Who wears short shorts? The staffers at Wirecutter do. With the weather heating up, we’re ready to trade in our jeans (ok, sweatpants) for some breezier styles. Whether you need sweat-wicking shorts for a run outside or a more polished pair to elevate your summer night-out wardrobe, our shorts recommendations will blow whatever you’re currently wearing right off your legs.

Imagine you’re a Park Commissioner in Vancouver.  You want to make sure seniors have a voice in any decision that affects car traffic in Stanley Park.  For many, that’s their access.

But you have a choice to make: Will you at the same time encourage seniors to cycle more?  And do something to make that happen.

More like this:

This is Michael Alexander a few days before his eighth decade, on the Arbutus Greenway.  A pause, a nod to the metaphorical flowers along the way.  This is a senior blissfully engaged in the life of Vancouver, loving the city we’ve become.  You know, because of that bike stuff.

And then he gives back more.  He’s a healthy citizen in every respect.

So how as Commissioner do you do both: open parks to traffic and get more seniors on bikes?

You’ll be deciding in the next few weeks.  What would you tell us?

For years and years I;ve been hassling my evil twin brother (it’s a long story) Jim Groom about getting Docker hosting up and running as part of Reclaim, so when an invite to the Reclaim Cloud beta arrived today (thanks, Jim:-), I had a quick play (with more to come in following days and weeks, hopefully… or at least until he switches my credit off;-)

The environment is provided by Jelastic, (I’m not sure how the business model will work, eg in terms of what’s being licensed and what’s being resold…?).

Whilst there are probably docs, the test of a good environment is how far you can get by just clicking buttons, so here’s a quick recap of my first foray…

Let’s be having a new environment then..

Docker looks like a good choice:

Seems like we can search for public DockerHub containers (and maybe also provate ones if we provide credentials?).

I’ll use one of my own containers, that is built on top of an official Jupyter stack container:

Select one and next, and a block is highlighted to show we’ve configured it…

When you click apply, you see loads of stuff available…

I’m going to cheat now… the first time round I forgot a step, and that step was setting a token to get into the Jupyter notebook.

If you look at my repo docs for the container I selected, you see that I recommend setting the Jupyter login token via an environment variable…

In the confusing screen, there’s a {...} Variables option that I guessed might help with that:

Just in passing, if your network connection breaks in a session, we get a warning and it tries to reconnect after a short period:

Apply the env var and hit the create button on the bewildering page:

And after a couple of minutes, it looks like we have a container running on a public IP address:

Which doesn’t work:

And it doesn’t work becuase the notebook isnlt listening on port 80, it autostarts on port 8888. So we need to look for a port map:

A bit of guessing now – we porbbaly  want an http port, which nominally maps, or at least default, to port 80? And then map that to the port the notebook server is listening on?

Add that and things now look like this as far as the endpoints go:

Try the public URL again, on the insecure http address:

Does Jim Rock?

Yes he does, and we’re in…

So what else is there? Does it work over https?

Hmmm… Let’s go poking around again and see if we can change the setup:

So, in the architecture diagram on the left, if we click the top Balancing block, we can get a load balancer and reverse proxy, which are the sorts of thing that can often handle certificates for us:

I’ll go for Nginx, cos I’ve heard of that…

It’s like a board game, isn’t it, where you get to put tokens on your personal board as you build your engine?! :-)

It takes a couple of mins to fire up the load balancer container (which is surely what it is?):

If we now have a look in the marketplace (I have to admit, I’d had skimmed through this at the start, and noticed there was something handy there…) we can see a Let’s Encrypt free SSL certificate:

Let’s have one of those then…

I’ll let you into another revisionist secret… I’d tried to install the SSL cert without the load balancer, but it refused to apply it to my container… and it really looked like it wanted to apply to something else. Which is what made me thing of the nginx server…

Again we need to wait for it to be applied:

When it is, I donlt spot anyhting obvious to show the Let’s Encrypt cert is there, but I did get a confirmation (not shown in screenshots).

So can we log in via https?

Bah.. that’s a sort of yes, isn’t it? The cert’s there:

but there’s http traffic passing through, presumably?

