes the user’s personal computer over cloud-based servers. The idea is to maintain the benefits of cloud computing, such as accessibility and collaboration, but without the need for a central server.  Developers no longer have to worry about server management but do not need a public or even private cloud. The new approach features what are called conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), which allow multiple people to collaborate on a file and automatically resolve conflicts. The concept is still in its early stages, but it’s gaining traction among developers disillusioned with the current state of cloud computing.

Sources include:  WIRED

Microsoft has made a slight concession in its licensing policies that allows customers with specific licenses to run Office applications on Amazon’s cloud service, AWS. The move comes after Europe’s competition regulators began probing Microsoft’s business practices. The licensing change partially reverses a 2019 policy that required customers with perpetual licenses to purchase new licenses to run those applications on AWS, Google Cloud, or Alibaba infrastructure. The new licensing terms, which only benefit AWS cloud customers, allow users with Microsoft 365 E3/E5/A3/A5 and Microsoft 365 Business Premium licenses to run Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise/business on Amazon WorkSpaces. However, the concession is still considered a premium way to run Office on WorkSpaces and remains a costly alternative to Azure.

Sources include: The Register

A team of researchers has discovered a method to jailbreak Tesla’s infotainment system, enabling them to access paid upgrades, such as heated rear seats, for free. The technique, known as voltage glitching, involves manipulating the supply voltage of the AMD processor that operates the infotainment system. This manipulation can trick the CPU into executing different instructions and accepting manipulated code. The researchers also managed to extract the encryption key used to authenticate the car to Tesla’s network, potentially opening up other attack avenues. However, the attack requires physical access to the car, and mitigating it would necessitate hardware replacement. The researchers plan to present their findings at the upcoming Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.

Sources include: Tech Crunch

Those are the top tech news stories for today.  Hashtag Trending goes to air 5 days a week with a special weekend interview show we call “the Weekend Edition.”

You can get us anywhere you get audio podcasts and there is a copy of the show notes at itworldcanada.com/podcasts 

We’re also on YouTube five days a week with a video newscast only there we are called Tech News Day and we’re part of the ITWC channel. 

If you want to catch up on news more quickly, you can read these and more stories at TechNewsDay.com and at ITWorldCanada.com on the home page.

We love your comments.  I’ve continued to shorten the stories this week. Still dying to know whether people find this a better pace or a more enjoyable experience.

You be the judge. If you’ve listened so far, you’re the audience I’m trying to reach.

So please go to the article at itworldcanada.com/podcasts – you’ll find a text edition there. Click on the x or the check mark but tell me what you think. 

I’m your host, Jim Love. Have a Fantastic Friday and a great long weekend. Being in Canada, we’ll be taking that long weekend and we’ll be back with a newscast next Tuesday.

The post Hashtag Trending Aug.4- Meta’s new AI creates music from text; Microsoft makes licensing concessions for non-Microsoft cloud providers; Researchers discover how to jailbreak Tesla’s infotainment system first appeared on IT World Canada.

Federal employees have been banned from using the Chinese-based TikTok video app on Canadian government-issued computing devices.

“Effective Feburary 28, the TikTok application will be removed from government-issued mobile devices,” Treasury Board president Mona Fortier said in a statement today. “Users of these devices will also be blocked from downloading the application in the future.

“Following a review of TikTok, the Chief Information Officer of Canada determined that it presents an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security.”

The decision to remove and block TikTok from government mobile devices is being taken as a precaution, the statement says, particularly given concerns about the legal regime that governs the information collected from mobile devices, and is in line with the approach of our international partners. On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide considerable access to the contents of the phone.

“While the risks of using this application are clear, we have no evidence at this point that government information has been compromised.

“For the broader public, the decision to use a social media application or platform is a personal choice. However, the Communications Security Establishment’s Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (Cyber Centre) guidance strongly recommends that Canadians understand the risks and make an informed choice on their own before deciding what tools to use.”

Treasury Board is responsible for advising the government on digital standards for federal employees.

The announcement comes after Canada’s federal privacy commissioner, along with three provincial privacy commissioners, last week started an investigation into TikTok, examining how the video-streaming platform collects the personal data of Canadian users.

The investigation is beginning now because class action lawsuits in the United States and Canada have been settled, the commissioners said in a statement.

