Tausi Insider

An Apple store in New York, on Oct. 16, 2019. MIKE SEGAR/Reuters As Canada’s top telecommunications companies face pressure to ensure Canadians can reach emergency responders in the event of a major outage, Apple AAPL-Q is rolling out a new service that will accomplish just that. The Cupertino, Calif., tech giant says its new Emergency SOS system, available on iPhone 14 devices in Canada this week, will help people without cellular or Wi-Fi service connect to a satellite to report an emergency or call for help in even the most remote locations. “There are always places that you will never be able to fully cover with cell towers like national parks or rural areas, and so when there is an emergency it becomes a problem very fast,” said Maxime Veron, Apple’s director of iPhone product marketing. “Imagine that you are hiking, for instance, and you’re on your own and you fall and break something or you roll your ankle, and the night is coming and you haven’t seen anyone for an hour. You k...

Ford Motor Co. F-N is recalling over 634,000 SUVs worldwide because a cracked fuel injector can spill fuel or leak vapors onto a hot engine and cause fires. The recall covers Bronco Sport and Escape SUVs from the 2020 through 2023 model years. All have 1.5-liter, three-cylinder engines. The Dearborn, Michigan, automaker said Thursday it’s not recommending that owners stop driving the vehicles or park them outdoors because fires are rare and generally don’t happen when the engines are off. But Ford said it has received 20 reports of fires, including three that ignited nearby structures. The company also said it has four claims of fires that were noticed less than five minutes after the engines were turned off. Ford also has four injury claims not involving burns, and 43 legal claims attributed to the problem. Repairs aren’t yeta available, but once they are, owners should schedule service with a preferred dealer, Jim Azzouz, executive director of customer experience, said in a stateme...

Twitter will roll out verified gold and grey check marks as it relaunches the blue check service next Friday, CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet. Reuters Twitter Inc is planning to roll out its verified service next Friday with different coloured checks for individuals, companies and governments, after a botched initial launch led to a surge in users impersonating celebrities and brands on the platform. Chief Executive Elon Musk on Friday allotted colours for the categories – gold for companies, grey for governments and a blue check for individuals including celebrities. “Painful, but necessary,” he said, adding that verified accounts will be manually authenticated before a check is activated. The revamped $8-per-month service will allow individuals to have a smaller, secondary logo of their organizations if verified by them, he said in another tweet on Friday. “Longer explanation next week.” The social media platform on Monday delayed its relaunch to make it foolproof as the service is e...

A Netflix DVD envelope in San Francisco, Calif., on Nov. 17. Michael Liedtke/The Associated Press Netflix’s trail-blazing DVD-by-mail rental service has been relegated as a relic in the age of video streaming, but there is still a steady – albeit shrinking – audience of diehards like Amanda Konkle who are happily paying to receive those discs in the iconic red-and-white envelopes. “When you open your mailbox, it’s still something you actually want instead of just bills,” said Konkle, a resident of Savannah, Georgia, who has been subscribing to Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service since 2005. It’s a small pleasure that Konkle and other still-dedicated DVD subscribers enjoy but it’s not clear for how much longer. Netflix declined to comment for this story but during a 2018 media event, co-founder and co-CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings suggested the DVD-by-mail service might close around 2023. When – not if – it happens, Netflix NFLX-Q will shut down a service that has shipped more than 5 billion...

A Embraer E195-E2 jet under construction. NELSON ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images The upstart Toronto airline with a raccoon as its mascot is poised to become a bigger pest to the larger carriers. Porter Airlines is set to receive the first of its Embraer E-195 jets this month, a 132-seat aircraft that will drive the expansion of the carrier’s network and help it compete with its mainline rivals. Michael Deluce, the chief executive officer of privately owned Porter, said the airline is targeting economy-class passengers, who comprise 90 per cent of the market, and will extend its reach to all of North America, as well as Caribbean vacation spots. Unlike its fleet of turboprops at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, the new planes will be based at Toronto Pearson International Airport, putting Porter in direct competition with Air Canada, Air Transat, WestJet Airlines and the low-cost carriers in Eastern Canada. Porter Airlines ordered to pay $130-million to operator of Toronto’s island airpor...

Canadians sending parcels this holiday season may be surprised to see a steep surcharge on domestic shipping due to the high price of diesel. The Canadian postal service’s package surcharge rose to nearly 40 per cent last week on domestic parcels and fell slightly to 37 per cent this week. Canada Post spokesman Phil Rogers says the fuel-based surcharge has been a standard company practice for more than 20 years and is based on the average price of diesel as measured by Kalibrate Technologies Ltd. Despite the higher-than-normal prices, Canada Post anticipates a busy holiday season as Rogers says the postal service has hired 4,500 additional staff and 1,550 more vehicles to accommodate the holiday shipping surge. Deadlines for domestic shipping vary on priority but regular parcels shipped in Canada should be sent between Dec. 9 and 19 to arrive in time for Christmas. Even sooner is the deadline to ship internationally which varies depending on the country. https://www.tausiinsider...

ArriveCan is merely a symptom of our government’s ailing approach to procurement and outsourcing in digital service delivery. Giordano Ciampini/The Canadian Press Amanda Clarke is an associate professor at Carleton University. Laura Chang and Sarah Niedoba are with Code for Canada. While the recent House of Commons inquiry into the $54-million ArriveCan is much needed, the truth is that Canada’s once-mandatory COVID-19 travel app is merely a symptom of the federal government’s ailing approach to procurement and outsourcing. A recent research project led out of Carleton University helps illustrate a root cause: an unhealthy dependence on private IT vendors, with a whopping $4.6-billion spent federally on contracting in 2021-22 alone. That was an increase of almost 8 per cent year over year. To make matters worse, this isn’t a case of “you get what you pay for” – big spending isn’t yielding the best-in-class digital solutions Canadians would expect (and deserve) based on the price tag....

SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Monday that the company is now close to having 100 active Starlinks, the firm’s satellite internet service, in Iran, three months after he tweeted he would activate the service there amid protests around the Islamic country. Musk said, “approaching 100 starlinks active in Iran”, in a tweet on Monday. The billionaire had said in September that he would activate Starlink in Iran as part of a U.S.-backed effort “to advance internet freedom and the free flow of information” to Iranians. The satellite-based broadband service could help Iranians circumvent the government’s restrictions on accessing the internet and certain social media platforms amid protests around the country. The Islamic Republic has been engulfed in protests that erupted after the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody after being arrested by the morality police for wearing “unsuitable attire”. https://www.tausiinsider.com/elon-musk-says-around-100-...

Chef René Redzepi of Noma, who practices a style of cooking known as 'New Nordic,' works in the kitchen at the Copenhagen restaurant. ERIK REFNER/The New York Times News Service Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for Tausi Insider. Foodies around the globe are mourning the news from Copenhagen this week that Noma, consistently ranked the world’s best restaurant, is closing. The death of this pioneer of New Nordic cuisine is more than a blow to lovers of signature dishes such as reindeer tongue tartare. It is yet another sign that, along with human customer service reps and common courtesy, traditional fine dining is rising up the list of endangered species in our culture. The reason, according to Noma’s owner-chef René Redzepi, is that the high-end restaurant business model doesn’t work any more. Changing cultural habits, severe shortages of qualified labour and a tightening of consumers’ belts in an inflationary period are putting pressure on an industry that is notorious...

Royal Bank of Canada will soon require its small business clients to pay a monthly fee to a third-party service if they wish to pay their taxes through their bank account. Alex Lupul/The Canadian Press Some banks are adding monthly service fees for businesses who want to pay their tax bills through their bank accounts, an extra expense that business groups say is unreasonable. Royal Bank of Canada RY-T will soon join the Bank of Nova Scotia in requiring small-business clients to pay a monthly fee to a third-party service if they wish to pay their taxes through their bank account. RBC recently informed its personal and commercial account holders that it was discontinuing its use of Interac Online Payments, which had no fees, as of May 30. Going forward, commercial accounts will have to use a service provided by Can-Act Payment Services Inc., which is owned by software company Dye & Durham Corp. RBC and Scotiabank both charge business clients a $25 setup fee for registering with Ca...

Katrina Ingram, CEO of Ethically Aligned AI, at home in Edmonton on Dec. 19, 2022. Amber Bracken/Tausi Insider As Katrina Ingram watched the internet explode with AI-powered text and image generators in late 2022, her mind returned to questions she’d been asking the tech sector for years. What values are baked into these artificial-intelligence systems, the chief executive of Ethically Aligned AI wondered , that might give rise to ethical quandaries? All over the internet recently, people have been prompting OpenAI’s text generator ChatGPT to churn out passages and essays, and processing selfies and other photos with apps such as Prisma Labs’s Lensa to look like portraits done by professional artists. While the trend seemed to many as a fun, participatory technological advance, it’s also restoked long-standing fears in the ethical AI community and among creative professionals. Many hands have been wrung over how ChatGPT, for one, could upend the very concept of academic essays, since...

Air Canada this month ended service to Calgary from Regina and Saskatoon and stopped flying to Victoria and other B.C. cities from the Alberta hub. MIKE SEGAR/Reuters Canada’s competition watchdog is being urged to look into moves by Air Canada and WestJet to end regional service in parts of the country, steps one business group alleges are anti-competitive. Air Canada AC-T this month ended service to Calgary from Regina and Saskatoon and stopped flying to Victoria and other B.C. cities from the Alberta hub. The Montreal-based carrier took the steps seven months after Calgary-based WestJet said it would end some service within Eastern Canada, including Quebec and the Maritimes. On Tuesday, the Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce called on Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell to investigate the service cancellations and their impact on travellers’ choices and costs. The group urged Mr. Boswell to find out if the airlines broke the law by effectively agreeing to divide the Canadi...

Twitter Inc said on Wednesday it was offering an annual plan for its subscription service called Twitter Blue, which includes its sought-after “verified” badge, at a discount to its monthly price. Users can subscribe to the service for an annual price of $84, instead of a monthly subscription price of $8 on the web and $11 on Apple devices. The discount would be available in countries including United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, New Zealand and Australia, Twitter said. Since billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter for $44-billion last year, he has brought changes to the company including new subscription plans for Twitter Blue. The blue check mark was previously reserved for verified accounts of politicians, famous personalities, journalists and other public figures. But a subscription option, open to anyone prepared to pay, was rolled out last year to help Twitter grow revenue as Musk fights to retain advertisers. Earlier in December, Musk added that Twitter’s Basic b...

Microsoft MSFT-Q said on Wednesday it had recovered all of its cloud services after a networking outage took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions around the globe. Azure’s status page showed services were impacted in Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Only services in China and its platform for governments were not hit. By late morning Azure said most customers should have seen services resume after a full recovery of the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN). An outage of Azure, which has 15 million corporate customers and over 500 million active users, according to Microsoft data, can impact multiple services and create a domino effect as almost all of the world’s largest companies use the platform. Businesses have become increasingly dependent on online platforms after the pandemic caused a shift to more employees working from home. Earlier, Microsoft said it had determined a network connectivity issue was oc...