I guess I maybe need another endpoint? https onto port 8888?

I didn’t try at the time — that’s for next time — becuase what I actually did was to save Jim’s pennies…

And confirm…

So… no more than half an hour from a zero start (I was actually tinkering whilst on a call, so only half paying attention too…).

As for the container I used, that was built and pushed to DockerHub by other tools.

The container was originally defined in a Github repo to run on MyBinder using not a Dockerfile, but requirements.txt and apt.txt text files in a binder/ directory.

The Dockerhub image was built using a Github Action:

And for that to be able to push from Github to DockerHub, I had to share my DockerHub username and password as a secret with the Github repo:

But with that done, when I make a release of the repo, having tested it on MyBinder, an image is automatically built and pushed to Dockerhub. And when it’s there, I can pull it into Reclaim Cloud and run it as my own personal service.

Thanks, Jim..

PS It’s too late to play more today now, and this blog post has taken twice as long to write as it took me to get a Jupyter notebook sever up an running from scratch, but things on my to do list next are:

1) see if I can get the https access working;

2) crib from this recipe and this repo to see if I can get a multi-user JupyterHub with a Dockerspawner up and running from a simple Docker Compose script. (I can probably drop the Traefik proxy and Let’s Encrypt steps and just focus on the JupyerHub config; the Nginx reverse proxy can then fill the gap, presumably…)

The beautiful weather brings out lots of cyclists. I was running a few deliveries tonight for the Toronto Bike Brigade, in support of #foodshareTO and #notanotherblacklife. Here is the pickup point at the Biking Lawyer’s office.

All loaded up.

Off I go.

On Dundas St, I run into this nattily dressed gentleman, and couldn’t resist stopping for a chat. Martin was riding a Bridgestone Moulton, which is a pretty rare bike.

On the way home, I also saw someone riding a Pedersen, but I didn’t get a picture. Can’t be too many of those in town either.

Thanks to David Shellnut and FoodshareTO for organizing the food drop offs.

Ride safe everyone!

Update: David posted some photos here.

@EvanSelinger tweeted, While some companies think it’s enough to tweet support for social justice while marketing a tool for oppression, IBM gets out of the facial recognition business & states opposition to mass surveillance & racial profiling. In that tweet he pointed to IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology (Subhead: IBM’s CEO says we should reevaluate selling the technology to law enforcement), by @jaypeters in The Verge. Here is the letter to the U.S. Congress in which Arvind Krishna, IBM’s CEO, says what this is about. The relevant passage:

IBM no longer offers general purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software. IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency. We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.

In About face, I went on the record (while it lasts, anyway) in opposition to facial recognition by machines. I summed up my case this way: The only entities that should be able to recognize people’s faces are other people. And maybe their pets. But not machines.

Privacy Badger found 46 potential trackers trying to load into my browser as I read that piece in The Verge. I’m on record opposing that kinda shit too.

Bonus link.

Another.

I was born in England but moved to the US when I was very young. My parents held onto their British culture in many ways, one of which was continuing to watch British comedy.

When I was in elementary school, I remember walking in on my dad watching “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” I watched it with him and thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen.

The sketch I walked in on was the Upper Class Twit of the Year, which I found even funnier because one of the “twits” had the same name as one of my brothers.

My brothers and I continued to enjoy Python for decades and followed the cast’s post-Python work as well, especially John Cleese’s (in fact, my wife and I re-watched “A Fish Called Wanda” just last night).

So I was thrilled to discover John Cleese on Cameo, offering to create personalized videos for a fee. My oldest brother had a birthday coming up, so I couldn’t resist paying John Cleese to insult him as a birthday gift.

He did not disappoint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IbZj96fVhM

I have been using Zim Wiki for a long time now. Its my knowledge base. Very frequently I also use it as an outliner to take notes. This is an outline about that; written in Zim Wiki and exported as HTML. I have also attached a screenshot below.

print("Hello world")

Zim Wiiki screenshot in my outliner mode

The post Outlining Your Notes with Zim Wiki first appeared on Thejesh GN.