It also comes after Washington issued a ban in December on U.S. government employees using TikTok on federal devices. In February the European Commission suspended the use of the TikTok application on its corporate devices and on personal devices enrolled in the commission’s mobile device service. Employees have until March 15th to remove it from their devices.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance of Bejing. According to Newsweek, ByteDance is not actually registered in China, but is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

There are allegations the company is close to the Chinese government. While the company insists its Singapore-based CEO, Shou Zi Chew, is independent, last month the New York Times said 12 former TikTok and ByteDance employees and executives believe his decision-making power is limited.

“Decisions about the service — including moves to emphasize livestreaming and shopping on TikTok — are made by Zhang Yiming, ByteDance’s founder, as well as by a top ByteDance strategy executive and the head of TikTok’s research and development team, said the people, who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals,” the article says in part.

Shou Zi Chew is scheduled to testify before the U.S. Congress on March 23rd, according to CNN. This follows the company’s COO’s testimony before Congress last September.

There are also fears that TikTok could gather the private data of subscribers.

Last June, Buzzfeed reported on leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings showing China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about U.S. TikTok users.

In December, Forbes reported that an internal investigation by ByteDance found that employees tracked multiple journalists covering the company, improperly gaining access to their IP addresses and user data in an attempt to identify whether they had been in the same locales as ByteDance employees.

In August, 2020, Public Safety Canada recognized growing international concern about TikTok and alleged privacy concerns in a research note quoting news media.

Being dropped by the general public in Western nations because of these allegations would be costly to TikTok and ByteDance because of the huge usage of the app around the world. In an attempt to diffuse criticism in the U.S., TikTok last year created a new division called U.S. Data Security (USDS) “to bring heightened focus and governance to our ongoing efforts to strengthen our data protection policies and protocols, further protect our users, and build confidence in our systems and controls in the United States,” the company said.  The goal is to minimize TikTok employee access to U.S. user data and minimize data transfers across regions – including to China, it said.

“Tiktok has essentially tried to prove that its data is walled off, so that its U.S. data stays in the U.S. and its China data stays in China,” Kendra Schaefer, the head of tech policy research at the Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China, was quoted as saying in Fast Company. “But it’s been hard to assuage U.S. policymakers.”

The post Canada bans employees from using TikTok on federal devices first appeared on IT World Canada.

Customer experience and changing expectations in accessing government services was a key discussion at Technicity GTA last week. 

Karthik Venkataraman, director of IT services, Town of Newmarket, Cielo Medel, chief information officer (CIO), City of Mississauga, Gary Yorke, director of customer experience division, City of Toronto and Beckie Jamieson, director of corporate services and clerk, Township of Scugog, shared their insights on the matter in a panel moderated by Mai Nguyen, head of government relations and public policy at VMware Canada.

The panelists kicked off the discussion by revealing the stumbling blocks that their respective municipalities face in implementing new technologies to streamline access to services for residents.

Collaboration across various departments and organizations, as well as partnerships with the private sector, help government leaders keep up with technology, update their legacy systems, and ensure that there are sufficient resources, staffing and technical help to face time-consuming roadblocks like budget cycles and council initiatives, explained Venkataraman.

The siloed structure of government teams is a challenge for the City of Mississauga also, Medel stated. “We have two levels of government: we have both the municipality and the region. The resident’s interaction starts with the municipality, but it has to flow through the region. So that alone provides a greater depth of access for the public.”

With 44 different levels of enterprise interaction within the city of Toronto, and each entity feeling like they own the customer or a fragment of the customer experience, delivering streamlined and consistent services to residents remains a challenge, Yorke added. “The city has to remember and be humble in the fact that we provide services. The group that owns the relationship with the public is council and the office of the mayor. We provide services.”

The biggest challenge in a smaller municipality like Scugog is being compared with and pressured to move at the same pace as larger municipalities while navigating outdated systems with very limited resources and budget, Jamieson explained. 

Here are some of the measures, highlighted by the panelists, that their municipalities have taken to improve customer experience:

1. Township of Scugog

 Implementing new software for building and planning applications, and launched a new Bylaw application.
Partnered with Region of Durham to launch the first phase of myscugog.ca

2. Town of Newmarket

 Building a new integration platform that standardizes the procurement of new technology, based on what it calls a LB (load balancer) API.
giving guidance on the use of these new technologies so that the service delivery department keeps up with the new standards.
Holding more hybrid council meetings that led to increased citizen interaction and engagement at a council level

3. City of Toronto

 Digitized all 600 types of service request, transitioning from a multi-channel environment to an omni-channel environment, looked at cost per transaction dropping from $11 – $16 (per service request calls) to 10 cents – $1, post digitization.
Developed the award-winning 311 Toronto mobile app, capable of handling over 600 categories of service request.

