Broadcast TV will be extinct by 2030, Netflix CEO says

The current model of TV programming distribution will be broken and non-existent within the next decade and a half, the CEO of streaming media company Netflix says.

Speaking at an industry event in Mexico City, Reed Hastings told reporters that he thinks the current system where television channels are grouped into free-to-air network television and premium cable channels is becoming obsolete.

"It's kind of like the horse, you know, the horse was good until we had the car," newspaper The Hollywood Reporter quoted him as saying. "The age of broadcast TV will probably last until 2030."

That's probably not a shocking statement from a man who runs one of the world's fastest growing content companies. But it does indicate how fast the pace of change in the industry is happening.

Recent data suggests Netflix makes up more than a third of all internet traffic in North America during peak periods. That's far more than any other source, and an indication of the type of heft that the once upstart company now has in the content game.

Netflix no longer breaks out its Canadian subscribers numbers separately, but boasts more than 34 million households in the U.S. — comparable to the reach of many television networks.

To keep up with that growth and pay for exclusive content like Orange Is the New Black, the company recently announced a price increase of between $1 and $2 a month for new customers.

The company showed off its disruptive influence in the industry in the summer in a testy exchange between a Netflix executive and the CRTC, which was demanding that the company hand over reams of subscriber data — something the company says it has no legal obligation to do.

That exchange came as the regulator was looking into changing the rules on "bundling" cable whereby customers are forced to pay for packages of channels — as opposed to picking and choosing the ones they want.

Although Netflix is the giant of the streaming space, others exist. Earlier this year Rogers and Shaw launched Shomi, a streaming service that's meant to rival Netflix.

Netflix has seen roaring success of late making popular programming, but Hastings comments come at a time when there's upheaval in the way that the industry even monitors what consumers are watching. Ratings company Nielsen is going to start tracking Netflix viewing in its ratings numbers, something it hasn't done before.

That's sure to be a sea change in terms of tracking what people are actually watching. As of yet, there hasn't been a reliable way of comparing how many people are watching a popular cable television show such as The Big Bang Theory, for example, versus a Netflix show like House of Cards on a real head-to-head basis.

Although Netflix likes to boast about the popularity of its shows, Hastings downplayed the significance of Nielsen's move because, by the company's own admission, it won't include mobile usage.

"It's not very relevant," Hastings said. "There's so much viewing that happens on a mobile phone or an iPad that [the new ratings] won't capture."

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Up, up and away: Camera captures Newfoundland from stratosphere

John Hennessey and Erica Styles sent a hydrogen-filled weather balloon equipped with a camera soaring above the west coast of Newfoundland and Labrador earlier this month, and what it captured is quite remarkable.

The pair attached a GoPro camera and two global-positioning systems to the device before sending it up in the air above Black Duck Siding. 

Hennessey said he and Styles have done several launches in the past, but they never saw anything like they did on Nov. 9. 

"This particular launch went further than launches I've done in the past. I think it went 225 kilometres," Hennessey said. "Significantly further than what it's gone in the past. I think the farthest that I ever got it to go was 187 kilometres." 

"You can see the blackness of space and the curvature of earth," Hennessey explained. 

The trip was 2 hours and 12 minutes in total, but the balloon exploded after reaching 33 kilometres from earth.

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Canada's process to protect endangered species is failing, study finds

The Canadian government may be shirking its legal responsibility to protect endangered plants and wildlife, a new study suggests.

Scientists found that 86 per cent of legally protected species in Canada either maintain the same level of risk or have deteriorated over time.

"What's at risk is biodiversity in Canada," says Dr. Brett Favaro, a research scientist with Memorial University's fisheries and marine institute, in an interview with Quirks & Quarks. "Extinction is forever ... If something goes extinct, this is millions of years of evolution that we're losing."

How Canada identifies at risk species

In Canada, animals become classified as at risk over a two-step process.

First, a group of scientists who make up the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) assess a species by looking at its population trajectory, range of habitat and a number of other factors. They then determine if the species is:

• Not at risk.
• Data deficient, which means there is insufficient data to complete the assessment.
• Special concern.
• Threatened.
• Endangered.
• Extirpated, which means the species no longer exists in Canada's wilderness, but does elsewhere.
• Extinct.

In the second step, the government considers COSEWIC's assessment. The Minister of Environment Leona Aglukkaq decides whether or not to list the species under the Species at Risk Act. It is designed to respect "the protection of wildlife species at risk in Canada," according to the Act.

The Cooper's hawk was a special concern species in 1983, but is no longer at risk. (Dean Fosdick/The Associated Press)

"The government can choose not to list the species even if it needs listing," says Favaro. "That decision takes into account how expensive it would be to protect them."

Favaro was among a group of scientists studying how all the animals identified to be at risk have fared since COSEWIC started conducting assessments in 1977. He and his colleagues at the University of Victoria looked at every species that has been assessed multiple times and logged how often a species gets better, stays at the same level or gets worse.

"What we found was quite surprising to us," he says.

Eighty-six per cent of species stayed at the same risk level or deteriorated over time, he says, calling the situation "very concerning."

For example, COSEWIC assessed the black tailed prairie dog five times between 1978 and 2011. It was considered a special concern between 1978 and 2000, but in 2011, it was upgraded to threatened.

Critical habitats left unprotected

Favaro says part of the reason such a high number of animals maintain their risk level or get worse over time is because their habitat is not protected — despite the Species at Risk Act requiring that to be done.

'If you're not protecting habitat, then no matter how long we leave something listed, it seems unlikely that it's going to recover and do better.'- Dr. Brett Favaro

For more than half of assessed species, their critical habitat wasn't identified, Favaro explains. For the species that had their habitat identified, in a lot of cases it was only partially done, he says.

"If you're not protecting habitat, then no matter how long we leave something listed, it seems unlikely that it's going to recover and do better," he says.

He says the government needs to invest more in identifying at risk species' critical habitat and protecting it.

Much like it did in the case of the Cooper's hawk. The hawk was a special concern species in 1983, but is no longer at risk. Favaro credits that to the government's decision to ban DDT, a previously commonly used pesticide.

"So, we identified the problem and we addressed the problem," he says.

Favaro's study didn't examine how much it would cost the government to protect the habitats of at risk species, but believes the government has the responsibility to do so once an animal is listed under the Act.

"At that point, I don't think we should take half-measures," he says. "If we're going to list it, I think we should go all the way."

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Security camera footage from homes, businesses broadcast online

Insecam.com, a new website, is broadcasting online private security camera footage from thousands of spots across Canada — all without the knowledge of the people who own and operate the cameras.

Insecam.com has feeds from internet protocol cameras (or IP cameras) all over the world.

"This is one of a series of websites that have been around for a while that basically go through and troll the internet for open ports," said Tod Maffin, a tech columnist based in Vancouver. "Until fairly recently that information was just kind of held for people's own curiosity, but now, as we're seeing, this site and other ones as well are posting their findings."

Insecam broadcasts footage from thousands of cameras from around the world, including this one in a Winnipeg Autopac location. They say they only broadcast footage from cameras that haven't had their default passwords changed.

Many of these cameras come with default passwords to access the footage on a website while you're away — and often people fail to change them.

That's where Insecam comes in. The site accesses the feeds using default passwords and broadcasts them.

CBC News watched several feeds from various locations in Winnipeg on Friday, including a car insurance sales office, a candy store, a tattoo parlour and others aimed at people's front doors, backyards and properties.

"These are very simple cameras. You can buy them in Apple stores and Future Shops for a couple of hundred bucks," said Maffin. "You basically plug it into your computer network at home and it begins broadcasting immediately."

Don Cairns of EyeSee Computers in Winnipeg sells thousands of the cameras every month.

He said people buy them to protect themselves and don't realize their privacy could be breached.

"People are buying a lot of cameras and surveillance systems because vandalism is rampant now," he said. "Break-ins — I mean, there's just a number of reasons why people want to feel more secure and are buying these cameras."

Site about warning of risks, Insecam says

Insecam claims on its website to be broadcasting the footage as a warning to people that their private security footage is accessible to everyone.

In the FAQs section of the website, organizers agree to remove any camera feed when asked.

Don Cairns of EyeSee Computers in Winnipeg says he sells thousands of IP cameras a month. The cameras allow users to view footage from anywhere they can access the internet. (Teghan Beaudette/CBC)

"If you want to leave your surveillance camera public accessible but want to remove it from this site send the URL of your camera to email from contacts section. But remember that your camera still will be available to all internet users," the site reads.

Insecam has drawn criticism online because it sells ad space next to the footage.

