Image Credit: Illustration by Eric Blattberg / VentureBeat

The Canadian government thinks it’s finally safe from the Heartbleed bug.

Canada has brought all of its public websites back online after installing security patches rendering them immune to Heartbleed, the government announced late Sunday evening.

The Treasury Board of Canada issued a directive late Thursday ordering all government websites running the flawed software offline. It called the action a precautionary measure in response to Heartbleed, the OpenSSL bug that may have enabled bad actors to snoop on “secure” communications and that went unnoticed for the past two years.

The Canada Revenue Agency, which brought its systems back online Sunday, said it is extending the filing deadline for tax returns from April 30 to May 5.

“Our systems are back online. We apologize for the delay and the inconvenience it has caused to Canadians,” said CRA Commissioner Andrew Treusch. “That said, the delay was necessary. We could not allow these systems back online until we were fully confident they were safe and secure for Canadian taxpayers.”

Governments and companies are still scrambling to deal with Heartbleed. Millions of Android devices (running Jelly Bean, version 4.1.1) could still be vulnerable, for example. Google is distributing patching information to device makers and operators, which are responsible for making the updates.

Researchers from Google and Finnish company Codenomicon exposed the Heartbleed bug last week. To protect yourself, you should change certain passwords and implement two-factor authentication when possible.

Above: Astronaut Stephen K. Robinson anchored to the end of Canadarm2

Image Credit: Wikimedia

The Canadian government has accused China of hacking the IT infrastructure of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).

The NRC is Canada’s top technology and science research organization, handling research related to space innovations, satellite technology, genetically altered foods, and more. The Communications Security Establishment determined that the Canadian government became the victim of a Chinese cyber attack on the NRC IT infrastructure.

CTV reports that a “highly sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored actor” is responsible for the attack, and NRC President John McDougall said that “any information held in our systems, including employees’ personal information, may have been compromised.” McDougall also told NRC employees not to connect smartphones, tablets, or memory sticks to work computers, as any private information could be vulnerable.

The Chinese embassy in Canada denies this allegation, though Chinese hackers have apparently been repeatedly attempting to hack into NRC computers over the past month. Chinese embassy spokesperson Yang Yundong said in a strongly worded letter that China will not accept speculation that it was involved in such an act:

“The Chinese government has always (been) firmly opposed to and combated cyberattacks in accordance with the law. In fact, China is a major victim of cyberattacks.”

There is no current evidence that cyber attacks have occurred in other networks of the Canadian government.

The NRC and its security partners have examined the situation and have taken action to protect information holdings and minimize disruptions to stakeholders and clients. The NRC understands that this breach will affect business operations, but IT experts and security partners have been working closely with the NRC to create a more secure infrastructure, which could take up to a year.

The NRC statement cannot release much detail about the breach due to confidentiality and security concerns. It plans to update information on the situation on July 31, 2014.

Canada is not too happy about Apple’s contracts with wireless carriers.

Earlier today, Canada’s Competition Bureau, a watchdog for business regulations and practices, said that it’s investigating allegations that Apple’s Canadian unit’s contracts with domestic wireless carriers had non-compete clauses.

So far, there is no decision as to whether the company has done anything wrong, the agency said, although it sought a court order this week to get Apple to turn over relevant records.

The Competition Bureau recently announced its support for Uber and other on-demand services, stating that “is of the view that these innovative business models have the potential to offer important benefits to consumers through more competition, including lower prices, greater convenience, and better service quality for a variety of reasons.”

The U.S. has also recently taken a deeper look at its telecom regulation, with recent debates over Internet service providers and net neutrality.

Via Reuters

Two weeks after Walmart expanded its new “Grab & Go” collection service for online purchases across Toronto, Internet behemoth Amazon has followed suit with a slew of new physical pickup points across Canada.

The aptly titled Amazon Pickup Points are operational at more than 6,000 Canada Post locations, and they come at a good time as the frantic pre-Christmas gift-buying rush prepares to heat up. Not all items qualify for the service, however.

Eligible products must be fulfilled by Amazon.ca, meaning third-party sellers don’t qualify. Also, it can’t be a “Subscribe & Save” item, have a “length + girth” of more than 3 meters, or be heavier than 30KG. Each package will be available for collection for 15 days after receipt of the delivery notice, after which it will be returned to Amazon and a full refund issued.

Amazon already operates physical collection points in the U.S. and the U.K., so it was only a matter of time before it looked to expand into more brick-and-mortar locations in other countries.

Today’s news comes a little more than a month after Amazon introduced same-day deliveries to Canada.

Amazon has launched its Kindle Unlimited subscription ebook service in Canada and Mexico, its eighth and ninth market respectively.

Today’s news comes more than six months after the service first launched in the U.S., and a little over four months after it landed in the U.K.

For CDN$9.99 ($8 USD) or 129 pesos ($8.60 USD), subscribers can access 750,000 ebooks. It’s worth noting that you won’t be able to access all the latest bestsellers — many of them are self-published titles created through Kindle Direct Publishing. That said, there are still many well-known titles on there, including Harry Potter and the Hunger Games.

The gradual global rollout is no doubt food for thought for a number of competing companies in the space — Oyster offers north of one million books for $9.95/month, though it remains a U.S.-only affair for now. Then there’s Scribd, which serves up around the same number of titles (including audiobooks) for $8.99 a month — and it’s available globally.

Kindle Unlimited is available on Kindles and via their associated apps on phones, tablets, and PCs. Though interestingly, there’s no mention of audiobooks being included in the new markets — subscribers in the U.K. and U.S., for example, also get a selection of audiobooks via Amazon subsidiary Audible.

GUEST:

Canada is one of the fastest-growing hotbeds for game development, and on a per capita basis, it is the largest gaming industry in the world, with more than 329 gaming companies employing more than 16,500 people. This is no accident, as substantial government support and access to great technical and creative talent makes Canada one of the best places to build a gaming company.

Ontario in particular has been attracting a significant number of game companies to the region by setting up generous tax incentives. I’ve had the opportunity to launch six tech companies on both sides of the border, and as someone who has mostly lived out of a suitcase, could have easily set up Big Viking Games anywhere in the world. But in the end, without a doubt, I chose to build the company out of Ontario.

