Reading Time: 2 minutes

In the 2014 Transparency Report, the Canadian telecom Rogers Communication has reported fewer customer information requests since the Supreme Court ruled that Internet Service Providers could not voluntarily disclose customer information to law enforcement officials than in previous years. In 2013, Rogers had 174,917 requests for customer information, including addresses, billing records and names, but in 2014 there were only 113,655.

This is partly due to the Canadian Supreme Court ruling that barred ISP’s, including Rogers, from disclosing names, addresses and phone numbers of their clients at the request of law enforcement officials without a warrant from a judge. This landmark decision has seen the number of requests drop significantly, but requests that had a judge warrant only dropped by roughly 3000, from 74,415 to 71, 501.

As well, Rogers confirmed that they denied access to information, or were unable to return a customers information in 2,278 cases in 2014. Whether this was due to the changes, or simply due to not keeping long term records is unknown, but this also signifies a raise in denials.

As per the ruling, the other major carriers such as Bell Communications and Telus Communications also have seen a similar drop in requests. We were unable to acquire concrete numbers from the other two of the big three, but have been told the requests for both non-warrant and warrant requests have dropped significantly.

This trend in Canada has not been repeated in other parts of the world, and this is worrying to many within the data industry.

Just south of the border, the United States has seen a sharp increase in requests to the major providers, and this has not only been limited to telecommunication companies.

For instance, in 2013 Verizon and AT&T received more than 300,000 requests from law enforcement, both federal and state, which sees little to no change. With Verizon seeing 150,000 requests in the first six months of 2014 and 140,000 requests in the last half of the year, a drop of only 10,000 between the two years. On the other side AT&T received 115,925 requests in the first half in both civil and criminal proceedings, and 147,830, and these are numbers are not the most troubling.

Multinational companies such as Microsoft and Google have been seeing a dramatic increase when it comes to requests. Google for instance has seen a 19% increase over the last year, and with the continued popularity of Google services that back up everything, this will only increase.

Although we are north of the border, here at 4GoodHosting we are proud to announce that when you utilize our services your information will not, under any circumstances be released to authorities without a warrant. We make sure that your data is safe and secure in our Canadian based data centres and continue to supply our customers with the best in class security and stability. Next time you are looking for storage options, the only place to look is at 4GoodHosting.

 

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Do you know if your hosting provider here in Canada is releasing your personal information to US and Canadian authorities without your knowledge?

A new study released today by the policy researchers Andrew Clement of the Universtiy of Toronto, and Jonathon Obar of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, in coordination with the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy looks at this exact question.

This study looked at the privacy practices of the top 43 Canadian internet service providers, and surprisingly finds that most of them will tell very little about what they do with your personal information. According to the study, many Canadian internet carriers are in violation of their legal responsibilities under Canadian Privacy Law.

The researchers based the internet service providers on 10 criteria including

• Whether they inform customers when a third party requests their information
• Whether they inform customers the circumstances in which they agree to the requests and provide customers information to said third parties.
• Whether they tell customers the location that their personal information is stored and processed
• Whether they attempt to avoid routing customers personal information outside of Canada, where it is at risk at being intercepted by American authorities.

The study reveals that a number of the top carriers in Canada in fact scored quite poorly on this scale. Our of the ten criteria, the average was two out of ten, which speaks to the issues around Canadian carriers.

Of the top isp’s in the country, the top scorer was the Ontario based Teksavvy with six stars. Telus received five stars for their services in Western Canada. While the other two members of the big three, Rogers and Bell, scored with scores of four and three stars respectively. Rounding out the major isp’s Shaw and Videotron were within the average at two stars each.

The researchers hope that this landmark study will lead to tougher Canadian privacy laws either through federal or provincial legislation. As well, they hope that carriers will become more transparent when it comes to providing customers information on how they handle their private data.
The issue with the lack of ISP transparency here in Canada, is it makes it difficult for domestic customers here in Canada to know who might be handing their data. No matter if it is the National Security Agency in the United States or the Canadian Security Intelligence Services here in Ottawa, their needs to legislated steps to protect personal data by the ISP’s.

The Office of the Privacy commissioner of Canada completed a poll on this subject, and its results showed that more and more Canadians continue to be concerned about their personal data. The poll found the majority of Canadians were not comfortable with government departments and agencies requesting personal information from ISP’s without a warrant. Further to this, Canadians continue to be concerned about how their data could be used for government surveillance without their knowledge. However it should be noted that nine of the top ISP’s received over one million requests from government departments for access to personal data on their servers. With very few of those requests denied by the ISP’s.

With this in mind, many of the discount ISP’s choose to route their services through transit carriers that are not located here in Canada to save money. When your information is routed, it loses all Canadian privacy protection, and allows for your information to be accessed by any third party, including the United States government.

If you are looking to protect your data, your best choice here in Canada is to trust the secure and stable experts at 4GoodHosting. We provide a stable and secure platform for your data, and unlike the leading ISP’s we do not share your data with third parties no matter what. As well, the only time we will release your data to the authorities is with a sealed court order. If you are looking for the best in security, the only choice here in Canada is 4GoodHosting.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

At some points in your work with web page redirection, it can feel that you are simply dodging bombs and at your luck will eventually run out. Enter in the 301 redirect, and canonical options. These have been around for years, and yet throughout the industry they continue to bring debate and stir up questions on how to best approach them.