In an email to CBC News, a representative from Insecam said, "The only solution to solve the problem is to make a panic in media. There is no way to contact a camera owner, e.g. by IP."

If your private images have been broadcast online, there could be few avenues for recourse.

Andrew Buck of Pitblado Law in Winnipeg handles online privacy cases and said they can be extremely difficult and costly to pursue when you don't know who is behind the breach.

"It's tough because one of the things you have to ask yourself is, against whom am I going to be taking recourse?" said Buck. "It becomes really difficult to find a remedy, because you have to understand and find out who is behind

[it] … servers can be located anywhere."

An Insecam.com feed shows security camera footage from inside a Winnipeg tattoo parlour on Friday. Other locations in Winnipeg included a pizza place, car insurance retailer, chocolate shop and several homes.

Even if the individual's identity is known, the person's location also plays into any potential legal action that could be taken, Buck said.

"Just because we're here in Canada, if someone else is somewhere else in a different country, our laws may or may not apply to them," he said. "Even to the extent that our laws apply, getting a remedy that you can enforce becomes difficult."

As for Insecam, it notes on its website that none of the cameras it broadcasts images from have been hacked.

"Owners of these cameras use default password by unknown reason. There are a lot of ways to search such cameras in internet using Google, search software or specialized search sites," the site says.

IP cameras popular, cheap solution for many

"You need a secure password on that camera," said Maffin. "It's always streaming that content out to the internet, but that's by design.… The problem here is that people are putting weak passwords on that connection and now anyone can go and look at it."

But Cairns warned these cameras can be hacked even if you do create a unique password, and even big names in the tech industry have been hacked.

"Do a lot of research … and find out which of the IP network video recorders are not at risk of being hacked or have protected themselves," said Cairns.

Cairns said hackers and other people can use the cameras to plan break-ins or to alter footage of illegal activity.

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How facial recognition technology is creeping into daily life

Calgary police became the first force in Canada to start using facial recognition software to match suspects against a mug shot database this week, but it likely won't be the last.

The use of facial recognition technology is growing not just in law enforcement and security fields but also in commerce.

"One of the reasons face [recognition] is so popular is that face images exist of almost everybody," said Kevin Bowyer, an expert on biometrics and computer vision and chair of the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame.

"You've got your driver's licence photos, you've got your identity badges wherever you work, so you've got this legacy of images that are easily accessible for everyone."

Some cellphone apps use face recognition instead of passwords to give users access to devices. (Carlos Barria /Reuters)

Chances are you've already encountered some form of this technology. Government agencies that issue driver's licences use it to verify that you are who your licence says you are. Banks use it when investigating debit card fraud.

Smartphone apps like FaceCrypt and FastAccessAnywhere use it to grant you access to your mobile devices. Social media sites like Instagram and Facebook employ it when tagging photos. Google uses it in search and tagging functions and police in Dubai have even incorporated it into its Google Glass eyewear.

Matching faces not so simple

The algorithms used to match images of faces vary and are largely proprietary but generally employ computational methods to analyze the pixel values in images and identify patterns and correspondences.

Matching images to mug shots can be problematic when using CCTV or security camera footage, which rarely provides clear, front-facing head shots. (Tony Gentile/Reuters)

A lot of progress has been made in facial detection and matching in the last decade thanks to the millions of dollars pumped into the field by the U.S. government — primarily the Defence Department — said James Wayman, a facial recognition expert who helped allocate that funding and is a research administrator at San Jose University

But facial recognition software can still be stymied by many factors: a person's pose, lighting, facial expressions, aging, image resolution and obstructions like hats or even hair.

"Identification is a very messy process. It's as messy for computers as it is for humans," said Kelly Gates, author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance and an associate professor of communication and science studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

"People look like each other, people look different over time …​ people can look very different depending on the lighting conditions, depending on the day.…

'You can never establish certainties; you can only establish probabilities of matches.'- Kelly Gates, author of Our Biometric Future

"You can never establish certainties; you can only establish probabilities of matches." 

To make a good match, you need images where people are looking straight into the camera and have similar facial expressions — ideally, a smile and not the neutral expression we've all been told to adopt on IDs and passport photos in the post-9/11 era.

"That rule is born out of this idea that you don't want to match across expressions," Bowyer said. "It turns out it would be better if everybody smiled because your smile is more distinctive than your neutral [expression]."

CCTV images often not useful

Facial recognition is only as strong as the algorithms and image banks driving it. When the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology tested the six leading suppliers of facial recognition software in 2013, it found the best-performing among them (NEC, the provider Calgary police are using) failed to recognize the most likely match in a database of 1.6 million mug shots about four per cent of the time. The worst-performing software missed it about 20 per cent of the time. For webcam images, the failure rates were roughly 11 per cent and 67 per cent, respectively.

Security cameras are usually mounted high up to prevent them from being vandalized, but this doesn't make for good quality images, says facial recognition expert Jim Wayman. (Soeren Stache/Pool/Reuters)

​The biggest obstacle to accurately matching faces is image quality. Many of the agencies that use facial recognition rely on CCTV and security cameras, but these produce images that are grainy, low-resolution and taken from above.

"The worst-possible direction to put a camera to try to recognize somebody's face is up," said Wayman.

He says he doubts that casinos, for example, ever really use the facial recognition software that is supposed to help them keep out problem gamblers and spot card cheats and VIP customers because their cameras are generally on the ceiling.

FBI adopts face recognition

Facebook, on the other hand, is full of high-resolution, front-facing pictures of faces, which is why it's more than 250 billion uploaded photos are a veritable gold mine for law enforcement.

The FBI has said it won't store social network photos in the database of 52 million photos that will be part of its new face recognition system, but groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have raised concerns that "there are no legal or even written FBI policy restrictions in place to prevent this from occurring."

Iris scans are another biometric tool used to identify individuals. They are used to screen travellers at some airports and will be part of the FBI's new identification database. India is using them to build a massive national identification system. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

The FBI has said that by 2015, its database will include at least 4.3 million "civil images" — those taken for non-criminal purposes.

"This means you could become a suspect in a criminal case merely because you applied for a job that required you to submit a photo with your background check," the EFF warned in an analysis of the program.

The FBI's Next Generation Identification system will also include fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans and information such as ethnicity and immigration status and be shared across agencies and police departments.

Automated passport checks

Facial recognition technology is also becoming a familiar site at airports. Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and Germany are among the countries that use automated airport customs gates outfitted with cameras that snap your picture and match it against your passport — and potentially a watch list.

A Qantas Airways flight attendant places her passport on a scanner as her face is photographed at an automated border control kiosk at Sydney Airport. (Tim Wimborne/Reuters)

Canadian border authorities have so far limited their use of biometric tools to iris scans, which are used to verify the identities of those who use CanPass or Nexus IDs to travel between the U.S. and Canada. New passports are equipped with a digital facial image that can be used in face recognition systems, and Passport Canada does use the technology to check applicants' photos against its database.

But while facial recognition might be able to detect passport fraud, it likely won't help authorities pick a known terror suspect out of a crowd at a busy airport. 

"How often do terrorists whose picture you have and are looking for really walk through airports? Not very often. A thousand times an hour some poor chump like me walks through the airport … so you get thousands upon thousands of false positives," said Wayman, who advises Australian customs authorities on their SmartGate facial recognition system.

Selling you stuff to your face

Security-related uses of facial recognition are to be expected, says Bowyer, but it's the commercial applications that have really picked up in recent years.

Retailers like Reebok and Tesco have used cheap webcam based facial detection software to monitor how customers react to store displays or to show them age- or gender-specific ads in real time. (Unlike face recognition, face detection doesn't try to make a match but estimates a person's gender, age and facial expression based on what their face looks like and what the software already knows about faces of a certain age, sex or mood.)

Smart TVs enable cable, video game and marketing companies to gauge audience reaction using face detection while online dating site Match.com will find you a mate who looks like your ex with the help of facial recognition​.

There's even a smartphone app called SceneTap that uses cameras and facial detection to tell you if a club or bar is busy and what the average age and gender ratios of the patrons are.

All this raises concerns not just of privacy —  the Alberta privacy commissioner has already announced she will review the Calgary police's use of face recognition technology — but also of autonomy, says Gates.

"Facial recognition plugs into a larger set of practices and problems around predictive analytics and the ways in which all of our online and offline experiences are constantly being modulated using data science and data analytics," she said.

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Theremin turning heads in Canadian music, literary circles

The sound it produces is beautiful, unsettling, haunting and unmistakable … resembling, as one critic famously said, "a cello lost in a dense fog, crying because it does not know how to get home."  