Last year, through the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC), gaming companies in Ontario received back between 35 percent to 40 percent of all dollars invested on developers, artists, and marketing costs. When you’re operating a company that’s comprised of 90 percent artists and developers like we are, that’s a huge sum of money.

But that’s just the beginning. The OMDC also supports new games through the Interactive Digital Media (IDM) fund, which is a grant that covers $150,000 up to 50 percent of a project’s budget. Last year, the OMDC reported that 23 gaming companies in Ontario received this $150,000 grant to produce a game.

On the federal side, the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) and the Scientific Research and Experimental Development Tax Incentive Program (SR&ED) offers new innovative tech companies from $50,000 to $500,000-plus each year to supplement development costs. What’s more, the Business Development Bank of Canada is a federally owned bank with more than $1 billion under management whose mandate is “to help create and develop Canadian businesses.” They aggressively support video game start-ups within Canada.

These programs are just some of the many available on both a provincial and federal level. There’s so many more out there to support burgeoning Canadian gaming companies, and all of this money is going towards a great cause as it is spurring jobs and creativity in the media / technology sector within Canada.

Big Viking Games itself has grown from just four people in 2011 to more than 70 employees in less than three years. We’re projected to grow our own company to over 120 employees before the end of this year.  Across the country, 40 percent of video game companies in Canada have projected at least 25 percent growth in the next two years. That’s the sort of impact the government support is having on this industry, and it’s awesome to see.

While the government support is attractive, what’s really helped multiply this benefit is the highly skilled talent pool we have available to us in the country along with very reasonable immigration policies that have enabled us to quickly pull quite a few of our fellow Californian friends to our company. Canada is home to many world-renown engineering programs, including University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, McGill University, and Queens University, with Sheridan College being recognized as one of the top animation schools in the world.

This a great resource, and is one of the main reasons starting a gaming company in Canada makes sense. We’ve managed to find amazing talent in Ontario, and many developers that once left the country to join companies in Silicon Valley are now staying in Canada as great opportunities develop in an increasingly thriving tech scene. Toronto also offers an attractive quality of life and cost of living, as an Economist study recently named the city the best in the world.

All of these factors — substantial government support, local access to skilled technical and creative leaders, and a growing and vibrant city that attracts talent from around the world — combine to create an amazing opportunity for gaming companies within Canada.

All that said, being the Canadians that we are, there’s a friendly, vibrant, and tight knit game development and startup community. I have close ties and connections with many CEOs and founders of other gaming companies and startups in the area, and there is a strong sense of community and mutual support. There’s definitely some friendly competition, but we’re all driven by the notion that the next big video game will come from the region.

More than the money, what excites us about the video game industry is the possibility to truly shape and impact the culture of the world with only a handful of people! It’s astounding to me that a game like YoWorld, which was originally developed by a small team of four, has more than 80 million registered users and continues to be a thriving virtual world after seven years. YoWorld has reached more people than the entire worldwide viewership of the Oscars.

In the next few years, Canada will undoubtedly release many of the top video games in the world, and the support system set up here will be a big reason why.

Albert Lai is the CEO of Big Viking Games, a social and mobile gaming studio based out of London and Toronto, Ontario. Big Viking Games has recently been recognized by Globe and Mail’s Canada’s Top 100 Employers as one of the best places to work in Canada.

Albert will be speaking at the VB Roadshow in Toronto on April 1st. The event is geared towards mobile professionals including developers, product marketers, and business development professionals, and is focused on mobile user acquisition and monetization.

GUEST:

A marketer’s job is more complex than ever, thanks to our increasingly digital world. Now, the Canadian government has thrown another challenge into the mix: Canada’s Anti-Spam Law, or CASL, presumed to be the strictest marketing regulation in North America. And they won’t just affect Canadian companies.

CASL fines can be as high as $1 million for an individual violation and $10 million for businesses, and we’re starting to see the fallout. Just last month, CASL’s very first million-dollar fine was handed out to Quebec company Compu-Finder. Two weeks later, well-known companies Plentyoffish Media Inc. and Avis received fines. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Other investigations are currently underway with more fines likely imminent, signaling that companies are having major issues getting up to code. It’s time for marketers to start paying attention before it’s too late.

Under CASL, which went into effect on July 1, 2014, marketers are required to get permission before any commercial, electronic contact with customers is initiated, versus the traditional method of giving consumers a chance to opt-out of future communication. In the weeks leading up to the July effective date last year, Canadian companies scrambled to get consent from customers, but few outside of Canada seemed to bat an eyelash. The dangerous misconception is that since CASL is a Canadian law, it does not apply to those outside of the country. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any company, anywhere, marketing to Canadian residents or businesses is subject to these regulations.

What is CASL?

CASL was initially passed by the Canadian government in 2011 to deter relentless spamming of consumers and is based on an “opt-in” system as opposed to “opt-out” (i.e., click here to unsubscribe). This means the law is one of the strictest marketing laws ever and requires businesses to obtain express or implied consent before sending any commercial electronic message. That’s a lot of terminology. Here’s what it all means:

• Express consent is when a contact requests to receive marketing materials from your company through a direct opt-in (such as filling out an online form or clicking a link).
• Implied consent happens when a contact has a relationship with your business but has not directly asked to receive marketing materials.
• A commercial electronic message is any message that promotes commercial activity delivered through electronic marketing channels including email, text messaging, social media, and even instant messaging.

Clearly, CASL has the potential to deliver devastating consequences to any companies or individuals in violation, but it could also initiate an enormous shift in electronic communications across the marketing industry.

A new era of marketing

Regardless of the slew of marketing technologies at our disposal, a consumer’s email account typically has no indicators to easily determine where that consumer resides and therefore if CASL applies to marketing messages sent to him or her. Here are a few things I see playing out:

Overcompliance
Given the sheer magnitude of the fines, companies will be over-compliant out of fear, thus locking themselves out of potentially lucrative customer interactions. North American companies that send out marketing emails to both U.S. and Canadian recipients may broadly apply the Canadian opt-in standard across all email communications if they’re unable to distinguish the location of the email address, thus unnecessarily restricting communications to U.S. recipients.