I know it seems like ages ago when we were talking about flattening the curve, but it was a rallying cry at some point. The charts that started it all weren’t particularly fancy or something to admire. For Mother Jones, Abigail Weinberg wondered why it still worked:

There were axes and legends, and Drew Harris, a professor of population health, would later add a line representing the capacity of the health care system, but in truth there was nothing particularly rigorous about the chart. It was a work of the imagination, too artless to be art but lacking the hard empiricism we expect of science. That in-betweenness is what made it so effective.

At the time, there were so many unknowns that projections seemed hard to grasp onto. But the visual concreteness of a chart, even though it was abstract and not based on actual data, seemed to be just enough certainty.

Tags: curve, Mother Jones

I’m reading N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Currently about half way through. It’s set in New York City, and the city is coming alive as a sentient entity. It builds on how cities can feel like there’s something to them that’s bigger than its parts, that constitutes some sort of character, personhood. Berlin does that for me, which attracts and repulses me at the same time. Copenhagen does too, like a comfortable coat during a beautifully glowing, but unexpectedly chilly sunset. London, yes, inspiring and gritty. And NYC, indeed. The image below is from my first visit to NYC, in ’93. With two friends we drove our car from up near Albany to Yonkers and then down the entire Manhattan peninsula taking in our surroundings, right down to Times Square, and exploring from there on foot. It was a grimy city then I felt. Another visit, just weeks after 9/11 it was a griefing city, putting everything into sharper focus, oddly clear sounds in the city’s overall din, more saturated colors, right along side the stench wafting over it all from its deep smouldering wound at ground zero.

Looking at the images, listening to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ Empire State of Mind.

NYC in 1993, from Empire State Building, looking down E34th and E33th towards Lexington Av

When exactly three months ago, on March 10th, the national advice became to stop shaking hands to reduce the spread of the Corona virus, I created a spreadsheet to track the numbers for myself. By the 13th we were advised to stay home from work, and by the 15th everything got shut down.

When I created the list I thought we might be in this for a long time, and set-up the table for three months, until today. By the time the lock-down measures were announced my estimate was it would be like that until June 1st. I filled out the last line in the original table just now, like I’ve done every day for the past three months.

At this moment, various measures have been eased, restaurants reopened. Much remains as well. No events, social distancing applied in trains and buses, and working from home until September (but several of my clients already saying January).

The numbers show things have been shifted back to a manageable level. Here’s the graph of deaths per week, against the log scale of the number of total cases tested positive. We’re not done, but we’re not being overwhelmed either. At a equilibrium of sorts.

I’ve come to the end of my original tracking table. Haven’t decided yet if I add another three months to the list.

Though I appreciate the reference to the Brautigan poem in the title, I admit to being a bit surprised to find no mention of the Adam Curtis BBC series of the same name, and on the same topic. Instead, what we have here is mostly a recounting of the debates between Herbert Simon (the same, Watters points out, who is today cited in reference to the term 'learning engineering') and Hubert Dreyfus, author of What Machines Can't Do (and also one half of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus that wrote Mind Over Machine, where they define the five stage model of skills acquisition). And this is important. Because while Dreyfus's point was that machines can't have intuition, Watters's point is that machines can't care. She doesn't mention intuition at all. But today's machines do have intuition - that's the core of the inexplicability problem in AI. Could future machines care? Even if they're not human?

go2ts is a simple and powerful Go to Typescript generator. It can handle all JSON serializable Go types and also has the ability to define TypeScript union types.

Written because none of the existing solutions did what I wanted.

This code originally started from struct2ts when I started writing a PR to add the features I wanted, but after adding unit tests, cleaning up the code to meet our internal standards, and removing features temporarily so I could more easily understand the code, I realized I only had a handful of lines in common with the original project, so I instead forked it into its own project.

Note that this doesn’t have a CLI, and that is intentional. To use the library you will need to write Go code, which I think is completely reasonable given what it does.

For frequent flyers or commuters on public transit, reducing the noise around you is the difference between enduring a trip and enjoying it. Noise-cancelling headphones can make your music easier to hear and your world a little more peaceful.

The Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 is our favorite pair of noise-cancelling headphones, but we also have recommendations for people who want to spend less or prefer earbuds over headphones.