He was talking about the theremin, also called the vox or "the voice from heaven." It's a mysterious electronic instrument whose Bolshevik and Cold War history is as fascinating as the music it makes.

"The theremin is the only instrument you play without touching it," says Clara Venice, one of the few composers who writes pop music for the theremin.

Clara Venice is one of the few composers who writes pop music for the theremin. (CBC)

"It has two antennae. The one on the right controls the pitch and the one on the left controls the volume, and as your move your hands around the antenna, you create sound. And if you practice a lot you can make make music."

She adds that there are no keys, frets or other guides to tell the musician where the notes are.

"I describe it as the instrument you play with your intentions. You think of a note, you find the note in thin air, Venice says. "It's an act of conjuring. It's a dance as well, because when you play it, you are constantly moving, and adjusting. It's a partner."

The theremin - once hailed as both a musical and scientific breakthrough - has lived most of its modern life on the fringes, in creepy movie soundtracks and pop music cameos.

This week on The Sunday Edition, starting at 9 a.m. Nov. 9 on CBC Radio:

• Remembering author Alistair MacLeod.
• Many are concerned that our justice system fails victims of sexual assault. Four experts offer thoughts on how to make things better for women who wish to come forward.
• Two eminent historians grapple with the legacy of the deadly carnage of WWI that killed 16 million people. David Stevenson of the London School of Economics looks at the advent of industrial warfare. Ian McKay of Queen's University examines Canada's glorification of the battle of Vimy Ridge.

But right here in Canada, the theremin seems to be having a bit of a mainstream moment.

Venice just completed a residency at the National Music Centre in Calgary. She celebrated her return to Toronto with a concert a few weeks ago, and is working on her second EP.

"The theremin is cool, it's sexy, and it can be used in any kind of music," Venice says. "It doesn't have to be classical music. It doesn't have to be experimental music. It can be used in R&B. I cover Bad Religion with the Theremin. I cover R Kelly with the Theremin. I write my own pop music with the theremin and it fits."

Montreal author Sean Michaels' novel, Us Conductors, is a love story rooted in the connection between Lev Theremin - the instrument's inventor - and its most famous player - Clara Rockmore. The book is a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, which will be awarded Monday night.

"Us Conductors  traces Theremin's invention of the device when he lived in Russia around the Bolshevik revolution, his travel to America as one of the greatest stars of his day, and then his return to Russia where he was sent to a Gulag prison in Siberia," says Michaels.

"It traces those broad historical moments, the nightlife of New York brushing shoulders with the Gershwins, Charlie Chaplin, the Rockefellers. But is also digs deep into ideas of heartbreak, unrequited love, and the things we do to make it through hardship alive."

Author Sean Michaels book Us Conductors traces Lev Theremin's invention of the device in Russia around the time of the Bolshevik revolution. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press)

He says anyone can make sounds on a theremin, but the instrument is exceptionally difficult to master.

"To me, having a theremin in the living room is a bit like having a wild animal. Most of us hold our flimsy hands in front of these antennae and we make this warbly shaky sound and hit the wrong notes. It all just ends up sounding like a dying cat."

Venice says when the theremin came out it took the world by storm. RCA bought the patent and was going to produce them, but then Lev Theremin was imprisoned by Stalin and disappeared. RCA no longer had a spokesperson, the public face who could bridge the gap between the instrument and the  public.

"So the question is whether it was his disappearance that affected the instruments'  fate, or was it just that it's so damned hard to play?," she says.

(To listen to The Sunday Edition's documentary on the theremin, Out of Thin Air, tune in to CBC Radio on Sunday Nov. 9 starting at 9 a.m. or click the "Out of Thin Air" box to the top-left of this story.)

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Wind turbine noise not linked to health problems, Health Canada finds

A Health Canada study has found no link between exposure to wind turbine noise and negative health effects in people.

Wind turbine noise did not have any measurable effect on illness and chronic disease, stress and sleep quality, Health Canada said.

However, the louder the wind turbine noise was, the more people reported being very or extremely annoyed, the department reported in a summary released today of the Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study.

The $2.1-million study, conducted with Statistics Canada in southern Ontario and Prince Edward Island, was launched in 2012. At that time, groups such as Wind Concerns Ontario had alleged that growing numbers of wind turbines were making people ill.

According to the Canadian Wind Energy Association, there are now enough wind turbines installed across the country to generate up to 8.5 gigawatts of energy, a 62-fold increase since 2000.

The study involved an adult in each of more 1,238 households at varying distances from wind turbines. The participants answered a questionnaire in person, and health measurements were taken, including blood pressure, heart rate, measures of sleep quality, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol in hair samples.

The researchers also measured 4,000 hours of wind turbine noise in order to calculate indoor and outdoor noise levels at different homes in the study.

The study found no link between wind turbine noise and ill-effects including:

• Symptoms such as dizziness and migraines.
• Chronic illnesses such as heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
• Measures of stress levels, such as heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol.
• Self-reported or measured quality of sleep.

"While some people reported some of the health conditions above, their existence was not found to change in relation to exposure to wind turbine noise," Health Canada said.

The study did find that as levels of wind turbine noise increased, people reported being more annoyed by various aspects of the turbines, from the noise itself and the aircraft warning lights on top of the turbines to the way they caused shadows to flicker.

Health Canada said the results of the study are considered preliminary until published in peer-reviewed scientific literature. It added that "detailed analysis and results will be shared with Canadians and the international scientific community over the next several months with updates provided on the Health Canada website."

Health Canada said the results will be used with other scientific research to:

• Provide advice on health effects of wind turbine noise.
• Support governments in making decisions, policies and advice related to wind power development.

The principal investigator of the study was David Michaud of Health Canada's health effects and assessment division. It also involved an expert committee that included more than two dozen government, academic and industry experts in fields ranging from acoustics to neurology and included four international advisers.

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Half of universe's stars are orphans with no galaxy

You can call them celestial orphans, stars flung out of their galaxies in colossal collisions that have occurred in space for billions of years. These forsaken stars may be far more common than anyone ever realized.

New observations from suborbital rocket launches and an orbiting observatory show that as many as half the stars in the universe may be this kind, scientists said on Thursday. They found that the dim light these stars produce from the far reaches of the cosmos equals the amount coming from all the galaxies.

The data was collected during 2010 and 2012 flights of a NASA suborbital rocket with the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) measuring background fluctuations in a compilation of all the light emitted by stars and galaxies in the universe's history.

'The night sky on a planet around such a star would be profoundly boring and black to human eyes - no other stars, or at least very few, no Milky Way band, only distant galaxies.'- Michael Zemcov, Caltech experimental astrophysicist

The researchers then checked the findings using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, an orbiting infrared observatory. The data indicated huge numbers of orphan stars, previously undetected, populate what had been thought to be the dark spaces between galaxies.

So how did billions of stars become orphans? Violently, to say the least.

Galaxies like our Milky Way are made up of stars, dust and dark matter bound together by gravity. As galaxies drift through space, they periodically crash into each other.

Stars and the other galactic stuff can merge together in these mash-ups, but some stars that were born and resided in these galaxies are stripped away and cast as debris into the cosmic wilderness.

The phenomenon of the orphan star has been well known. Astronomers have witnessed tidal streams of stars being stripped away from colliding pairs of galaxies.

"There are many beautiful pictures of this happening. Of course, since we are viewing this from such a great distance we don't see the stars individually, we see a glowing haze made by billions of stars," said experimental cosmologist Jamie Bock of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology.

A time-lapse photograph of the last of 4 CIBER rocket launches. CIBER measured background fluctuations in a compilation of all the light emitted by stars and galaxies in the universe's history. (Toshiaki Arai/University of Tokyo/The Associated Press)

The data suggests orphan stars are probably relatively small, less massive and cooler than our Sun, but typical of most stars in the universe, said Caltech experimental astrophysicist Michael Zemcov.

The night sky as seen from Earth is brimming with starlight. But these orphans would be so distant from other stars that a view from one would offer almost complete nothingness.

"The night sky on a planet around such a star would be profoundly boring and black to human eyes - no other stars, or at least very few, no Milky Way band, only distant galaxies. You might be lucky and see your parent galaxy off in the distance like we see Andromeda," Zemcov said.

Zemcov said scientists have traced the origin of galaxies to about 13.2 billion years ago, 500 million years after the Big Bang that created the universe.

"Galaxies have been forming and interacting continuously since then, with a peak in the star formation rate about two billion years after the Big Bang," Zemcov said. "You have enough interactions over enough time, and you end up stripping out a lot of stars."