4. City of Mississauga

Invested in the ease of use and reliability of the mississauga.ca website
Being transparent in the use of residents’ data . 

The panelists also acknowledged that engaging with frontline employees, getting their feedback and finding what tools and resources they need to be successful has helped deliver efficient frontline customer service.

“Don’t be afraid to bring any idea forward,” said Jamieson. “It may not be possible, but we’ll definitely consider it and see if we can find a way to incorporate it.”

Watch the full panel here.

The post Technicity GTA 2023: Improving customer experience with technology first appeared on IT World Canada.

Most municipalities are different from organizations in the private sector, however, they have one thing in common: the need to prioritize their data to meet privacy and security obligations.

During an online cybersecurity panel at this month’s Technicity GTA conference, speakers from the municipal sector made it clear doing that is no different from the way profit-making firms do it.

“It’s critical that the information security team spend time with business leaders to understand questions such as how long would it take to retrace all of our engineering drawings, how much lost productivity would we have if the ERP system was unavailable for a week?” said Brent Capp, IT security and risk officer, for the town of Newmarket, Ont.

“Using this information we can start to tell a story of how critical an asset is, what it’s worth from a service delivery perspective.”

It starts with collaborating with the city clerk’s office, with business owners and data custodians who can help identify data based on its classification, agreed Maneesh Agnihotri, interim CISO of the city of Toronto. Then, he said, based on the data classification, infosec leaders can look at the security infrastructure and everything around it that supports the safekeeping of that data.

“So the first step is to have that discussion, to identify what is the key data in the organization, where is it housed, and how do we secure that?”

That led moderator Richard Freeman, Ricoh of Canada’s portfolio manager for enterprise workflow solutions, to ask how municipalities can balance the security needs of users — internal and taxpayers — with the need to protect data.

Kush Sharma, director of municipal modernization and partnerships for the Municipal Information Security Association of Ontario, reported that 92 per cent of respondents to a recent poll of members said municipalities should first focus on critical infrastructure — such as the water system, public transit, solid waste and the voting system — before what they called traditional IT.

“What you don’t want is the water system to be breached. If Microsoft Office 365 and your documents go down, or maybe you can’t process some financial statements, that can be fixed. But if your water system goes down there are life-safety issues. If we can try to balance the resources we have as municipalities and focus on the critical infrastructure components …. that would be a good start.”

Finding information is vital, panelists said. Capp noted that IT business system analysts and the records management team will help with the lesser-known areas where personally identified information is stored. They are experts at collaborating with different business units and know where some data is “unofficially” stored.

“Sometimes you’ll find people are storing PII somewhere because it’s convenient and helps them get from point A to point B faster. The more we understand the use cases for these temporary or alternate use cases, the easier it is to work with the business units and improve the security posture,” he said.

The panel also touched on cyber insurance. Roland Chan, CISO at Toronto Metropolitan University, said that because rates depend on what organizations are doing to protect themselves, his institution makes departments aware of the importance of good cybersecurity practices.

Many municipalities won’t be able to qualify for insurance based on the heightened cyber controls insurers are asking for, warned Sharma. Even if they do, insurers may declare a cyber incident is excluded from coverage because it is part of an ‘act of war’.

Any municipalities smaller than a city may have to look at self-insurance, he advised, or group with other municipalities to self-fund themselves.

“Organizations have to understand insurance isn’t a cyber control,” said Agnihotri. “It’s part of your remediation, it’s part of your recovery. So what is driving this now is how fast can we improve and mature our security posture.”

Finally, asked for tips on improving employees’ cybersecurity awareness, Sharma urged infosec leaders to stop thinking of themselves as technical experts. “We need to translate and communicate better to the leadership that we are a critical business function within the organization,” he said.

The post Technicity GTA 2023: How municipalities prioritize data security first appeared on IT World Canada.