Microsoft took a better-safe-than-sorry approach shortly before the law came under effect by putting an end to regular emails about security updates for its Windows operating system and other Microsoft software, laying the blame squarely on CASL. Microsoft reinstated security emails shortly thereafter, but it’s clear that the domino effect has started.

Data Segregation
Marketers will segregate any data they can to identify Canadian contact points and avoid potential violations. If Canadian contact points are separated from others, marketers can hone in on this list to make sure CASL procedures are applied in full force. The downside is that it could potentially be very time consuming and costly to keep up with quickly-changing data sets.

Opting-In Across the Board
Could other countries like the United States adopt an opt-in framework going forward because of this “better safe than sorry” mentality? It’s a real possibility. The Canadian standard may become the new standard for marketers if CASL proves to be a success for the Canadian government. Some would argue that, with fines as high as $10 million, it is only a matter of time before the U.S. Congress takes note.

For marketers conducting legitimate business, being labeled a “spammer” is like the kiss of death. Not only does this cause financial damage, but the brand can suffer irreparable harm and lose consumer trust. Many weren’t taking CASL seriously, but it’s clear now that it’s a legitimate risk.

As marketing technology continues to evolve, it’ll be interesting to see if there will be any innovations directly related to CASL compliance and how marketers can better manage Canadian marketing contact points and communication. What do you think? Has your business had any issues around CASL? Have you adjusted any processes because of this?

Jeff Fotta is President and CEO of Gryphon Networks.

Public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced that it will open a new region of data centers in Canada — specifically Montreal — sometime in the next 12 months.

“The planned Canada-Montreal region will give AWS partners and customers the ability to run their workloads and store their data in Canada,” AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post today.

Expansion into Canada should be welcome news to AWS customers in Canada, who have not had their own region in the nearly 10 years of the service’s existence. Applications could perform better and data could be delivered to end users more quickly as a result of a closer region.

Amazon has expanded the geographic reach of AWS many times over the years. Recently it has committed to opening regions in India, Korea, Ohio, and the United Kingdom.

Other cloud providers, like the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, have expanded their own fleets of data centers in their quest to compete with Amazon, which is the leader of the market. The clouds also compete on prices and features.

AWS has more than 1 million customers, and it generated more than $2 billion in revenue for Amazon in the third quarter of 2015.

More information:

Powered by VBProfiles

VANCOUVER — In Canada, 75 percent of major retailers accept contactless payment. In the U.S., fewer than 2 percent of retailers do the same.

“Canada is the most ready country in the world for mobile payments to take root,” Rogers Communications VP David Robinson said today at the Wavefront Wireless Summit in Vancouver. “Ten percent of domestic transactions are contactless … and that’s going up about 1 percent a month.”

Today, contactless payments are almost exclusively the domain of chip-and-PIN cards tapped or air-kissed to contact-free terminals. Cards equipped with RFID chips identify themselves and authorize payment in a single tap, speeding checkout and significantly increasing per-sale purchases.

But the ubiquity of contactless payment technology in Canada has paved the way for virtual wallet technologies that haven’t yet been able to take hold in the U.S.

Which is exactly what Rogers is banking on — literally. A Canadian telco that offers mobile services, Rogers recently also became a bank as part of its quest to redefine mobile shopping. It’s launching Suretap, a mobile wallet that aims to be pretty much what your “leather platform wallet” is: a collection of all the ways you might want to pay, served up as you want them, when you want them. Suretap uses NFC to be immediately compatible with all contactless point-of-sale systems, but it also uses 1D and 2D barcodes to be compatible with non-NFC systems — and other mobile phones.

Which means that most modern smartphones, with the notable exception of Apple’s iPhone, are automatically compatible.

Above: Suretap

Image Credit: Rogers

It’s an interesting play — not least because Rogers will preload it on smartphones that it sells, or because it’s a platform that developers can hook into and build on top of via APIs — but it’s only possible because of major technology upgrades in Canada that have it ranked the second-leading national market in contactless payment, according to Juniper. That’s clearly a positive for Rogers — and the company plans to entice its existing subscribers to use Surepay via a compelling strategy:

“Suretap will be preloaded with a prepaid MasterCard to encourage trial usage,” Robinson said.

For card issuers like MasterCard and Visa, Suretap will be cheaper and faster. New cards can be provisioned at Internet speed — essentially real time with no need for manufacturing and mailing. Retailers will also see benefits, Robinson said, as they’ll be able to know who their clients are and be able to communicate with them via Suretap. And users will be able to manage all their payment processes digitally, including topping up pay-as-you-go cards, sending gift cards, and, presumably, managing allowances for kids.

As a digital payment solution, Suretap will have access and connectors to location data, identity, payments, loyalty programs, messaging, personal data, and offers and coupons. Security will be key — as will consumer awareness of what the solution can and can’t do — and an access code will protect users’ access to the app.

The APIs and third-party developers are key to Rogers’ plans, says Robinson, who seems realistic about what a major corporation can and cannot do.

“We’re a telco, we do big things well … we do little things badly.”

While Canada might be a good test market for mobile payments, the U.S. will get chip and PIN — and contactless payments — over time, Robinson said. That’ll happen for a variety of reasons, likely by 2015.

Not least of the reasons, of course, is security:

“A lot of the U.S. doesn’t support chip and pin yet … although the CEO of Target is reconsidering that,” he said with a wry smile.

A big question, however, is Apple.

Apple’s iPhone infamously does not support NFC, and although theoretically Suretap could work via 1D or 2D barcodes — or, as Google Wallet does on iPhone, with a smart plastic card that morphs into whatever credit card you want to use — in practice a mobile wallet that actually handles real payments on Apple’s platform that is not from Apple itself is likely to run into issues.

Robinson was diplomatic:

“Apple is an amazing company, but they march to the beat of their own drummer,” he said.

(By Ethan Lou, Reuters) – The Toronto Stock Exchange has hired a Bitcoin entrepreneur as its first chief digital officer as it explores the capabilities of blockchain, the technology behind the virtual currency, a senior executive at TSX parent TMX Group said on Thursday.