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Urgent climate change warning falling on deaf ears: Bob McDonald

The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the loudest shout to come from the scientific community about the urgency to do something about global warming. Yet less than a week later, it's barely talked about.

The 116-page report is a synthesis of the last four reports - intended to act as a summary of where we are - leading up to the next big UN climate summit in Paris next year. Normally, the wording of these reports has been somewhat cautionary, using phrases such as, "very likely," or "strong evidence," when referring to changes taking place in the Earth's atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  

Not this time.

The message from the scientists is now clear. Fossil fuels must be gone by 2100 or we will pass a tipping point into a future calamity.  

While this message from scientists has been growing more urgent since the first report in 1990,  the response from politicians has been slow. Global carbon emissions continue to rise, along with rising temperatures in the air and the oceans.

The message from the scientists is now clear. Fossil fuels must be gone by 2100 or we will pass a tipping point into a future calamity. (Martin Meissner/AP)

The situation is similar to one any parent knows; the more you yell and scream at a misbehaving child, the less effective you are - especially over the long term, when the child becomes "mommy deaf."

Of course, the reason governments are slow to react to the warning about climate change is because of the perception that adapting our technology away from fossil fuels would break the economy.  

This is especially true in Canada, where the expanding fossil fuel industry is a cornerstone of our economy. While this report points to sensible ways to avoid that economic collapse, the politicians are still acting deaf.

I saw a parallel situation from the past recently while watching my favourite classic science fiction movie, The Day The Earth Stood Still, released in 1951. In the movie, an alien spaceship lands in Washington DC. The pilot, a humanoid named Klatu, along with his tank-destroying robot Gort, arrive with a message for humanity from the other planets in the galaxy. It seems our neighbours in space were uncomfortable with our development of nuclear weapons (the movie made its debut not long after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). "Aggression will not be tolerated," Klatu declares.

He first asked to deliver this message to representatives from all the world's governments, but was told that it would be impossible to gather them all together in one place. There was simply too much conflict in the world. So he went to a scientist, who happened to bear a strong resemblance to Einstein, and asked if he could gather colleagues from around the planet so the message could be delivered to the thinkers of the world.

The answer he got was, "Yes, but people don't listen to us scientists very much."

Several cities in China are on the list of places around the world that scientists predict will experience increasing extremes in weather as a result of global warming. (AP)

Even in the 1950s, when many scientists, including Einstein, were warning that nuclear weapons were dangerous territory, the proliferation of those weapons still reached insane levels on both sides of the Atlantic. Thankfully, annihilation of humanity hasn't happened, common sense has prevailed, and nuclear disarmament is now a reality. It hasn't completely gone away, but the threat of  nuclear war is far less than it was during the Cold War.  

So, what will appeal to our common sense and drive us to do something about climate change?

Unless a UFO lands on Parliament Hill, the strongest warning is coming from nature; more droughts in some parts of the world, more extreme weather events in others, island countries consumed by rising sea levels, water shortages ... the list is growing.

The most important part of the message from this IPCC report is that doing nothing will cost much more than taking action now. That's an economic argument.

Let common sense prevail.

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Faking it: 4 ways companies can deceive you online

Trying a new sushi spot or booking into a hotel? Do you check online before you check it out?

Millions of consumers look at online references to followers, likes and shares to try to determine if a business is popular and legitimate before deciding to spend their money there.

But how much can you trust a company's online reputation?

Cornell University professor Jeff Hancock says 'it's really amazing how easy it is to purchase deception now on the internet.' (CBC)

CBC's Marketplace investigated how companies artificially inflate their online credibility through paid testimonials and fake reviews.

Marketplace set up a fake business to test how easy it is to buy a good reputation online. The Marketplace investigation, "Faking It," airs Nov. 7 at 8 p.m. (8:30 p.m. NT) on CBC Television.

"I think it's really amazing how easy it is to purchase deception now on the internet," says Jeff Hancock, a professor who researches online language and behaviour at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

"You can get fake likes, you can get fake comments, fake reviews, fake everything."

So why do we fall for companies' fake reviews and false reputation?

"We believe other people," Hancock told Marketplace co-host Erica Johnson. "It's actually the foundation of how, I think, language and society work."

For some companies looking to look good online, there are lots of ways they can try to boost their business. Here are four ways that companies can fake it online.

Fake reviews

Research published by the Harvard Business School in 2011 found that a one-star increase on the popular review site Yelp meant a five to nine per cent increase in revenue for independent restaurants.

"If you're an owner of property that gets reviewed — and there is hardly anything that isn't reviewed now — there is real pressure to have good online reviews because if you don't, your business is gonna be hurt," says Hancock.

A 2012 study from IT research analysts Gartner found that 10 to 15 per cent of reviews on social media are fake.

'We take verification very seriously and have several processes in place to authenticate businesses and remove false reviews.'- Google

Last year, New York state cracked down on fake reviews, setting up a fake business and buying fake reviews in a sting operation dubbed Operation Clean Turf. It fined 19 businesses a total of $350,000 US.

"Consumers rely on reviews from their peers to make daily purchasing decisions on anything from food and clothing to recreation and sightseeing," New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman wrote in a news release, describing the practice as false advertising.

Some internet marketing and online reputation management companies bolster a business's online image with fake testimonials on a variety of popular review websites for a price.

Other websites connect businesses with freelancers who post fake reviews. Marketplace paid as little as $5 for testimonials about its fake business.

Review sites like Yelp and Google say they do what they can to delete fake reviews.

In a statement to Marketplace, Google said that the company takes down thousands of suspicious reviews down every month, but "there is a small subset of bad apples out there."

"We take verification very seriously and have several processes in place to authenticate businesses and remove false reviews, including a link next to each review allowing users to help flag suspicious reviews for us."

Fake YouTube views

With more than 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, it can be hard for companies to compete for video views.

But Marketplace found it was easy to buy them, and inexpensive; the show bought 10,000 video views from a company for its video promoting its fake business. The cost? Thirty dollars.

Some websites connect businesses with freelancers who post fake reviews. Marketplace paid as little as $5 for testimonials about its fake business. (CBC)

In December 2012, YouTube stripped almost two billion fake views from music videos from major labels including Universal, Sony/BMG and RCA.

In February, Google, which owns YouTube, announced that it was increasing efforts to audit video views and remove fake views from the site.

Software engineer Philipp Pfeiffenberger wrote in a blog post: "When some bad actors try to game the system by artificially inflating view counts, they're not just misleading fans about the popularity of a video, they're undermining one of YouTube's most important and unique qualities."

Fake Twitter followers

Last year, Italian security researchers Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli researched fake Twitter followers. They estimated that four per cent — or 20 million — Twitter accounts were fake.

According to the researchers, fake Twitter accounts have become a multimillion-dollar business.

Millions of consumers check out online reviews to help decide the restaurants, shops and companies where they spend money. (CBC )

Research by internet security analysts at Barracuda Labs found that as of the end of 2013, there were 52 sellers on eBay selling fake Twitter followers, a number that more than doubled in roughly six months.

How much does a fake follower go for? Not a lot: the cost was an average of $11 per 1,000 followers.

Twitter's rules prohibit buying and selling fake followers.

"When you purchase followers, retweets and favourites, you are often purchasing bot (fake) or hacked accounts," the site reads.

"Any account caught participating in this behavior will be in violation of the Twitter rules and may be suspended."

Fake Facebook likes

Facebook is another platform popular for posers. The company estimates that as many as 1.2 per cent of accounts are fake, but with 1.2 billion active monthly users, that number represents as many as 14 million fake accounts.

Like many other sites, Facebook says it tries to crack down on fakers.

'We adapt our defences constantly to stay ahead of spammers' techniques.'- Matt Jones

"Fraudulent activity is bad for everyone — including page owners, advertisers, Facebook and people on our platform," wrote Facebook site integrity engineer Matt Jones in a blog post last month.

"We adapt our defences constantly to stay ahead of spammers' techniques, and one area we've focused on for several years is fake likes."

Hancock says that while some reviews are fake, many are honest and useful.

"Most businesses really want to provide a genuine service; most businesses are real," he says.

"The ones that do take the risk and they're desperate and buy some fake support, some fake reviews, some fake likes, this is not going to be a long-term business.

"It's going to damage the reputation in the long run. If I had one piece of advice, not for the consumers but for business owners, don't do it. It's too easy to get caught. One of the main things with deception on the internet: it leaves a record."