CEOs and leadership teams now must conduct meetings that had once been considered critical to do in-person – often with course-changing implications for the companies they are leading – virtually in audio and increasingly video conferences. Building alignment around strategy and making mission-critical decisions is tough enough in face-to-face settings, a challenge we discussed in our Harvard Business Review article “Unite Your Senior Team.” And virtual meetings bring along their own challenges – technical disruptions, low-quality audio and video, the inability to read body language or have sidebar conversations.

But by applying the right set of alignment strategies, executives can conduct virtual meetings as effectively as in-person meetings – and even reap unique advantages. In fact, there is growing evidence that effectively-run virtual meetings may be superior to in-person meetings in two ways. First, they have the potential to neutralize cognitive biases. For example, leadership teams often defer to the CEO, which can shortchange debate and result in less informed decisions. In virtual meetings, however, this bias appears to be less prevalent and participants are more comfortable openly disagreeing with top leaders, which leads to more productive discussion and often better outcomes (Olsen et al., 2017; Bloom et. al., 2014).

Download the full PDF.

 

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Based on our work with corporate leaders of global companies, we offer five recommendations to improve the efficiency, quality of interactions, and compliance of virtual meetings to realize these benefits.

1. Select a user-friendly video platform to optimize experience and enable human interactivity.

The functionality of a platform can make or break effective collaboration, facilitation, and experience. Just as company leadership provides input on the decision of a new office locations, they should similarly ensure access to a secure, video-enabled conferencing platform with the user at the center.

Take, for instance, the example of a large bank that recently conducted a series of virtual workshops with more than 40 top executives. These workshops used a platform that met all criteria in terms of security and compliance but did not enable user-friendly and engaging interactions. As a result, there was low participation and technical issues that regularly interrupted the discussion.

2. Use engagement tools to improve interactions.

A common meeting objective for C-Level meetings is to identify disagreement and work toward alignment. During in-person meetings, it is often easy for facilitators to “read the room” and detect body language that may indicate disagreement or if participants are losing focus. But this is harder to detect when participants are thumbnail videos on a screen.

Example of a C-suite alignment working session on corporate strategy

One way to overcome this is to integrate polling, breakout rooms, virtual canvases, and other tools to encourage active participation and make misalignment visible. These tools allow real-time capture and playback of different views and ensure that all participants are engaged and contributing – breaking the illusion of unanimity linked to authority bias, social loafing, or status quo bias.

Consider another example; Innosight has adapted an alignment exercise called “walk the line” to a virtual experience. In traditional in-person meetings, this exercise involves asking leaders to stand along a spectrum to indicate their point of view on a critical issue – for example, “What should our growth aspiration for 2030 be?” For virtual video conference meetings, we now use a dedicated tool that allows senior leaders to choose avatars and then virtually position the avatar during a discussion with multiple potential outcomes that led to a rich dialogue with all participants involved.

3. Set clear rules and roles to drive desired leadership behavior.

Explore other COVID-19 disruption resources.

Setting standards of expected behavior such as designating speaking times or only allowing a host to record meetings can further improve efficiency and security.

In one example, we developed a set of behavioral norms or “enablers” for focused discussions that we adapted to the virtual setup. For a senior leadership program with a large global financial institution, we introduced the concept of assigning “MOJOs” for each meeting. As described in Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation, a MOJO entails a Meeting Owner (MO), who has the responsibility of ensuring that the meeting has a clear agenda and objectives, that it starts and ends on time and that there is “equal share of voice” through the discussion, and a Joyful Observer (JO), who, at the end of the meeting provides feedback to the MO about how the meeting was in fact run. These norms can leverage the virtual context – such as, for example, by using the private chat function to allow one-on-one discussions and feedback.

4. Adapt frequency and duration to balance meeting time with content.

It is not uncommon for in-person strategy meetings to take place over a full day or even over multiple days. The switch to virtual, however, requires a different cadence to keep participants engaged. Like most people, they are sitting in front of their laptop, alone, lacking the stimulating side discussions an in-person meeting typically brings. Similarly, facilitators often lack the cues to provide breaks when necessary. Also, some leaders have the habit of standing up and walk around the table while talking, something that might trigger irritation in a video conference. To keep participants engaged on one recent project, we doubled the meeting cadence while capping meeting time at three hours with scheduled breaks. This tactic noticeably improved the engagement and focus of the C-suite participants.