Anthony Di Iorio, who has founded several companies based on the technology, filled the role at Canada’s largest stock exchange in January, Jean Desgagne, chief executive of TMX’s Global Enterprise Services, said in an interview.

Stock exchanges are embracing blockchain, which allows Bitcoin users to conduct secure transactions without middlemen, as they seek to diversify and boost profit margins. When used to issue securities, the technology could potentially remove the need for clearing houses.

“Blockchain is a disruptive technology,” Desgagne said, noting that major changes could result from its potential adoption. “We’re focused on it, we’re going to learn.”

In January the Australian stock exchange said it had enlisted a blockchain startup to develop a new trade settlement system.

Nasdaq in the United States used the technology last year to issue securities to an unidentified private investor. Last month, Nasdaq said it was developing a blockchain-based shareholder voting system for its Estonian stock exchange.

Blockchain could make operations “better, faster, cheaper,” Desgagne said, but noted that, if adopted, the technology would be only one element in TMX’s digital operations.

Di Iorio and Desgagne declined to discuss details about potential blockchain projects at TSX.

Di Iorio is the founder of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada and a co-founder of Ethereum, a blockchain-based computing platform.

(Reporting by Ethan Lou; Editing by Euan Rocha and Richard Chang)

After three years, Canada’s Execution Labs has decided to shut its game startup accelerator program. Now it is transitioning to doing fewer, more custom investments in independent game studios.

The effort shows that making fewer bets on later-stage startups may yield better results in the maturing $90 billion game industry. The news isn’t good for the smallest indie game developers who are just trying to get a foot in the door, but it could be good for a smaller number of more advanced indie game studios.

“In a nutshell, instead of lots of $50,000 checks, we’ll be writing a smaller number of (up to) $500,000 checks,” said Keith Katz, the cofounder of Execution Labs in Montreal, in an interview with GamesBeat. “And we’ll be deploying our in-house team of experts remotely rather than having studios spend a fixed amount of time in Montreal. We are moving up the curve on when we come into the studios.”

The range of investment amounts is expected to be $200,000 to $500,000, Katz said.

Above: Kitfox Games’ Moon Hunters is launching shortly on PC and later on PS4.

Image Credit: Execution Labs

Execution Labs is maintaining its offices in San Francisco and Montreal. For over three years, Execution Labs has funded and trained more than two dozen indie game studios through its accelerator program. It often had about 10 companies a year — often no more than one or two developers at the outset — going through the accelerator. The model was to get the games started, train the developers for a few months, and then enable them to self-publish their games.

But now the market requires the indies to find publishers, and that requires more work and money to get to the point where a publisher can take over. Execution Labs has funded a few games over the years that are close to fruition and are using publishers. The rationale for the new model is to work closely with publishers, who generally work on a royalty model, and other investors.

“We realized that the market is changing, and we need to spend more time with each of the companies,” Katz said.

One of the upcoming games is Kemojo Studios’ Tap Cats, which is being published by Kongregate. Execution Labs is helping during the soft launch on things like playtesting, core loops, user interface, and business intelligence. Vancouver-based Kemojo is creating the game.

Another title coming soon is Moon Hunters, an action role-playing game by Kitfox Games. It is launching next week on PC and the following month on PlayStation 4. Execution Labs funded Kitfox Games, which made a game called Shattered Planet first; Moon Hunters is their second title as a studio, and it was funded via Kickstarter and the Canada Media Fund.

“The kind of studios we’ll be investing in going forward will be more like what Kitfox is today rather than what they were back then,” Katz said. “Our model has evolved to reflect the competitive marketplace and the resources needed to survive.

Execution Labs also funded Double Stallion, which launched the OK K.O.! game with Cartoon Network.

“It’s about where we see the market heading, partly it’s about the kind of studios we want to partner with, and partly it’s about how we can best leverage our expertise,” Katz said. “We always wanted to be flexible enough to experiment.”

The Outerminds studio game, PewDiePie: Legend of the Brofist, was perhaps the most successful game that was funded by Execution Labs, Katz said.

Above: Tap Cats by Kemojo Studios in Vancouver.

Image Credit: Execution Labs

Being Canadian means a lot of things. For example, I’ve driven a car, an ATV, and a snowmobile. But this, this is something else.

Canadian inventor and mechanic Tod Anderson has taken a Smart car and converted it into a … snowmobile car? Snow car? Ski car — Let’s go with that because I just got back from a ski trip.

In short, Anderson decided to add custom skis to the front of his 2006 Smart car and winter ATV tracks to the rear, because why the hell not. The result? A diesel-fueled ski car that lets you drive across snow at speeds up to 70 km/h (that’s 43.5 mph for y’all Americans).

Seriously, why drive a snowmobile when you can do the same thing in the comfort of a warm car?

The story goes that the invention was a local secret, until last week when someone snapped a picture and uploaded it to Reddit.

It inevitably went viral. The original photo, shared below, was simply captioned “Only in Canada.”

“It’s just a thought that came to me and it seemed like the right thing to do,” Anderson told CTV News. “It’s a rear-drive, rear-engine car, so it’s ideal for this sort of thing. The whole point of this exercise was to see if it could be done.”

Well, point proven. And apparently Anderson says it only cost him about $7,000 CAD (that’s $5,250 USD) and six weeks to build. If he ever wants his Smart car back, it only takes an hour to put the wheels back on.

I’m having difficulty finishing this up because my mind keeps skiing off on its own to imagine what I would with my own ski car. Oh geez, what if all my friends had their own ski cars? The only real problem here is that the ski car isn’t street legal.

Yet.

(Reuters) – Some Canadian Netflix Inc users cried foul on Wednesday after the video-streaming giant appeared to have made good on its pledge to block access for customers using unauthorized services to view more varied American content.

Canadian customers have access to less content on the service, with one website estimating Canadians could see 4,000 TV shows and movies, compared with 7,000 in the United States.

As a result, some subscribers use proxies or servers that facilitate access to Internet content not available locally.

Netflix said in January it would clamp down on usage of proxies or unblockers. It appeared to have stepped up enforcement over the weekend, with people on social media and online forums reporting mass outages.