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Apple devices hit by 'WireLurker' malware in China

Palo Alto Networks Inc has discovered a new family of malware that can infect Apple Inc's desktop and mobile operating systems, underscoring the increasing sophistication of attacks on iPhones and Mac computers.

The "WireLurker" malware can install third-party applications on regular, non-jailbroken iOS devices and hop from infected Macs onto iPhones through USB connector-cables, said Ryan Olson, intelligence director for the company's Unit 42 division.

Palo Alto Networks said on Wednesday it had seen indications that the attackers were Chinese. The malware originated from a Chinese third-party apps store and appeared to have mostly affected users within the country.

The malware spread through infected apps uploaded to the apps store, that were in turn downloaded onto Mac computers. According to the company, more than 400 such infected apps had been downloaded over 350,000 times so far.

It's unclear what the objective of the attacks was. There is no evidence that the attackers had made off with anything more sensitive than messaging IDs and contacts from users' address books, Olson added.

But "they could just as easily take your Apple ID or do something else that's bad news," he said in an interview.

Apple, which Olson said was notified a couple weeks ago, did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

Once WireLurker gets on an iPhone, it can go on to infect existing apps on the device, somewhat akin to how a traditional virus infects computer software programs.

Olson said it was the first time he had seen it in action.

"It's the first time we've seen anyone doing it in the wild," he added.

---

​Palo Alto Networks offers tips to protect yourself and your Apple devices from WireLurker:

• Use an antivirus or security protection product for your Mac OS X system and keep its signatures up to date.
• In the OS X System Preferences panel under "Security & Privacy," ensure "Allow apps downloaded from Mac App Store (or Mac App Store and identified developers)" is set.
• Don't download and run Mac applications or games from any third-party app store, download site or other untrusted source.
• Keep the iOS version on your mobile device up to date.
• Don't connect your iOS device to untrusted or unknown computers, accessories or devices, including chargers.
• Don't jailbreak your iOS device; If you do jailbreak it, only use credible Cydia community sources and avoid the use or storage of sensitive personal information on that device.
• Don't accept software distributed via an "enterprise provisioning profile" unless your IT corporate help desk or other trusted party explicitly instructs you to do so.
• Businesses should route mobile device traffic through a threat prevention system using a mobile security application.

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Virgin Galactic aims to resume spacecraft test flights in 2015

The space tourism company that suffered a tragic setback when its experimental rocket-powered spaceship broke apart over the California desert could resume test flights as early as next summer if it can finish building a replacement craft, its CEO said Wednesday.

The sleek composite shell and tail section of the new craft are sitting inside the company's manufacturing facility in Mojave, California.

After more than two years of work, it's beginning to look like a spaceship, but Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said there's much more to be done, from relatively simple things such as installing windows to the more complex fitting of flight controls and other wiring.

The ship — dubbed SpaceShipTwo Serial No. 2 — will replace one that was destroyed last week after its feathering system that controls descent deployed prematurely and aerodynamic forces ripped it apart, killing the co-pilot and seriously injuring the pilot.

In the wake of the accident, workers have focused on building the new ship.

"That's provided some solace to all of us, and I think there's sort of a therapeutic benefit to folks to be able to put their energies into constructive work," Whitesides told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

He said the company will be able to continue flying its mother ship — the much larger jet-powered plane that launches the rocket ship at high altitudes — while federal investigators look into the cause of the deadly crash with the co-operation of the company.

It's possible that test flights for the next spaceship could begin within six months, before the investigation is expected to conclude, Whitesides said.

Scaled Composites, which is developing the spacecraft for Virgin Galactic, has an experimental permit from the Federal Aviation Administration to test the crafts. Just last month, the company had received approval from the agency to resume rocket-powered flights.

When the new ship is ready next year, the FAA said it will conduct a more extensive review to ensure whatever caused last week's mishap has been addressed before allowing test flights to resume.

Speculation continues about how far the accident will push back the day when Virgin Galactic's paying customers can routinely rocket dozens of miles from a $219 million spaceport in the New Mexico desert toward the edge of space for a fleeting feeling of weightlessness and a breathtaking view.

Whitesides said the accident has been tough on many levels, but he refused to see it as a roadblock and said the company does not have to start from scratch.

"There was no question it was a tragic setback, but it's one from which we can recover," he said. "With Serial No. 2, we'll be putting a stronger, even better ship into initial commercial service and I think we'll be able to get back into test flights soon and carry forward."

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Canadians aim to send micro-rover and lander to Mars in 2018

A Canadian company aims to launch a micro-rover and mini-lander to Mars in 2018.

Thoth Technology, based in Pembroke, Ont., launched a campaign on Indiegogo today to crowdfund $1.1 million to pay for the hardware needed to fly the Northern Light lander and Beaver rover in space and land them on Mars. The project is being developed in partnership with Toronto's York University, which houses a lot of the space testing facilities and will analyze the data from the mission.

If it is successful, it would be first Canadian mission to the surface of Mars.

'If we are serious about living on Mars, we need to explore it much more thoroughly.'—Ben Quine, Thoth Technology

"I think it's important to do big things," said Ben Quine, principal investigator for the mission. "Mars is the only other habitable planet in the solar system, and if we want to survive, we need to be a multi-planet species."

Quine is the technical director and chair of the board at Thoth Technology and a professor of space engineering at York University, which is a partner on the project.

Ben Quine, principal investigator for the mission, is the technical director and chair of the board at Thoth Technology. He is also a professor of space engineering at York University. (Thoth Technology)

So far, Quine said, robots like NASA's Curiosity and Spirit and Opportunity rovers have only explored a half dozen sites on Mars.

"If we are serious about living on Mars," he said, "we need to explore it much more thoroughly. We probably need hundreds of landers to pepper the surface prior to sending people so we know exactly what it is that we're up against, where we'd find things like minerals and where we'd want to live."

Hunt for life

Northern Light aims to gather data about rocks, minerals and greenhouse gases on Mars, as well as hunt for life.

Quine said that in Antarctica and the Canadian Arctic, photosynthetic microbes can be found in a layer a millimetre or two below the surface of the rock, where they are protected from the harshest of the sun's UV rays, but can still use sunlight to produce energy.

The solar-powered Beaver rover weighs just six kilograms and is semi-autonomous. (Thoth Technology)

Northern Light will look for similar light on Mars by using the lander's robotic arm to grind away the surface of rocks. It will then use a device called a photometer to scan for different shades of green that may indicate the presence of photosynthetic organisms.

Meanwhile, the solar-powered Beaver rover is like no other that has ever gone to Mars. For one thing, it weighs just six kilograms. In comparison, NASA's Curiosity rover is a hefty 900 kilograms, forcing it to rely largely on nuclear power to lug its bulk around.

The NASA rovers, which are controlled from Earth, move very slowly, covering only a few dozen metres per day, because their commands take 15 minutes to reach Mars from Earth.

The Beaver rover is designed to be quicker — and more independent.

Intelligent rover

"We're going to embed intelligence into the rover," Quine said, "and the rover is going to be tasked to drive around and explore the environment using autonomous algorithms built into the rover to determine things like when it should make a manoeuvre to avoid falling into a hole or run into a rock."

Quine said he has already spent 12 years working on the project. His team has spent half a million dollars developing and testing prototypes of the lander and micro-rover, and done space tests on some of the instruments by flying them on satellites in low-Earth orbit. Thoth Technologies also recently spent $1 million leasing and repairing the Algonquin Radio Observatory from the federal government, which had barely used the crumbling radio telescope in the Ontario park for decades.

The Northern Light lander will include a device that can grind away the surface of rock and look for green, photosynthetic microbes. (Thoth Technology)

Quine said it's the only steerable radio antenna dish in Canada large enough to detect signals from Mars. It will be used as a ground station to communicate with the lander and rover when they are on Mars.

The Northern Light team hopes to send their lander and rover to Mars by piggybacking on a spacecraft that is already headed to the Red Planet.

There are a number of spaceflight options scheduled for 2018 including the joint Russian-European Space Agency ExoMars rover mission and an Indian Space Research Organization mission that will likely include a lander and rover.

Quine said Northern Light aims to barter for the flight in exchange for collecting and relaying other agencies' data from Mars via the ARO ground station, which can collect them at times of day when places like Russia and India are facing away from Mars.

Members of the public who support the campaign will get a chance to help choose the landing site for the mission and will get rewards ranging from a Frisbee for $20 or the chance to name the lander for $1 million.

Mars One, the company that hopes to start the first human settlement on Mars in 2025, also plans to send a lander to Mars, along with a satellite, in 2018. It raised $313,744 US of its $400,000 goal on Indiegogo earlier this year.

