By David Farrell
Major telecoms agree to emergency outage deal
Canada’s major telecom companies have reached a formal agreement to “ensure and guarantee” emergency roaming and other mutual assistance in the case of a major outage.
“Going forward, should one of these providers be faced with a major network outage, the other companies have committed to providing the support and assistance necessary so that Canadians can reach loved ones, access 911, and conduct business transactions,” François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, said to reporters during a cabinet retreat In Vancouver Tuesday. – The Canadian Press
Canadian TV news is inept at the top
Talk about awkward. On Monday night Omar Sachedina anchored the CTV National News for the first time since you-know-what happened. At the end of the newscast came the inevitable: “We typically cover the news, but lately, we have become the subject of it.” There followed a beyond-uneasy acknowledgment that Lisa LaFlamme controversially didn’t have her contract renewed for the job he was now doing.
“Half a century after my parents were expelled from Uganda and were welcomed by compassionate and generous Canadians from coast to coast to coast, starting this journey with you tonight means a great deal to me, and it validates the promise of possibility,” Sachedina said.
Well, you can spin it this way and that, but the fact is, many Canadians are neither compassionate nor generous to CTV News and Bell Media right now. Another fact is, that CTV News is the object of international attention that often amounts to scorn. Its machinations and responses have been mentioned on CNN; a headline in the Los Angeles Times shouted, “The firestorm over the firing of a gray-haired female news anchor in Canada.”There is no misperception or mystery clinging to the story… – John Doyle, The Globe and Mail
Rogers’ purchase of Shaw is now likely to drag into mid-2023, analyst predicts
The federal Competition Bureau’s continued opposition to Rogers Communications Inc.’s RCI-B-T planned acquisition of Shaw Communications Inc. SJR-B-T has one industry expert predicting the fate of the takeover may not be decided until next summer.
On Monday, the competition watchdog won a minor victory in its campaign to block the $26-billion merger of the country’s two largest cable companies when the federal Competition Tribunal ruled Rogers’ service outage in early July, which affected about 12 million customers, will be part of its planned hearings on the deal. The bureau pushed to have the outage on the agenda, while Rogers argued it was not relevant. – Andrew Willis, The Globe and Mail
Police must pay attention to online threats and harassment against journalists seriously: Trudeau
Police forces need to take seriously a pattern of hate and harassment targeting journalists and other public figures, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday.
Trudeau said that message would be conveyed to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police during a meeting with Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino Thursday afternoon. – Mia Rabson, National Observer
Web 3.0 is a lane, not a highway
Facebook was not the first web 2.0 company, but it was the one that took it mainstream to a global audience. Consumers’ digital lives would never be the same again. Whereas web 1.0 had enabled them to visit and read websites, much like a digital evolution of newspapers and magazines, Facebook enabled consumers to participate, comment, upload photos, converse, etc. It was a total transformation of the internet and enabled much of the digital world in which we live now. But it did not mean the end of web 1.0. Indeed, 18 years after Facebook’s launch, web 1.0 is alive and well, with websites being an integral part of our everyday digital lives. Sure, many of those have adopted web 2.0 components, such as comment fields, but they are still fundamentally web 1.0. With all the hype, or even, post-hype of web 3.0, it is tempting to think that our entire future digital lives will be lived in VR glasses and on the blockchain. But the actual future will be more prosaic, with web 3.0 being another lane to the internet’s highway, rather than an entirely new road to replace the old one. And that is no bad thing, nor does it undermine the vast potential that web 3.0 has. Nonetheless, it does warrant a reassessment of just what role web 3.0 will play. – Mark Mulligan, Music Industry Blog
Android still dominates smartphones globally — but Apple is gaining ground
As of August, Android held 71.54% of the mobile global market share, while Apple's iOS came in at 27.81%, according to web analytics service StatCounter data. Now, if you're looking at those numbers thinking "that's most phones," you'd be right. The next top competitor, Samsung, can claim only 0.42% of the worldwide mobile OS market share.
For all the hullaballoo surrounding iPhones, Android is still the dominant mobile operating system across the world. – Alexandra Garfinkle, Yahoo! Finance
Yahoo buys The Factual to add news credibility ratings
Yahoo has acquired The Factual, a company that uses algorithms to rate the credibility of news sources, Yahoo president and general manager Matt Sanchez told Axios.
The deal could provide Yahoo News' 200 million+ monthly visitors with ratings for the thousands of news sources Yahoo aggregates on its site.
With the transaction, which closed last month, The Factual's eight employees, including its founders, have joined Yahoo News full time. – Sara Fischer, Axios
Facebook’s $37.5M location tracking settlement
Facebook will pay millions of dollars in damages to end a location-tracking dispute. This isn't an easy situation, though. According to reports, Facebook and META have a disagreement regarding whether users can be tracked after they've logged out of the app. As a result, it's evident that Facebook is monitoring people who've deleted the app. Meta, on the other hand, is attempting to fight this lawsuit.