C-Level executives, despite their deep expertise, may be unfamiliar with new, video-enhanced virtual tools. We have found that checking in individually with executive team members ahead of and after a virtual meeting to gauge comfort with virtual tools can be a powerful way to make everyone feel included and address individual challenges.

5. Distribute comprehensive preparatory work to ensure a common starting position.

Example of a C-suite working session on prioritizing and aligning on top trends that will impact the core business by 2030. The two priority axes 1.) Certainty that a specific trend will occur 2.) Strategic impact of a specific trend on established business

Pre-reads and background materials are critical for agenda-packed in-person discussions – and they may be even more crucial to virtual discussions. Consider a meeting where leadership’s objective is to align on financial targets for 2020 and beyond; for this, participants should be familiar with the associated revenue and cost scenarios including underlying trends and assumptions beforehand.

Also, assigning small homework tasks ensures that participants think through their answers and ideas to develop their own opinions in advance. At one virtual leadership event we hosted, the objective was to align participants around growth drivers for the mid-term. Before the meeting, each participant received a structured pre-read, reducing the time needed for clarification and dive into alignment exercises. Short e-surveys in advance of a meeting have similarly proven to be effective because playing back the survey results with simple visuals during the video conference increases the level of engagement and attention.

These tactics can result in meetings that meet objectives and produce alignment on even contentious or high-stakes decisions. In fact, they can bring advantages in terms of overcoming cognitive biases and driving inclusivity.

These benefits highlight an essential fact: the C-Suite may not just need to adapt to virtual collaboration in the “new normal” of working from home. We predict that this experience will change C-Suite collaboration in the long run, even after this hopefully short-term disruption to business normality. Mastering effective executive virtual collaboration can be a way to ensure not only business continuity now but also the effectiveness and efficiency of C-Suite collaboration – virtual and in-person – in the future.

About the Authors

Bernard Kümmerli is a Senior Partner at the growth strategy consulting firm Innosight. bkuemmerli@innosight.com

Claudia Pardo is a Partner at the growth strategy consulting firm Innosight. cpardo@innosight.com

Thiemo Werner is an Associate Partner at the growth strategy consulting firm Innosight. twerner@innosight.com

Kelsey Beuning is an Analyst at the growth strategy consulting firm Innosight. kbeuning@innosight.com

The post Building Senior Team Alignment Virtually appeared first on Innosight.

Greg Glassman was CEO of Crossfit, a fitness system that is affiliated with many gyms. He shared insane and racially insensitive conspiracy theories on a call with gym owners — and then the company issued a rambling and ineffective statement to justify itself. Glassman’s now out the door. The statement is practically a case study … Continued

The post The 10 mistakes in CrossFit’s “apology” for the racial insensitivity of CEO Greg Glassman appeared first on without bullshit.

I work at a company that offers hardware-based cybersecurity products and services. Our major product is a network appliance, called a data diode, that restricts data flow in one direction (meaning you can’t hack in the opposite direction).

Before you gasp in shock, it’s a real thing, needed by real people. For example, nuclear power plants use them to secure their operational networks (OT). The data diode allows them to stream their operational data out of the OT to their enterprise networks (IT) without allowing hackers to attack or send commands into the OT.

And it’s not just critical infrastructure folks who are interested, military and intelligence organizations use us to defend their networks and data.

So there.

Self-isolating
A core concept for our data diodes is the enforcement of one-way data flow using optical isolation – usually a light transmitter and receiver pair connected with a fiberoptic cable. That means the reverse direction can’t happen. And, without the optical connection, the two sides of the data diode are effectively ‘air-gapped’.

Optoisolator chips are similar: a light diode on one side, paired with a photoresistor on the other side. Optoisoloators are usually used to isolate networks with different voltages, allowing a signal to go from one side to the other without having to unify the two voltage nets. For example, say you have a 3.3V microcontroller and you want to drive a 120V speaker.