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CERN picks Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti as new head

Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti was chosen on Tuesday to head the CERN particle physics research centre that houses the giant LHC "Big Bang" machine, making her the first woman nominated to lead a top global scientific institution in the field.

Gianotti, who won world attention in 2012 for her leadership role in CERN's discovery of the long-sought "Higgs boson", will take up the post in January 2016 as scientists there look to new findings on the origin and make-up of the universe.

Her appointment was decided at a meeting of the centre's ruling council, made up of representatives of its 20 member states, a CERN announcement said. It remains to be formalized at a further meeting in December.

Gianotti, 52 and a researcher at CERN near Geneva since she joined it with a doctorate from the University of Milan in 1987, will replace Rolf Heuer, who steered the centre through the initially-troubled launch of the Large Hadron Collider.

The machine was primarily built to find the Higgs — a theoretical particle and related energy field which was thought to have made formation of the physical universe possible by converting matter into mass.

In the LHC, now awaiting relaunch with twice the power in spring next year, elementary particles are smashed together at close to the speed of light, creating billions of tiny "Big Bangs" and their aftermath.

Gianotti in 2009 became project leader of the Atlas collaboration, one of the two major teams working separately to spot the Higgs in the LHC data.

With her counterpart from the CMS team, she detailed the finding of the Higgs — named for the British physicist who predicted its existence in 1964 — before a global television audience in July 2012.

The discovery brought a Nobel Prize in 2013 for Peter Higgs, the British theorist, and Francois Englert, a Belgian physicist working on the same idea with two other colleagues in the early 1960s and who also posited the existence of the boson.

Gianotti, an accomplished pianist who once considered devoting her life to music, said she was honoured to be named to head the sprawling institute — which links some 10,000 scientists on site and around the globe — along the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva.

"CERN is a centre of scientific excellence and a source of pride and inspiration for physicists from all over the world, a cradle for technology and innovation, and a shining concrete example of scientific cooperation and peace," she said.

When collisions in the LHC are resumed, scientists will be looking for evidence helping to resolve other major questions including the dark matter thought to make up about a quarter of the universe and dark energy accounting for some 70 percent.

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Engine involved in space rocket explosion will likely be pulled

New

Preliminary results of investigation point to failure in one of two main engines

The Associated Press Posted: Nov 05, 2014 9:44 AM ET Last Updated: Nov 05, 2014 9:44 AM ET

Orbital Sciences says it will likely stop using the type of engines that were employed when its unmanned Antares commercial supply rocket bound for the International Space Station exploded moments after liftoff last week.

The company says its investigation of the crash is continuing, but preliminary results point to a failure in one of its two main engines. Orbital says it still plans to fulfill its contract with NASA to deliver all remaining cargo to the Space Station by the end of 2016.

Orbital Sciences Corp., based in Dulles, Virginia, says there will be no cost increase for NASA. It will introduce an already-planned upgrade to the Antares propulsion system early in 2016.

Orbital doesn't expect costs related to the accident to be material in 2015.

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Telecom complaints down 17% overall — but misleading contract complaints surge

For the first time in its seven-year history, the watchdog in charge of dealing with consumer complaints about their telecommunication providers says the number of complaints has gone down.

In its annual report published Tuesday, the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services says it received 17 per cent fewer complaints from Canadians about the services they buy from various telecom firms.

Covering everything from landlines to cellphones, and both wireless and wired internet providers, the CCTS is the independent agency tasked with sorting out who's wrong and what the compensation should be when paying customers have problems with their telecom services.

'A 30-page terms of service written in small font by a team of lawyers is probably not the best way for customers to really understand what they're getting'- CCTS Commissioner Howard Maker

The CCTS saw a total of 11,340 complaints in the past year. That's down by more than 17 per cent from 13,692 the previous year. And that's the first time the number of complaints has actually decreased in the seven years the agency has existed.

On the surface, that's good news. But it remains to be seen whether the drop is truly a sign that an industry with an established reputation for poor customer service is finally cleaning up its act.

"The question is whether these results are anomalous," is how the CCTS's head, Commissioner Howard Maker, put it in an interview, "or whether they represent the beginning of a trend."

"From our examination of other statistics," he said, "we are cautiously optimistic that the industry as a whole is becoming more focused on customer issues and on how it addresses customer problems."

It was an eventful regulatory year for an industry that frequently raises the ire of Canadians. Last December, the CRTC's Wireless Code came into effect, a lengthy code of conduct that attempted to mandate a reduction in some of the most common complaints in the industry by changing company practices.

The CCTS report does seem to suggest that progress is being made on a number of fronts — complaints about incorrect charges showing up on bills, and complaints about spotty, inferior service both declined by more than a sixth.

But hidden in the positive headline number was evidence that one of the most-irritating telecom complaints is actually getting more common: misleading contract terms.

The CCTS saw 1,686 complaints about misleading, fine-print-laden telecom contracts in the past year. It was the second-most frequent customer complaint (behind straight-up billing errors) and it increased by about 75 per cent from the previous year.

"We're a bit disappointed to see this particular issue grow so much," Maker said, adding that he's hopeful the new code will help bring those numbers down over time — it was only implemented in December, and the CCTS report only covers up until July of this year — by making contracts clearer and easier to understand.

"A 30-page terms of service written in small font by a team of lawyers is probably not the best way for customers to really understand what they're getting," Maker said.

Overall instances of complaints were down, but the report also found that it's a bigger problem with some service providers than others.

Almost a third — 32 per cent — of the complaints the CCTS received from Canadians this year were from Bell Canada customers. Almost 3,700 people brought their complains about Bell to the watchdog, far more than any other company.

A Bell spokesman told CBC News that since the company has "significantly more customers than any competitor," it tends to have the highest total CCTS number.

"But we're pleased that we're making progress, underlined by our exceptional customer growth in broadband Internet, wireless and TV services," Bell spokesman Jason Laszlo said in an email.

No. 2 was Rogers, which saw 2,379 complaints, or just over 20 per cent of the total. Together those two companies dominate the telecom market in Canada, so it may be expected that they would engender more than half of all the industry's complaints.

Rogers did not get back to CBC News' requests for comment. Telus, the third of the so-called Big Three telecom companies, was the source of 653 complaints all year, or just under six per cent of the total.

That's fifth overall, but given their heft in the market, it represents a relatively strong showing. Telus has 11 million customers across Canada but was the source of fewer customer complaints than Fido and Virgin Mobile alone — two subsidiaries of Rogers and Bell.

A spokesman for Telus told CBC News the company is pleased with the progress, noting that Telus' decline of 26 per cent in the number of complaints is the third straight year the company saw fewer complaints.

"It's a key measure of our success in delivering on our 'customers first' approach that we've been focused on for a number of years," the spokesman said. "But we'll certainly be giving the report a good look and parsing what we can so we can make even more improvements."

Indeed, at least one of the company's recent customers says the company is indeed making progress — and he's someone with a track record of not taking any guff from his telecom providers. 

Burnaby, B.C.,'s Matt Buie made headlines this year when a family trip to Mexico resulted in a $22,000 cellphone bill when they returned. Buie had set his phone to "airplane mode" so that it couldn't download any expensive data packets. But while playing a game on his iPhone, Buie's son managed to turn off the airplane mode and download several hundred megabytes worth of in-game downloadable content.

Buie was a Fido customer at the time and after the media outcry, he managed to get the exorbitant fee down to $200. He soon stopped being a Fido customer, and says his best advice to other upset consumers is to resist the lure of a subsidized phone, and instead "never" sign a cellphone contract.

"I go month to month .. if I'm not happy with a service or billing, I call them up," he says. "It's amazing, they start bending over backwards to satisfy me."

Buie is now a Telus customer and he does begrudgingly give the company credit for his customer experience so far. But as the CCTS shows, while progress is being made, there's still room for improvement in the industry as a whole.

"Why would I want to sign a contract with companies that have notoriously been proven to not be forthcoming?" Buie said.

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Virgin crash: The tech moguls behind the race for commercial space travel

Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic company is reeling from the loss of SpaceShipTwo, which crashed in California's Mojave desert on Friday, killing one of its pilots and seriously injuring the other. 

Branson, a billionaire business mogul whose Virgin group of companies have ranged from music to airlines to mobile phones, founded Virgin Galactic ten years ago with the aim of offering flights to the edge of space for anyone who could pay the $250,000 price tag. The future of Virgin's commercial suborbital flight program is unclear in the wake of the tragic accident.

The 64-year-old Branson is not the only businessman in the space trade. Historically space and aviation have been a point of fascination for moguls who have made their fortune and want to accomplish something bigger.

Eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, who made his name in the film business in the 1920s and 1930s, fixated on aerospace and aviation and built innovative airplanes and set air-speed flying records. And James Lick, a real estate tycoon, spent a fortune building a state-of-the-art telescope and observatory in 1876 in San Jose, California.

Today, the concept of space travel has proved an irresistible allure for many entrepreneurs who've made it in the tech world, and they have been spurred on by NASA's increasing reliance on private companies to conduct space missions.

The industry has been rocked by SpaceShipTwo's crash coming just days after the explosion of an Orbital Sciences Corp. commercial supply rocket bound for the International Space Station. But the race for commercial space travel continues. Here's a look at the major tech titans leading the way:

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. (Stephen Lam/Reuters)

The 43-year-old co-founder of PayPal and head of Tesla Motors launched Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in 2002 with the ultimate goal of developing the technology to allow humans to live on other planets.

SpaceX, which has flown unmanned cargo capsules to the International Space Station, unveiled a new spacecraft in May designed to ferry up to seven astronauts to low-Earth orbit. (Jae C. Hong/Associated Press)

SpaceX, as it is known, designs, makes and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. In 2012, NASA hired SpaceX to deliver cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. The company's spacecraft have since made five trips to the International Space Station and back, including four official resupply missions.

On mobile? Read the tweet here. 

The Hawthorne, California, company has over 3,000 employees and operates the spacecraft Dragon and the launch vehicle, or rocket, known as Falcon 9. It also has a rocket called Falcon Heavy under development. Its Dragon spacecraft is expected to begin manned missions in the next two to three years.

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Jeff Bezos ​

Jeff Bezos is the 50-year-old CEO of Amazon.com Inc. (Ben Margot/Associated Press)

The 50-year-old co-founder of Amazon.com Inc. started Blue Origin in Kent, Washington, in 2000 to develop technology to make human access to space easier. It is currently focused on developing rocket-powered vertical takeoff and landing vehicles for access to the edge of space and beyond.

At Blue Origin's West Texas facility, a test of a new hydrogen rocket engine mimics flight of the New Shepard, and is intended for use on vehicles carrying humans to low-Earth orbit. (NASA)

As of 2012 Blue Origin had received $22 million from NASA. Its crew and cargo vehicle, called New Shepard, is designed to eventually take tourists to suborbit. Last month, United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. that launches unmanned rockets, picked Blue Origin to develop a rocket engine that could eventually replace the Russian rocket engine used in many American unmanned launches.

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Paul Allen

Microsoft co-founder and SpaceShipOne sole funder Paul Allen, left, poses with SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. (Reuters)

The Microsoft Corp. co-founder teamed with aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan in 2004 on the experimental SpaceShipOne, which was launched from a special aircraft. It became the first privately financed, manned spacecraft to dash into space and later won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for accomplishing the feat twice in two weeks.

More recently, the 61-year-old's Stratolaunch Systems, based in Hunstville, Alabama, is developing the world's biggest plane to help launch cargo and astronauts into space. Called Thunderbolt, it is tentatively scheduled to launch in 2018. Stratolaunch is working with Orbital Sciences and Rutan's Scaled Composites. SpaceShipTwo was piloted by Scaled Composites, under contract with Virgin Galactic, during this week's fatal crash.

On mobile? Watch the video here.

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Jeff Greason

XCOR CEO and founder Jeff Greason. (XCOR)

The rocket scientist and former Intel Corp. employee founded XCOR Aerospace in 1989. XCOR also is pursuing space tourism and hopes to conduct flight tests for its Lynx spaceship beginning in 2015. In September, XCOR was partner to the Federal Aviation Administration approving a commercial space launch licence for Midland International Airport in Texas, where XCOR operates a research and development centre.

The Lynx, a two-seat rocket ship XCOR is developing, is designed to be capable of suborbital flights to altitudes more than 60 kilometres above the Earth. (Mike Massee/XCOR/Associated Press)

The 50-employee company is based at Mojave Air and Spaceport in Southern California and has built 13 different rocket engines and built and flown two manned rocket-powered aircraft — the EZ-Rocket and the X-Racer. Greason has served on the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee.

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Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp helping ISIS, U.K. spy alleges

The new head of Britain's electronic eavesdropping agency says U.S.-based social media have become "command-and-control networks" for terrorists and criminals, and tech companies are in denial about their misuse.

Writing in Tuesday's Financial Times, GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan said British intelligence agencies know that Islamic State in Iraq and Syria extremists use messaging services like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp to reach their peers with ease.

He said spy agencies need to have greater support from the U.S. technology companies which dominate the Web in order to fight militants and those who host material about violent extremism and child exploitation.

Twitter declined to comment on the story. Facebook — which owns WhatsApp — had no immediate comment.

"However much (tech companies) may dislike it, they have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as the rest of us," he wrote.

"To those of us who have to tackle the depressing end of human behavior on the Internet, it can seem that some technology companies are in denial about its misuse," Hannigan wrote.

He said the challenge of new technology required "better arrangements for facilitating lawful investigation by security and law enforcement agencies than we have now."

While terrorist propaganda is not new on the Internet, authorities say the rise of the ISIS group and the proliferation of al-Qaeda offshoots has multiplied its message, reaching an even broader audience through its sophistication and familiarity with the media.

Twitter declined to comment on the story. Facebook — which owns WhatsApp — had no immediate comment.

Eve Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online privacy group that is partly funded by tech companies, said "there are already plenty of mechanisms in place at these companies to police the kinds of speech that we have decided are illegal."

Referring to the large-scale snooping programs revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, she told BBC radio that intelligence agencies' "powers are already immense. I think that asking for more is really quite disingenuous."

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'A spy in the huddle': Baby penguin cam gives unprecedented access

The newest tool for biologists is the baby penguin robotic spy.

It's pretty darn cute, and so convincing that penguins essentially talk to it, as if it is a potential mate for their chicks.

Emperor penguins are notoriously shy. When researchers approach, these penguins normally back away and their heart rate goes up. That's not what the scientists need when they want to check heart rate, health and other penguin parameters.

So international scientists and filmmakers, led by Yvon Le Maho of the University of Strasbourg in France, created a remote control rover disguised as a chick to snuggle up to shy penguins in Adelie Land, Antarctica — the same place where the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins was filmed.

Researchers watched from more than 200 metres away.

1st prototype failed

The first disguised version of the rover, made of fibreglass, didn't pass muster and scared the real birds, Le Maho said.

Researchers tried about five versions until they hit upon the right one. It's covered in gray fur, sports black arms, and has a black-and-white painted face and black beak.

Emperor penguins are notoriously shy. When researchers approach, they normally back away and their heart rate goes up, which is not what the scientists need when they want to check heart rate, health and other penguin parameters. (British Antarctic Survey)

The penguins didn't scamper away and even sang to it with "a very special song like a trumpet," Le Maho said.

Le Maho suggested that the adult penguins were trying to find a mate for their chicks and they were listening for a response, but researchers didn't program the rover to make a sound.

"They were very disappointed when there was no answer," Le Maho said. "Next time we will have a rover playing songs."

At other times, the rover crowded in with a group of chicks, acting as "a spy in the huddle," Le Maho said.

Shyness can affect physiology

There's a reason scientists want to use rovers. Some, but not all, researchers worry that just by coming close to some shy animals they change their behaviour and can taint the results of their studies, Le Maho said.

Le Maho also used a rover without any animal disguise to spy on king penguins and elephant seals because those animals don't flee strangers. The king penguins attacked the small rover with their beaks, unless it stayed still, but that still allowed the device to get close enough to get readings.

The large lumbering elephant seals didn't budge when the rover zipped by and around them.

In the future, the researchers plan to use a more autonomous robot to spy on the emperor penguins. The idea is to use devices on the rover to read signals from radio tags on the birds.

The study is published Sunday by the journal Nature Methods.

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E-commerce explosion coming for 2014 holiday shopping: Dianne Buckner

Canadians of all ages will set new records shopping online this holiday season, according to a number of industry insiders.

Canadians are coming a bit late to the e-commerce party. In Britain close to 15 per cent of overall retail sale are made online. In the U.S. it's nine per cent, according to Forrester Research. Canada is at six per cent.

But Canadians are taking their dollars to the keyboard and closing the gap. Within five years, the U.S. is forecast to be at 11 per cent; Canada at 10 per cent, Forrester Research said.

Canada Post expects to deliver 20 per cent more parcels related to e-commerce this November and December.