A Twitter user with the handle @mrmitchclarke told the streaming service on Wednesday he would stop paying, attaching a screenshot of a Netflix page telling the user payment cannot proceed.

A Twitter user with the handle @Sethalos said the Netflix service available to Canadian users is “terrible.”

“So what other choice do you have other than Torrent,” he said, referencing BitTorrent, the free peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that allows illegal movie and TV show downloads.

Netflix’s move comes after its forecast of slower subscription growth this quarter, which sent its shares tumbling 8 percent in after-hours trading on Monday.

A Netflix spokeswoman referred to the company’s January announcement and Monday’s video conference about the company’s earnings and declined further comment.

In the earnings call, Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings dismissed concerns that the crackdown might affect business.

“It’s a very small, but quite vocal minority,” Hastings said of the users affected by the crackdown. “It’s really inconsequential to us.”

Netflix grants unlimited access to its selection of TV shows and movies for a monthly fee and is known for its original shows including “Orange is the New Black” and “House of Cards.”

(Reporting by Ethan Lou in Toronto; Editing by Alan Crosby)

FEATURE:

Google is no stranger to litigation, but for the past couple of years, the company has been fighting a case in Canada that could have far-reaching implications — not only for Google, but for the global internet-using population.

In light of this, a number of technology firms, human rights groups, media companies, and freedom-of-speech bodies are coming to the internet giant’s defense.

In the beginning

The background to the case dates back to 2011, when Canada-based industrial networking company Equustek began proceedings in the Supreme Court of British Columbia for an injunction to be brought against a competitor called Datalink Technologies. Equustek argued that Datalink had infringed on Equustek’s intellectual property rights with products sold under the Datalink brand. The long and short of this case was that Datalink was ordered to stop selling the products in question, but because Datalink had seemingly shifted to an entirely online operation, Canadian authorities were unable to enforce the ruling. Datalink continued to sell the products, and warrants were ultimately issued for the arrest of key personnel in the company.

Running out of options to prevent Datalink from marketing the products, Equustek turned to the mighty Google for help, asking it to block the company’s websites from search results. The internet giant voluntarily agreed to de-index some specific URLs, as requested. But Google didn’t go far enough, in the eyes of Equustek, which wanted entire websites de-indexed from Google’s search results. Indeed, though the defendants had originally operated out of Vancouver, they subsequently switched to using a “complex and ever expanding network of websites through which they advertise and sell their product,” a court document noted.

Thus, in 2014, Equustek filed a motion against Google Inc. and Google Canada Corporation to force the search engine to comply with its requests. In June of that year, Equustek received a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court of British Columbia, which agreed that for the ruling against Datalink to be impactful, Google would have to take a more holistic approach to de-indexing the implicated sites.

Not only had Google refused to de-index entire domains, but the 300-plus URLs it had agreed to de-index were restricted to the Google.ca search engine in Canada. Given that the defendants in the case were savvy enough to know that moving the products to a different web page on the domain would be enough to bypass the block in Canada, and since the bulk of Datalink sales were outside of Canada anyway, this meant that the scope of a Canada-only restriction would have little effect on Datalink’s ability to sell the products. In view of the situation, the court granted a worldwide injunction against Google.

On appeal

British Columbia’s highest court dismissed an appeal from Google in June 2015, leaving Google with one final avenue of recourse. In February of this year, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) agreed to hear Google’s appeal.

“This case raises important questions about the freedom to access information on the internet, and whether one country can determine what the rest of the world can see online,” a Google spokesperson said at the time.

The Supreme Court of Canada will soon have to assess whether Canadian courts have the authority to block search results outside of Canada’s borders, and under which circumstances a litigant can seek an injunction against a “non-party” that had nothing to do with the original lawsuit — in this case, Google. A spokesperson has confirmed to VentureBeat that it submitted its brief to the Supreme Court last month, and it expects the court to hear the case in early December.

David Price, Google’s lead product counsel, provided VentureBeat with this statement:

Courts and regulators should think carefully before they seek to impose extraterritorial orders. If you export global removals, you may import them, and the trade balance may not be in your favor.

In support

Wikipedia’s parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, announced yesterday that in support of Google, it has filed what’s known as a motion to intervene, whereby applicants offer the court an alternative perspective on the issues at hand.

“An order of this kind threatens the free flow of information on the internet,” explained Michelle Paulson, legal director at the Wikimedia Foundation, in a statement. “Not only does it lack geographic or temporal limits — it is indefinite, and worldwide — but it was issued against an organization that was uninvolved in the underlying dispute and that was not accused of any wrongdoing. It is questionable whether such orders would be appropriate under any circumstances, but if considered, courts should take far greater care to safeguard free expression.”

The statement continued: “We believe we must speak up in this case, with the hope that the Canadian Supreme Court will see the far-reaching impact such orders can have upon free speech, access to knowledge, and the internet at large.”

The Wikimedia Foundation isn’t the only body to file a motion in support of Google — according to the SCC’s official proceedings page, the following entities have recently filed motions to intervene: eBay, Kickstarter, Foursquare, Software Freedom Law Centre, Center for Technology and Society, Dow Jones & Company, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, American Society of News Editors, Association of Alternative Newsmedia, The Center for Investigative Reporting, First Amendment Coalition, First Look Media Works, Human Rights Watch, Article 19, and Open Net (Korea).

If the court grants the respective parties leave to intervene, they would typically have around eights weeks to submit a more formal brief outlining their case.

Perhaps support shown by prominent third parties could be enough to sway the country’s highest court. But if what’s been happening in Europe over the past couple of years is anything to go by, nothing can be taken for granted.

The case in Canada bears striking resemblance to the so-called “right-to-be-forgotten” ruling in the European Union, the result of a 2014 directive by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The ruling was designed to help individuals hide web pages that contain out-of-date, irrelevant, and ultimately “damaging” information about them, but it has led to a great deal of conflict between Google (as the biggest search engine) and national law makers.

Indeed, while Google finally agreed to hide search listings on all global Google domains accessed from within the EU country in which the removal request was made, France requested that the web pages in question be hidden from all internet users globally — something that Google is continuing to fight.

