Tag: canada

Canadian’s club spammer

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

mountie-maintain-rightManon Bombardier, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC’s) Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer has fined an outfit $1.1 million for spamming.

Compu-Finder has 30 days to object or pay up.

After an investigation, CRTC found Compu-Finder sent out spam in which the unsubscribe mechanisms did not function properly.
The emails sent by Compu-Finder promoted various training courses to businesses,

The four violations happened last year between July 2, 2014 and September 16, 2014. Compu-Finder spam accounted for 26 per cent of all complaints submitted last year.

Canada’s anti-spam legislation was adopted by Parliament on December 2010 and came into force on July 1, 2014.

Bombardier said that Compu-Finder flagrantly violated the basic principles of the law by continuing to send unsolicited commercial electronic messages after the law came into force to email addresses it found by scouring websites.

Complaints submitted to the Spam Reporting Centre clearly indicate that consumers didn’t find Compu-Finder’s offerings relevant to them, he said.

Apple faces antitrust investigation by Canada

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

watchdogCanadian antitrust watchdogs are about to sink their teeth into the ample rump of the fruity cargo cult Apple.

Canada’s Competition Bureau is investigating allegations that Apple Canadian unit used anti-competitive clauses in contracts with domestic wireless carriers.

The CCB has insisted that it has found no wrongdoing by Apple’s Canadian arm so far, and is not naming the person who laid a complaint. The Tame Apple Press is claiming that the watchdog has no evidence that Apple has contravened any rules and that it has not filed any application with the Competition Tribunal or any other court to seek remedies for any alleged anti-competitive conduct.

However, it is early days yet. The bureau sought a court order to compel Apple to turn over records relating to the ongoing investigation.

Canada’s antitrust watchdog has also been carrying out a similar probe into the country’s top grocer, Loblaw, ordering some of the chain’s major suppliers to hand over records relating to their dealings with the company.

“Should evidence indicate that the Competition Act has been contravened, the Commissioner will take appropriate action,” said Greg Scott, a spokesman for the bureau, in an email.

The bureau did not state whether it has also approached Canada’s largest telecom players for records related to its probe.

Apple has been doing badly out of anti-trust investigations. This year it lost a case where it ran a cartel with several book publishers with the aim of killing off Amazon.

 

American gamers tell Aussie women to get back to the kitchen

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

aussie minersCorrection: Sarkeesian cancelled a planned speech at Utah State University (USU), which is in Logan, Utah and is a different university than the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Apologies.

Women video game developers and critics in Australia are being threatened with rape and murder by American and Canadian gamers as the dispute that has gripped the global gaming community  goes global.

Sydney-based independent video game developer and critic ‘Sarah’ said she had received threats as a part of the movement after she voiced her opinion on an online gaming forum.  They were pretty blunt about what they were going to do to her for daring to make games that did not depict women as whores or sex objects.

“They were saying that they were going to rape me, they were going to kill me… They ran to friends of theirs, got them together … and started tweeting threats at me,” he said.

Sarah believed the perpetrators had set up a system that sent multiple threats to her account automatically.

Fortunately, they were not that clever. One posted a picture that allowed Sarah to figure out their name because they would screen capped it with their Facebook account in the background so I was able to find out the attackers name, and get a sense of who the other guys were.

They are all young, and they are all from the US and Canada and are all keen to spread their backward brand of misogyny to countries where women are treated a little more equally.

“That was almost a bit more terrifying – that they were this loose group of people that one of them could call up the others and they would attack.”

Unfortunately, because they were not Aussie misogynists they could not be arrested and charged with threatening behaviour.

The movement originated from a debate about whether video game journalists were too close to the industry, but then took a more threatening turn.

Earlier this month American feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian was attacked by people claiming to be from the gamergate movement shortly after posting an online video about the portrayal of women in games.

She was forced to cancel a speech at the University of Utah, after an anonymous threat from somebody who said they were planning to carry out a mass shooting at the event.