How it works
To make one-way transfer via an optoisolator more tangible, I built a prototype where two microcontrollers communicate via an optisolator. Buttons on either side are pressed and the button states are sent to the other side (via serial, if you must know), reflected in the indicator LEDs.

I chose the ATtiny84, as it is a nice and small microcontroller (MCU) and has more pins relative the more common ATtiny85. The optoisolator was the common 4N35. The rest is a bunch of wires (this being a breadboard proto), LEDs, resistors, and buttons.

For the data connection, let’s call the blue side the side that can transmit (TX) the state of the buttons through the optoisolator. The red side receives (RX) the button states. Clicking a button on the blue side will light up the corresponding LEDs on the blue and red side (the red side receiving the update). If I click a button on the red side, only the LED on the red side changes, as the red side can’t send data to the blue side, due to the optoisolator and also because the TX of the red side is not connected to the RX of the blue side.

But I put the same code on both MCUs, so the red side MCU is still trying to transmit the button states. I can show this by bridging the optoisolator with a jumper wire connecting the RX of the red side and the TX of the blue side. With the jumper in place, a button press on the red side will show a corresponding change on the blue side.

Visualizing something simple
This is a way to show how you can have something that keeps data flowing in only one direction. And the jumper shows that you actually have to physically bridge the optoisolator to get transmission in the opposite direction.

Ideally, I wanted to make this into a badge folks could play with and hack. But perhaps later. Also, the way we build our data diodes, we actually have proxies on both sides of the gap to handle more complex communication on each side of the diode. I’ve been wondering of a way to make that concept more tangible, and I have an idea how that doesn’t use MCUs. But that, too, perhaps for another time.

Summary
This build is part of some exploration of mine to make some concepts more tangible. What drives me is to how to show things that can’t be seen, how to make the digital more physical.

Check out the video below for how the proto worked out and let me know how I did.

The post Optoisolation and tangible concept demonstration first appeared on Molecularist.

I’ve been keeping track of this for a long while, partially because I actually bought BeOS a long time ago and liked the approach behind it, and partly because I keep wishing they did an ARM port for the Raspberry Pi–an idea that was (ironically) repeatedly shunned over the years due to “lack of popularity”.

Which is kind of sad, since with a working WebKit browser, a pretty decent user interface and an emphasis on simplicity, it would be an amazing OS for the Pi (as well as a great way to revive older laptops).

Any working ARM port has yet to happen (and other things like laptop-grade power management are apparently still MIA), but it is nice to see progress regardless, and I will eventually fire up a KVM instance to check this out. just booted it on an ancient Eee PC and it does work reasonably well if you’re very tolerant of the browser limtations and UI conventions.

Godot is a game engine that has risen in popularity over the past few years. It currently supports (officially) its own programming language (GDScript, in both textual and “visual” forms) and C# (via mono), and is able to target most platforms (including mobile, VR headsets and consoles).

Unlike Unity or Unreal (which have massive communities, asset stores, and performance/storage requirements), it has an almost tiny footprint (less than a hundred megabytes) and runs quite well on low-end hardware, so despite having fiddled with Unity on and off for years, I (together with my kids) find myself playing around with Godot instead.

(It’s worth noting that Godot’s visual scripting is a pretty decent starting point for getting started with game logic.)

Resources

A new app in the works from developer Equal Experts hopes to make it easier for people to return to work safely amid COVID-19.

The app, called ‘Work | Space,’ will use Bluetooth to detect when you get too close to your co-worker and will alert users to help them build a habit of maintaining a safe distance while at work.

The technology in use is similar to the contact tracing software developed by Apple and Google to help public health agencies. However, it’s important to note that Equal Experts isn’t using that official API — it’s currently limited to only official public health agencies.

Considering that Work | Space isn’t designed to perform contact tracing, it may not be a significant issue if it isn’t using the API from Apple and Google. Instead, Work | Space appears to be a more proactive tool designed to alert people when they get too close, rather than retroactively notify people that they may have come in contact with someone infected with COVID-19.

At the time of writing, Work | Space wasn’t available on the iOS App Store. However, interested businesses can reach out to Equal Experts through their website to learn more about Work | Space and how to implement it in their office space.