(Reuters) – A Chinese businessman who pleaded guilty in March to conspiring to hack into the computer networks of Boeing and other major U.S. defense contractors was sentenced on Wednesday to nearly four years in prison, prosecutors said.

Su Bin, 51, was charged with taking part in a years-long scheme by Chinese military officers to obtain sensitive military information. In addition to the 46-month prison term, a judge in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles also ordered Su to pay a $10,000 fine.

“Su Bin’s sentence is a just punishment for his admitted role in a conspiracy with hackers from the People’s Liberation Army Air Force to illegally access and steal sensitive U.S. military information,” John Carlin, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement.

“Su assisted the Chinese military hackers in their efforts to illegally access and steal designs for cutting-edge military aircraft that are indispensable to our national defense,” the statement said.

In an August 2014 indictment, prosecutors said Su traveled to the United States at least 10 times between 2008 and 2014 and worked with two unidentified co-conspirators based in China to steal the data.

The trio were accused of stealing plans relating to the C-17 military transport plane and F-22 and F-35 fighter jets, and attempting to sell them to Chinese companies.

According to prosecutors, in pleading guilty Su admitted sending emails to his co-conspirators telling them which persons, companies and technologies to target with their hacking and translating the stolen material from English to Chinese.

Su admitted taking part in the crime for financial gain, prosecutors said.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied any involvement in hacking.

Su was arrested in Canada in 2014 and ultimately consented to U.S. extradition.

He pleaded guilty in March to one count of conspiring to gain unauthorized access to a protected computer and to violate the Arms Export Control Act.

(Reporting by Dan Levine and Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Grant McCool and Richard Chang)

GUEST:

Oh, Peter Thiel. It’s always entertaining when smart people say stupid things, but we probably shouldn’t be surprised by what Thiel said in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. As brilliant as he has been at predicting the future and making investments that hit big, the man isn’t known for his for pulling punches – or worrying about what others think of him for that matter.

Not that I really need to tell you, but last week while speaking to an audience in Chicago, Thiel basically told the room they weren’t very bright or they wouldn’t even be there. “If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.” Those were his exact words. You can almost hear the cringe.

There’s no arguing that a lot of the best and brightest from every city in the world have flocked to the coasts for the chance to catch the next rising star. Every year, I watch hundreds of graduates from my alma mater, the University of Waterloo, head to Silicon Valley to make their fortunes. It’s been reported that UW provides the Valley with more tech workers than any school except Stanford.

I admit that’s hard to watch, especially when there are so many great things happening in Waterloo. We boast the second highest density of startups outside of the Valley. There’s hardware, software, robotics, ed tech, wearables, marketing tech, smart traffic, and on and on. Not to mention Google and other tech giants, including Netsuite, Square, and Electronic Arts, have opened offices here because they recognize the wave of talent that graduates every spring. But I guess some people don’t mind spending half their salary on apartments the size of Thiel’s coffee table.

I won’t lose sleep over what Thiel said, mainly because Waterloo – and other tech hubs like Austin, Boston, Toronto, London, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Singapore, and on and on – shouldn’t try to be Silicon Valley. They should embrace who they are and take advantage of their individual strengths. David didn’t beat Goliath by becoming a giant. He found his own competitive advantage. And that’s not to say that any of this is a competition. There are no prizes for having the most startups or unicorns.

Thiel’s tone deaf comments just perpetuate the myth that there’s nowhere else worth being. The rest of us plebes in the boonies will just have to prove him wrong. Fortunately, there are plenty of investors who will see Thiel’s comments as an opportunity to find the diamonds in flyover country, and there are plenty of diamonds to be found. Thiel can close his mind, but the rest of us will be better off when innovation happens everywhere instead of within one or two echo chambers.

And who knows? Maybe Thiel will help us out with the brain-drain problem. He is endorsing Donald Trump for president. For those of us outside the United States, maybe he’ll get his wish, and all of those brilliant foreign minds will want to go home.

Kurtis McBride is CEO and cofounder of Ontario-based Miovision. He also cofounded the upcoming Catalyst137 makerspace and Internet of Things development hub in the Waterloo Region.

GUEST:

If you’re interested in learning about, investing in, or building a company involved in machine learning, Toronto should be on your radar. Here are five reasons why:

1. The Geoff Hinton Lab Mafia

If you’ve been following the industry, you likely know all about Geoff Hinton’s lab based out of the University of Toronto. But even if you haven’t been following the industry, you may have witnessed some of the excitement surrounding the 2012 Imagenet challenge, which represented a breakout moment for the lab — and the industry as a whole: Hinton’s lab demonstrated, for the first time in history, that computers could recognize images more accurately than humans could.

This achievement was not the product of an epiphanic moment but rather a result of the incredible talent coming through the lab year after year, with students building off each other’s ideas and breakthroughs. Many of these talented students are now considered world leaders in the field, and they hold important posts at the world’s most cutting edge organizations.

Yann Lecun did his post-doc there in 1987 and is now head of AI research at Facebook.

Ruslan Salakhutdinov did his PhD at University of Toronto, was an assistant professor there before heading to Carnegie Mellon, and was recently hired as Apple’s first AI director.

Ilya Sutskever started his career in the Machine Learning group with Hinton and eventually became Research Director at OpenAI.

There are many I’m sure I’m not naming, but you get the point.

Although many of these talents have been snapped up by large companies not based in Toronto, they have likely inspired what will be the next generation of leaders in the field here, and Hinton continues his work at U of T.

2. The Creative Destruction Lab

When the world seemed to have accelerator fatigue, Professor Ajay Agrawal decided to create one that actually got companies to move faster — The Creative Destruction Lab (CDL). Another University of Toronto affiliated organization, the lab was founded to help science-based technology companies make the jump from pre-seed to post seed funding. It isn’t for the faint-hearted. Companies that aren’t performing are cut, and by the end of the program only the strong survive.

Recognizing the incredible talent that existed in Toronto, and the draw it had for machine learning enthusiasts, the CDL added a new stream specifically for machine learning startups. This year’s class will boast over 50 companies working on interesting ML problems, and the CDL has pulled together a world class group of mentors who invest in and advise the companies.

