As you may have seen in the news recently, Canadian merchants are starting to charge processing fees for credit card transcations [https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/canadian-businesses-can-charge-credit-card-fees-starting-oct-6-1.6096370] . The history of this goes back to 2018, when class action lawsuits
Brief Summary of the Rogers Outage RFI
Late last night the CRTC posted the reply from Rogers to the request for information [https://mgamble.ca/static/Rogers-CRTC-RFI.pdf] (RFI) it sent last week. In the RFI, the CRTC asked Rogers to respond to 55 questions about the
Rogers outage postmortem - is it time for structural separation?
On Friday July 8th around 4:45AM, the Rogers network in Canada went down hard [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-view-of-the-rogers-communications-outage-in-canada/] . Cellular, internet, and cable services were disrupted for customers across the country. The NetBlocks monitoring group estimated the outage knocked
The cautionary tale of the $5000 pop-up window
It started with a pop-up window on an old Windows PC indicating there was a problem with the computer. The user needed to contact Microsoft support via an 800 number for assitance to resolve the error. Innocent enough, right? That
Canadians deserve service based competition
In my talk a few weeks ago [https://mgamble.ca/a-kafkaesque-nightmare-the-history-of-stir-shaken-in-canada/] at RAG New Orleans I ended by saying "Or maybe the situation is worse. Maybe the regulator fails to see that smaller players – who function without large scale
Reolink NVRs and 172.16/12 - Or how I wasted my evening
Lately I have been looking for an IP Camera solution for my house. The requirements were simple - it needed to be cost effective, support wired and wireless cameras, and not require a connection to the cloud to operate. While
21 Hours in purgatory - a love letter to EWR
On Thursday of this week I was returning from the Risk and Assurance Group conference in New Orleans [https://riskandassurancegroup.org/new-orleans-conference-5-6-apr-2022/]. Because there were no direct flights to Buffalo (or Toronto), from NOLA, my return trip had me going
A kafkaesque nightmare - The history of STIR/SHAKEN and small carriers in Canada
Earlier today I had the honour of presenting a talk at Risk and Assurance Group (RAG) conference [https://riskandassurancegroup.org/new-orleans-conference-5-6-apr-2022/] in New Orleans on the history of STIR/SHAKEN in Canada from the perspective of smaller providers. RAG doesn&