TekSavvy’s application to the CRTC to address issues of undue preference arising from off-tariff agreements (OTAs) stirred up a hornet’s nest, with interventions pouring in from sympathizers and critics alike.

OTAs were permitted by the CRTC in 2012, allowing carriers to enter into negotiated wholesale agreements with competitors that deviated from the Commission’s normal rate regime.

But with the embattled Rogers-Shaw merger at stake, a new policy direction pushing for competition and innovation, and the meteoric rise in cell phone service bills over the past decade, the OTAs dispute could not be more relevant.

TekSavvy’s Part 1 application, filed on Jan. 20, refers to two alleged instances of undue preference. First is the OTAs that Rogers has entered into with Vidéotron as a remedy to enable the closing of its C$26 billion acquisition of Shaw. The wholesale arrangements will confer on Vidéotron favourable rates and terms for access to backhaul, domestic roaming, and Third-Party Internet Access (TPIA), not available to other competitors.

The second instance concerns Bell which, according to the independent ISP, is providing its newly-acquired EBOX Inc. with access to wholesale FTTP (fibre-to-the premises) services that are not available to other competitors and for which there are no wholesale tariffs.

Pending the outcome of this investigation, TekSavvy is asking the CRTC to void the wholesale agreement between Rogers and Vidéotron or order Rogers to extend the same rates and terms to all competitors. Bell should also be ordered to offer competitors aggregated wholesale access to FTTP service speeds it has provided EBOX, Teksavvy said.

The application gained support from advocacy groups like OpenMedia, Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), Competitive Network Operators of Canada and competitor carriers Globalive, TELUS, and Community Fibre Company.

Globalive, one of the most vocal critics of the Rogers-Shaw merger, argued that these wholesale arrangements will have a negative impact on its re-entry into the wireless market. Globalive also said it is preparing its own Part 1 Application to the CRTC regarding the these wireless-specific arrangements and related specific remedies.

PIAC contended that the CRTC allowing OTAs was “the beginning of a slow death for wholesale competition”, adding, “it is no surprise that a system ripe for abuse and secrecy, in the absence of rigorous Commission oversight, was indeed abused and rendered largely inscrutable to both competitors and the public.”

Furthermore, OpenMedia claimed that its support for TekSavvy’s application represents a community of “nearly 300,000 people in Canada”. But it should be noted that the association attached a petition with only 31,886 signatures, senior consultant in the telecommunications industry Mark Goldberg pointed out in a tweet, adding that scanning through the signatures revealed many duplicates.

TELUS also showed support for TekSavvy’s request to investigate whether agreements between Rogers and Vidéotron violate subsection 27(2) of the Telecommunications Act but “takes no position” on whether a similar investigation in Bell’s case is warranted.

Shaw and Québecor, unsurprisingly, bared their teeth, lambasting TekSavvy’s plea to sabotage the side divestiture on which the Rogers-Shaw merger deal lives or dies. 

Since the 2012 decision, Shaw argued, at least 21 OTAs were entered into by carriers, and since 2015, dozens more. “In spite of the exponential increase in OTAs being entered into in the past decade, TekSavvy’s is the first Part 1 application alleging undue preference through an OTA, negating TekSavvy’s suggestion that OTAs are inherently problematic.”

Shaw added that the new policy direction does not justify a reconsideration of the entire OTA regime. “In fact, the prevalence of OTAs demonstrates that a robust market for wholesale internet services has emerged and is healthy. The current regime is achieving the Act’s objectives, while also helping to encourage all forms of competition and in doing so foster affordability in the market, all of which are consistent with section 2 of the new Policy Direction.”

Québecor, on the other hand, took the high road, saying that it is actually open to entering into an OTA with TekSavvy or any other carrier. The Quebec-based carrier said it can even offer the same wholesale arrangements as the one it currently has with Rogers. That, Québecor says, should be enough for the CRTC to see there is no undue preference whatsoever arising from its OTA with Rogers.

However, Québecor vouched for TekSavvy’s request to investigate Bell’s alleged instance of undue preference.

In response to TekSavvy’s accusations, Bell affirmed; “EBOX is now a division of Bell. Bell doesn’t provide EBOX with any wholesale services, telecom or other. There can be no agreement, off-tariff or not, preferential or not, between Bell & EBOX since they’re the same corporate entity.”

The post CRTC puts off-tariff agreements under scrutiny again first appeared on IT World Canada.