3. MKT4INTEL Conference

The CDL, in collaboration with Bloomberg Beta, hosted the first inaugural MKT4INTEL conference last year, and it was a runaway success. If you’re more interested in the research side of the industry, NIPS in Montreal is likely a better fit. But in terms of discussing the potential impact and applications of machine learning that will affect our lives and industries, MKT4INTEL is world class. They’ve put together an amazing agenda this year, to be held tomorrow, October 27.

4. Toronto/Kitchener-Waterloo Talent Factory

The Toronto-Waterloo corridor is now becoming known all over the world. People frequently compare it to San Francisco and Palo Alto, but it has its own unique characteristics and is charting its own path.

Of significance to the ML ecosystem is the incredible talent that the two academic powerhouses are churning out. I’ve talked at length about the machine learning program at the University of Toronto. The University of Waterloo, which is known for the quality of engineers graduating from its computer science faculty, also has an AI/ML program, and we should continue to expect these schools to be feeders that will help rapidly growing ML companies in the area scale up.

Furthermore, the Toronto-Waterloo corridor is a fantastic place to build a company because it is central, boasts a relatively low cost of living for a world class city, and employees are far more loyal than in other ecosystems.

5. The Next Generation

Not only is the Toronto ecosystem powered by the tradition of world class research in its backyard, but a whole crop of startups are carrying the torch on the commercialization side as well.

Brendan Frey (a Hinton Lab graduate) founded Deep Genomics because he saw an opportunity to transform the way precision medicine, diagnostics, and therapeutics are developed today using ML technologies.

Mike Murchison is using ML to help augment and automate elements of customer support with ada.support.

Maluuba, out of Waterloo, is a world leader in natural language processing technologies whose goal is to “teach machines to think, reason, and communicate.”

And Google Ventures-funded Kindred, which has many AI engineers working out of Toronto, just exited stealth with plans to deliver a robot that learns by copying human behavior.

Toronto ML startups have also become thought leaders. Although the promise of sentient AI is alluring, there is still a long way to go before we can put unsupervised products in people’s hands. The companies that will be most successful in the near term are those that build human-in-the-loop workflows into the experience of their products, where the more usage there is, the more data there is that can train the ML application, making it more useful for end users. Toronto understands this.

Additionally, there is a coming renaissance of Toronto-based companies pursuing opportunities to automate and improve the efficiency of manufacturing jobs, likely leading to the “Industrial Revolution 2.0.”

Toronto has long been searching for its own identity in the tech world, and I believe it already has one in ML/AI. The necessary ingredients are all in place, and the world is waking up to it. That’s why I am excited to be investing here.

Gideon Hayden is a cofounder and partner of Leaders Fund, a $100 million enterprise software focused fund based in Toronto and Atlanta.

Google is announcing today that it’s setting up a deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) research unit in its office in Montreal and giving $3.37 million in grant money to deep learning luminary Yoshua Bengio and seven other people associated with the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA).

Bengio himself has previously received backing from Google, and from other companies as well — namely, IBM, Samsung, and Intel. But the new grant is “bigger than any of the other funding we’ve received from private companies up until now,” he said during an interview with VentureBeat.

Bengio will not be formally allying himself with Google proper, because he wants to stay independent.

“That’s who I am,” he said, “that’s the choice I made that fits with my values, and I don’t need to get the millions, I’m fine. My salary is very good, and I care more about how what I can do could have a positive impact for science, humanity, and for training the next generation [of researchers].”

Google’s move to build a bigger AI presence and more closely ally with MILA, which has a presence at the University of Montreal and McGill University — mostly at the former — comes as other big technology companies take steps to enhance their products with deep learning. The approach typically involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data, such as photos, and then getting them to make inferences about new data. Facebook has created an AI research lab, and Google has the Google Brain group, while Google parent company Alphabet also operates the DeepMind group, and Baidu has formed its own research operations. Microsoft Research is also active in this area.

While this is a time of great activity in AI research and development, Bengio, who supervises 25 students and five post doctoral students as a full professor at the University of Montreal, intends to stay on the research side and not shift toward development. Interestingly, his brother Samy Bengio works at Google Research and has contributed to working products, such as Google’s image search.

The new Google AI research group in Montreal will be led by Hugo Larochelle, who recently left Twitter’s Cortex deep learning division.

The other MILA grant recipients are Christopher Pal, Doina Precup, Joelle Pineau, Simon Lacoste-Julien, and Laurent Charlin, as well as two of Bengio’s frequent collaborators, Pascal Vincent and Aaron Courville.

A blog post has more on the news.

Public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced that its new Canada region of data centers is now available for people to use. Computing, storage, database, and other services are online out of the region, which is known as Canada (Central) and located in Montreal, with two geographically separate availability zones.

Back in January, when AWS announced the coming of the Canada infrastructure, it said the region would become available within a year. And so the cloud has kept that promise. This is AWS’ sixth AWS region in North America and 15th around the world, with 40 availability zones, AWS said in a blog post.

AWS’ other major competitors, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, are also setting up more data center infrastructure, and also cutting prices and announcing features, but AWS has the lead in the market.

AWS’ Ohio data center region went live in October.

AWS had $2.21 billion in operating expenses in the third quarter of this year, parent company Amazon reported.

CyberConnect2 has been making games for two decades, growing from a tiny company in Fukuoka, Japan, to more than 200 developers today. It has worked on big titles such as the licensed Naruto games and the .hack// original series. And now the company has been entrusted with the development of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Remake.

But CyberConnect2 is barely recognizable on the global stage. While it is well known to Japanese gamers, it has a way to go before it has solid name recognition in Western markets. Hiroshi Matsuyama, the gregarious CEO of CyberConnect2, is aware of that and he’s trying to do something about it. I met Matsuyama on a recent trip to Japan, where I moderated a session on Matsuyama’s expansion plans in Canada and also visited the company’s headquarters. It seemed to me that the company’s challenges in going global and sticking to its knitting are similar to the quandaries that many game studios face around the world as they try to decide where to grow next on the path to leveling up.

That headquarters in Fukuoka — a city of 1.48 million on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu — was bursting at the seams with developers. The company’s two floors in a building near Fukuoka’s central train station are loaded with desks, monitors, and huge collections of manga (Japanese comics) and manga videos. CyberConnect2 has another office in Tokyo with 30 employees, and it has just opened a new studio in Montreal, its first foray into an international location. Live camera feeds connect the locations.