You can also learn more about Work | Space on the developers’ website.

Source: 9to5Mac

The post New app ‘Work | Space’ hopes to make returning to work safer during COVID-19 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A large number of senior citizens have been turning to online banking options during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to CIBC.

During the month of April, the Canadian banking giant says it saw a 250 percent increase in customers aged 65 and higher signing up for digital banking.

Given that seniors are at higher risk to contract the virus, they’ve been advised to remain at home as much as possible. However, many of us likely have that stubborn grandparent or other elderly family member that ignores social distancing advice. Therefore, it’s good to see that some seniors are at least reducing their outings to the bank.

To assist seniors, CIBC says it’s eliminated e-transfer fees for senior clients (retroactive to May 1st, 2020) on all personal chequing accounts. Further, the bank has launched the CIBC Seniors Support Centre to provide seniors with a dedicated resource for online banking.

Beyond digital solutions, CIBC notes that it also CIBC offers priority phone routing and priority service to seniors in banking centres, should they need to in-person assistance.

Source: CIBC

The post CIBC saw 250 percent increase in digital banking among seniors in April appeared first on MobileSyrup.

When it comes to protecting your Google account, Google Prompt is one of the best tools available. It turns your smartphone into a convenient two-factor authentication (2FA) tool. Whenever you sign in to your Google account on a new device, Google will prompt users to allow the login from their smartphone.

Google Prompt has gone through a few changes in its lifetime, but a new change rolling out to users makes Prompt less secure for those with multiple devices.

Back in 2018, Google opened up Prompt to work on all phones signed into a given account. Users could head to the ‘Security’ tab of the Google account settings page and manage which phones worked with Prompt under the ‘2-Step Verification’ section. Unfortunately, that feature is on the way out. Instead, Google will send the login prompts to every device signed into your account.

Currently, the Google Prompt section features a note about the change, which reads as follows:

“In the coming weeks, you’ll also get Google prompts for 2-Step Verification on any eligible phone where you’re signed in. To stop getting prompts on a particular phone, sign out of that phone.”

There’s also a toggle to turn Prompt on or off across all signed-in devices.

Along with this, Google recently sent an email out to Prompt users, noting that any signed-in phone that doesn’t currently receive sign-in prompts will start getting them on July 7th. If you don’t want a phone to receive the prompts, you’ll need to sign out of your account on that phone.

Android Police points at that this means individual device management will likely be a thing of the past, which will be particularly frustrating for people who manage an account across multiple phones. While admittedly a niche issue — outside of phone reviewers, most people probably don’t have a bunch of phones signed into a Google account — there are situations where it could prove problematic.

For example, some people let their kids play on their old phone, but leave their Google account signed in. In those cases, the child could accept a sign-in prompt, which could potentially put the account at risk. Again, this likely won’t impact most people, but by forcing every connected device to surface sign-in prompts, Google could put users at risk.

Source: Android Police

The post Google will start pushing sign-in prompts to all signed-in devices on July 7 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Vancouver-based national carrier Telus is launching its ‘PureFibre 1.5 Gigabit‘ internet service in British Columbia and Alberta.

The carrier says this service brings fast speeds clocking in at up to 1,500Mbps download and up to 940Mbps upload. Telus’ PureFibre 1.5 Gigabit service with unlimited home internet data is available for $165 per month on a two-year term.

Telus notes that these speeds are possible through its PureFibre network, which it says is the largest 100 percent pure fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) network in Western Canada. The carrier outlines that a 100 percent FTTP network allows for higher download and upload speeds and better reliability.

“The advanced technology and unparalleled speeds of our PureFibre network are providing enhanced access to digital healthcare solutions, enabling virtual education and powering teleworking capabilities that fuel economic productivity and diversity,” said Telus CEO Darren Entwistle in a press release.

The carrier states that at 940Mbps, Telus’ PureFibre’s top upload speed is over 37 times faster than the upload speeds of other plans widely available in Western Canada.

You can learn more about the new plan here.

Source: Telus

The post Telus launches ‘PureFibre 1.5 Gigabit’ internet service in Alberta and B.C. appeared first on MobileSyrup.

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