Lenovo in talks to buy Blackberry

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

ripeunripeChinese telecom gear maker Lenovo is in talks to buy Lenovo and is expected to offer the company $15 a share later this week.

Lenovo and BlackBerry refused to comment and this is not the first time that the two have been rumoured to be involved in a tie up.

Senior Lenovo executives have indicated an interest in BlackBerry as a means to strengthen their own handset business. Last year, when BlackBerry said was exploring strategic alternatives, Lenovo was named as an obvious buyer.

The Canadian government put the brakes on any deal when it announced that any sale to Lenovo would not win the necessary regulatory approvals due to security concerns. At the time, the Canadian government had swallowed the US Cool aid which stated that Chinese companies were turning over data to their government through secret spyware. In fact, US companies were turning over data to their government.

BlackBerry’s secure networks manage the email traffic of thousands of large corporate customers, along with government and military agencies across the globe. Under Canadian law, any foreign takeover of BlackBerry would require government approval under the Industry Canada Act.

Analysts also say any sale to Lenovo would face regulatory obstacles, but they have suggested that a sale of just BlackBerry’s handset business and not its core network infrastructure might just sneak past the regulators.

BlackBerry was believed to want to off-load its handset business, even as the arm turned a profit before special items in the last quarter.

BlackBerry chief executive officer John Chen has said in the past he sees the handset business as core to the company for now, as it will foster sales growth over the next few quarters until the software and services business begins to generate new revenue streams in the first half of 2015.

Ingram embraces Cisco partners

Posted on March 12, 2013 by - News

Jay MileyIngram Micro’s North America Services Division has made its Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) available to qualified Cisco channel partners across the US and Canada.

Powered by Cisco, the cloud service has already been available in beta with select Ingram Micro channel partners for several months. It is now set to be demonstrated live at Ingram Micro’s 2013 Cloud Summit April 7-10 in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Featured on the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace, the Ingram Micro HCS is, it is said,  an end-to-end system that lets partners make subscription-based, “as-a-service” offerings around Cisco Collaboration technologies including Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco Customer Collaboration and Cisco WebEx.

The service is also said to include the full range of Cisco Collaboration functions along with the tools to deliver these to the end customer in an automated, standardised and efficient manner.

Ingram Micro is also taking advantage of the Cisco Advanced Services team to help its channel partners provision and deploy the service, as well as offering round the clock service management, monitoring and Level 2 and Level 3 technical support.

Jay Miley, vice president and general manager, Advanced Technology Division, Ingram Micro US said that by engaging Ingram Micro, and utilising its dedicated Cisco Business Unit and growing Cloud Marketplace to offer HCS-as-a-service, Cisco channel partners could “establish a new recurring revenue stream without having to invest in the upfront capital to get the business moving.”

Sophos about to shake up its channel again

Posted on March 1, 2013 by - News

sophos-HQNew broom at insecurity outfit Sophos, Michael Valentine, has warned that he plans to shake up the company’s channel, just 24 hours after he first put his bottom on his seat.

Valentine has just started his job as Sophos’ senior veep and will manage the global channel programme. He wants to apply his own philosophy to the company’s channel, with subtle changes aimed at reigniting business, particularly in the US and Canada.

He thinks that Sophos needs to attract new partners, particularly if it wants to get money out of the US which has been a lacklustre market.

Talking to CRN in the US, Valentine said that the North American space is where Sophos was doing the least amount of business, and the gap is absolutely huge. Sophos has the product set and the new management allowed to run it and it needs an enriched channel program, he claimed.

In addition to antivirus software, Sophos’ endpoint security platform provides software for encryption, vulnerability monitoring, data loss prevention and mobile device management. It also has unified threat management appliances and firewalls to sell following the acquisition of Astaro in 2011.

Valentine said it was too early to provide any details on changes to the Sophos partner program, but he wants to strengthening Sophos’ three-tiered program with additional support and attention to partners.

This will be yet another shake-up for the Sophos Solution Provider Partner Programme which was rejigged under Emmanuelle Skala, vice president of global channels. There is also a new redesigned partner portal also provides deal registration, product and promotion information.