The company maintains its close relations with Japanese publishers through its Tokyo office. It makes its games for the most part in Fukuoka (though all offices work on all games), and through Montreal, the company hopes to broaden its reach beyond a single development culture and make games for the international market.

Above: Hiroshi Matsuyama (left) of CyberConnect2 with Martial Pagé, Minister and Deputy Head of Mission for Canada in Tokyo.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

The company has come far since a friend of Matsuyama’s started CyberConnect in 1996. A few years later, Matsuyama joined, and he took over as president in 2001, rebranding the company as CyberConnect2. That was about the same time that the PlayStation 2 was hitting the market.

“We started without around 10, and now we’ve got 200 in Fukuoka, 30 in Tokyo, and eventually 50 in Montreal,” Matsuyama said, speaking through a translator. “Our focus has always been on the software.”

In 2002, CyberConnect2 published its first .hack//Infection game, an action role-playing game for the PS2 that was built by CyberConnect2 and published by Bandai. Matsuyama played a key role in the development of the concept for the series about monsters in the digital world of viruses and hackers. The .hack// games sold well, particularly in Japan, and they put CyberConnect2 on the map — at least in Japan.

Above: Some of CyberConnect2’s console games.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Matsuyama also played a big role in pitching the Naruto fighting video games to the manga series creators. The pitch was accepted, and the company developed a series of Naruto games that Bandai published on the PlayStation 2 and other platforms. That series sold more than 10 million units worldwide, and it fueled CyberConnect2’s growth as a company.

CyberConnect2 became one of Japan’s largest independent studios. The company developed very close relationships with a few game publishers so that it could focus on the art of making games, Matsuyama said.

“We want to get better at developing games so we can make the children around the world smile,” Matsuyama said.

Around 2008, the company started making more original games such as Asura’s Wrath and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. CyberConnect2 makes both mobile and console games now, but much of its heavy-duty development is still focused on consoles.

Above: CyberConnect2’s entrance in Fukuoka, Japan.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

For the past five years, CyberConnect2 has been preparing to launch its new studio in Montreal, and in 2016 it finally made the move. Koji Yamanouchi, a veteran developer at CyberConnect2, became the studio manager in Montreal. In a Skype call, he described how it was difficult moving to Montreal, where he not only had to try to learn English but also French in order to communicate with the locals. Building a studio in a strange city, with people from multiple cultures, has become an interesting experiment. But Yamanouchi said he felt like it would be an interesting challenge to build a multicultural team that was filled with like-minded adventurous game developers who love the craft.

“We want to recruit both students and veterans,” Matsuyama said.

Matsuyama said that he hopes to build the Montreal studio into 40 or 50 people eventually. Asked what the studio will make, Matsuyama said that the purpose is to make games that help make the dreams of children come true.

The company chose Montreal in part because it has more than 10,000 game employees, and it’s already a big player in the world’s game industry. By moving into such an international city, CyberConnect2 can have contact with and learn from locals who are already good at global gaming. Matsuyama also said that CyberConnect2 wanted to be one of the first big Japanese companies — aside from Square Enix’s Eidos division — to create a large operation in Montreal, a place where there’s a large support system for new ventures.

Above: CyberConnect2 turned 20 in 2016.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

“Creativity doesn’t have any restrictions,” Matsuyama said. “We want to get some very interesting chemical reactions.”

But part of the reason for opening Montreal is a recognition that the Japanese way isn’t always right. Japanese game developers don’t have all the instincts when it comes to figuring out content that various global audiences will enjoy. Matsuyama wants the Montreal team to be able to tell the Japanese teams when they are unconsciously overstepping or even being offensive to people from other cultures.

“This is the kind of information that we want to get, and it helps that Montreal is a multicultural place,” Matsuyama said.

CyberConnect2 has sold more than 20 million games. That’s a lot for any local developer, but it’s not much when you think about the world’s biggest game companies. And while Matsuyama wants to expand in new territories and make games that are appealing to global audiences, he doesn’t want to forget that CyberConnect2 is a Japanese company and one of the only game companies with roots in Fukuoka, where the game community is strong but small.

Matsuyama wants the community to grow together and create new talent, and he helped set up a group that has monthly meetings that bring together people from more than a dozen game companies in Kyushu. The group has contests to promote and foster new developers in the region.

“One interest is to make Fukuoka the Hollywood of the game industry,” Matsuyama said. “The game companies are increasing, but not enough. We have to make it more appealing and charming.”

That might sound too ambitious, but he noted that Montreal’s development community was about as big as Fukuoka’s just 10 years ago. If Fukuoka can breed companies that grow fast, it could also be a big player on the global stage.

At CyberConnect2, the company is working hard on the Final Fantasy VII Remake, a title that is so beloved that the crowd cheered when Sony announced in 2015 that Square Enix planned to publish a remake of the game. Matsuyama can’t talk about it much, but Square Enix publicly announced that CyberConnect2 is working on the game.

Above: Manga collection at CyberConnect2.

Ultimately, CyberConnect2 will have to figure out what its next level will be. If Final Fantasy VII Remake is successful, that will raise the company’s profile.

Once they become as large as CyberConnect2, many large developers choose to become game publishers themselves or move into multiple businesses. But CyberConnect2 has yet to stray far from making games. Matsuyama knows that it’s risky to put everyone to work on the same games, but he doesn’t want to stray too far from the franchises that the company has excelled at making. CyberConnect2 can work on about eight games at once now, about half consoles and half mobile. Matsuyama is also experimenting on a new intellectual property in virtual reality.

And it still focuses on making games that its developers want to make, rather than making games that others want them to make or games that the company has to do in order to make money.

“We can make what we want to make,” Matsuyama said. “We have never made games that we didn’t want to do. We are not satisfied with our place in the hierarchy in the food chain. But CyberConnect2 is very cool, and we are known as talented and skillful. We are not aiming just to expand. We want to make the world happy with our games.”

Disclosure: The Canadian government paid my way to Japan. Our coverage remains objective.