In this article we will be looking at the two main methods to manage both the 301 redirect, as well the canonical attribute. Naturally, we will show you how to better the duplicate content issues, sustain your rankings and lastly how to improve the all important user experience.

Before we dive in, lets make sure we are all on the same page with what the difference between 301 redirects and canonical redirects. In laymen terms:

• a 301 redirect communicates to search engines that this page is no longer here, and has permanently moved to a new page. Please remove it from your index and pass credit to the new page.

• a canonical redirect communicates to the search engine that, I have multiple versions of this page, but please only index this version. People can see the other versions, but please do not put them in your index thanks!

301 Redirects

We have all seen the standard 301 HTTP status code that is mean to mange the complete and permanent redirection of page. Once this is established, in theory you will eventually pass the majority of the original page’s link authority relevance as well as its ranking power to the page that you are redirecting to. A 301 redirect informs both the user and Google of this change. However, in realty we know that this can be trying process in which success is measured by increments rather than full authority all at once.

Common issues with the 301

The first issue you may face is that it takes a long time, and I mean you are going to have to take a few turns of the calendar until some search engines will attribute authority to the redirected page. Naturally, this depends on how often your page is crawled by the search engines, but the delay does mean that if the change is on a tight deadline, a 301 is not your best tool.

Another issue is on some pages it is not possible to implement HTTP status codes. The reasons for this are many, including not having FTP access or your web designer told you this is not going to work. It all boils down to if you do not have the ability to have server-side access, the 301 is not going to work, simple as that.

Lastly, 301’s often are used incorrectly, and when this happens it undermines your own relevancy. A 301 is not to be used to redirect all pages during a website shift, this will actual cause a high bounce rate, and your client will simply not be able to get anywhere near the site.

However, when it comes down to a simple page redirect, the 301 is still the king of the court, even with its very complex issues.

When to Use a 301

• As default
• When a page has been permanently moved or replaced
• Domains that are permanently moved during a re-branding or acquisition
• 404 pages, as well as expired content

rel=Canonical Attribute

To start off, the rel=”canonical” attribute is not a substitute for a 301 redirect, it is merely a tool that is utilized by the search engines. This is because it is a tool when a web page has duplicate content but both pages need to stay active, and is used to avoid the punishment by search engine crawlers for near identical content.

This means that if you have a page with the same content, but that have different URL’s that have a product listed by size, and the other by weight. When Google goes to index both, it will pick which one is more relevant to the search, rather than the actual page that the person is looking for. This can be avoided by simply placing a rel=”canonical” and picking which page will always come back on the search. This lets Google know you realize that there is similar content, but you would prefer the size page to be relevant for instance.

Common Issues with Canonical

The biggest issue with rel=”canonical” is the fact that it is so commonly misused, by industry professionals and amateurs alike. If you are looking to redirect, you really need to go another route. This is only to be used if you have the issue of duplicate content, and that is it.

Yet another issue is when there is a misuse of the tag on multiple pages. When you use this tag, it is telling Google that the first page is what is relevant, while the rest of the content is a duplicate. This might not be your intention, and will actually have the opposite effect than desired as your page will lose visibility. Plus, even if you have made the level of relevance and authority for specific searches, these pages will not show up due to this command. Simply put, unless there is duplicate content do not be lazy and look for other options.

When to use Canonical

• When 301’s cannot be implemented, or when a time restraint is on the project
• Duplicate content, and looking to keep both pages live at the same time
• Dynamic pages that have multiple URL’s on the same page
• Cross-domain issues when both sites are very similar but are needing to be kept alive

Summary

Although redirect options can first look to be intimidating, they are in fact not. Both of these options will in fact work, but their implementation are for very different circumstances. 301 is still the dominant form and for good reason, however if you are concerned about duplicate content or speed the choice is simply to utilize rel=”canonical.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

According to the latest Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) one in five 18-34 year old Canadians have made a purchase on a mobile device. The CIRA announced its fourth annual .CA Factbook 2015 this last Tuesday, and within it the mobile device is becoming a central hub for ecommerce among the Canadian Youth.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

This article is about how flash-based Solid-State Storage Drives, or SSDs, mass storage devices are designed and manufactured.

A Solid-State Drive (SSD) is a type of data storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies in silicon memory to store data persistently. However it has no “drive” or motor, nor any actual moving parts. Pretty much just infinitesimally small electrons move around in a SSD drive. As of 2015, most SSDs use NAND-based flash memory, which retains data without power.

Some major milestones have been: At Cebit 2009, OCZ Technology demonstrated the first 1 Terabyte (TB) flash SSD using an 8x PCI Express interface. It displayed a maximum write-speed of 654 megabytes per second (MB/s) and maximum read speed of 712 MB/s. In December 2009, America’s Micron Technology announced a SSD using a 6 giga-bits per second (Gbit/s) SATA connection interface.

Here is a short video view into a Micro SSD factory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK-fXJnR5K0

Just 1G of storage take over 8 Billion transistors all wired up precisely without 1 wire out of place. As there are 3 wires for each memory cell, that is a sum total of 24 billion microscopic wires to make up 1GB of storage. Yet SSDs even come in 1TB, or Terabyte capacities. There are 8TB of SSDs available on the market today. So multiply 24 billion by another 1000, as 1000 gigabytes = 1 TB, so that is 8 billion transistors and 24 Trillion wires in our Enterprise Flash Drives (EFD – another name for Enterprise hosting grade SSDs).