"The growth has been amazing," says Rod Hart, Canada Post's general manager of parcels and e-commerce. "And you also see that online shopping used to skew to an age category that was on the younger side. Now we see that right through to 60-plus, they've becoming more comfortable with it."

Retailers slow to adapt

Consumers aren't entirely responsible for the slower pace of adoption here. Later adaptation to online trends by Canadian retailers has been a factor as well, according to the head of digital for Best Buy Canada.

"Forty per cent of Canadians are spending their dollars online with foreign retailers, and that's because the selection is not here," says Thierry Hay-Sabourin of Best Buy. "Retailers have not adopted e-commerce at the same pace as consumers."

But the bandwagon is filling up now, according to internal studies done by Canada Post.

One million Canadian households started shopping online in the past eight months.

Close of half of those Canadians e-shoppers have purchased three or more items for delivery in just the past three months.

Industry insiders point to growing trends such as in-store pickup, mobile purchases and wider selection offered online as setting the pace in Canadian e-commerce.

In-store pickup

In the past there were two ways to shop: go to the store to buy, or go online and have your purchase delivered. In-store pickup is a mix of the two. Customers place an order online, and then visit the store to pick it up.

At first glance it doesn't seem to make sense — what's the point of going online if you're going to end up making the trip to a store anyway?

"Convenience is the name of the game for consumers," says Hay-Sabourin of Best Buy. He says customers save time, not needing to trudge through aisles in search of what they want, plus there's no risk the item may not be available.

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Customers who've reserve products online can show up as soon as 20 minutes after their online purchase, Best Buy promises, and even use use special parking and check-out counters.

The Bay intends to introduce an in-store pick-up system in the coming year. But it won't be a reservation system. 

"We tried it at Saks," explains Michael Burgess, the president of The Bay's e-commerce division. "It was not very effective, because a lot of customers would reserve but then not go in and buy. We're going to do a buy online and pick up in store, so that customers have actually made the commitment."

Mobile purchases

The use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is going through the roof, both for product research and actual transactions.

"Mobile is such an incredibly pervasive technology that no one is going to ignore it," says Michael LeBlanc, VP of digital for the Retail Council of Canada. He notes that in an internal survey, some retailers reported that a full 25 per cent of their online transactions are coming directly from a mobile device.

A growing number of retailers such as Mountain Equipment Co-op and Indigo have invested in software that can tell when a customer arrives at the website via a mobile device. They'll then be directed to a site that's been designed to be easily viewed on a smaller screen.

Endless aisle

Retailers refer to the practice of making a far wider array of products available online, than in a physical store as "endless aisle." Real estate is a lot cheaper in cyberspace. Wal-Mart, Sears, and Foot Locker are just a few that take this approach.

Some e-tailers are stretching beyond of their own traditional categories to sell goods you'd never find in their stores.

For example, pharmacy chain London Drugs is offering musical instruments and vacuums on its website, to name just a couple of surprising items.

Meanwhile electronics chain Best Buy is selling furniture, baby supplies, ping-pong tables and more. "We have the largest selection of luggage in Canada," boasts Hay-Sabourin.

These merchants have found that if a customer is satisfied with their e-commerce experience, they may be willing to buy an even wider selection of goods.

Despite the growth of e-commerce, parking lots and check-out lines will still be a nightmare this holiday season.

Old-school shoppers

As dramatic as the growth of e-commerce may be, the reality is that the vast majority of holiday shoppers will still be doing it old-school, and taking a trip to the mall. Plenty of shoppers want to touch and feel the products they buy, and always will.

Then there are the shoppers who have no idea of what to buy, and need to meander through multiple stores in the hopes of spotting the perfect gift.

The burst of online sales that will occur after U.S. Thanksgiving on Cyber Monday, Dec. 1 (which will likely extend to be more of a Cyber Week if past indications hold true, says Canada Post's Hart) will definitely pull some shoppers out of the stores. But not all, meaning most shoppers still spend time in a crowded, bricks and mortar store.

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Virgin Galactic crash blamed on slowing device deploying too soon

A space tourism rocket broke apart in flight over California's Mojave Desert after a device to slow the experimental spaceship's descent deployed too soon, federal investigators said.

The cause of Friday's crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo has not been determined, but investigators found the "feathering" system — which rotates the tail to create drag — was activated before the craft reached the appropriate speed, National Transportation Safety Board Acting Chairman Christopher Hart said.

The system requires a two-step process to deploy. The co-pilot unlocked the system, but Hart said the second step occurred "without being commanded."

"What we know is that after it was unlocked, the feathers moved into the deploy position, and two seconds later we saw disintegration," Hart said.

The finding moves away from initial speculation that an explosion brought down the craft but still doesn't fully explain why the disaster occurred.

The investigation is months from being completed, and officials are looking possible factors including pilot error, mechanical failure, design and whether pressure existed to continue testing, Hart said.

"We are not edging toward anything, we're not ruling anything out," he said. "We are looking at all these issues to determine the root cause of this accident."

The co-pilot, Michael Alsbury, 39, was killed, while pilot Peter Siebold, 43, parachuted to the ground and is receiving treatment at a hospital for serious injuries.

Investigators have not interviewed the pilot because of his medical condition, Hart said.

In this video grabbed image, billionaire Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, at podium, pauses during a news conference on Saturday before he saluted the bravery of the test pilots, and vowed to find out what caused the crash of his prototype space tourism rocket. (Scott Fain/The Associated Press)

Virgin Galactic — owned by billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Aabar Investments PJS of Abu Dhabi — plans to fly passengers more than 100 kilometres above Earth. The company sells seats on each prospective journey for $250,000 US.

Branson told Sky News on Monday that the company will move forward despite the crash. He said there would be a "whole massive series of test flights" before he and his family would fly into space, followed by the company's customers.

"We need to be absolutely certain our spaceship has been thoroughly tested — and that it will be — and once it's thoroughly tested, and we can go to space — we will go to space," Branson said.

"We must push on. There are incredible things that can happen through mankind being able to explore space properly," he said.

Branson, who had hoped to begin commercial flights next year, dismissed British newspaper reports about a midair explosion as insulting and untrue.

SpaceShipTwo tore apart Friday about 11 seconds after it detached from the underside of its jet-powered mother ship and fired its rocket engine for the test flight. Initial speculation was that an explosion occurred, but the fuel and oxidizer tanks and rocket engine were found and showed no sign of being burned or breached, the NTSB said.

A review of footage from a camera mounted to the ceiling of the spaceship's cockpit shows the co-pilot moving the feathering lever to the unlock position, Hart said.

The feathering is a feature unique to the craft to help it slow as it re-enters the atmosphere. After being unlocked, a lever must be pulled to rotate the tail section toward a nearly vertical position to act as a rudder. After decelerating, the pilots reconfigure the tail section to its normal position so the craft can glide to Earth.

The feathers activated at Mach 1.0, the speed of sound, or 1,223 km/h, Hart said. They shouldn't have deployed until the craft had at least reached a speed of Mach 1.4, or more than 1,609 km/h.

Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides issued a statement Sunday to tamp down on conjecture about the cause of the crash.

"Now is the time to focus on all those affected by this tragic accident and to work with the experts at the NTSB, to get to the bottom of what happened on that tragic day, and to learn from it so that we can move forward safely with this important mission," he said.

SpaceShipTwo has been under development for years and, like all space projects, has suffered setbacks. In 2007, an explosion killed three people on the ground and critically injured three others during a ground test in the development of a rocket engine.

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Oculus Rift: Tech fans get a glimpse of the virtual future in Toronto

Back in the early '90s, virtual reality, or VR, promised to revolutionize gaming and many other experiences. But the clunky goggles, gloves and jerky lag time between the user's movements and the visuals were underwhelming if not vomit-inducing.

Flash forward to 2014: where experts say we're now finally on the verge of a VR revolution that will soon change the way we play games and experience the movies.

Oculus Rift development kits sell for about $350. (TAVES Consumer Electronics Show)

Getting a lot of the hype is a new piece of hardware called Oculus Rift. These VR goggles put the user inside an invented 3-D world with no lag time and stunning results. The company was bought a few months ago by Facebook for $2 billion.

Now eager Canadian tech lovers will be able to get their hands on the not-yet-available device at the 2014 Toronto Audio Video Entertainment Show.

Stephan Tanguay​ is one of hundreds of thousands of developers designing products to take advantage of the technology, creating content for when the consumer models are available.

"It can't be stopped," said the Toronto-based designer who is developing his own VR game for the headset.

"To actually be able to throw myself and project myself into a universe where I feel the depth and there's no window I'm looking through but I'm in that space, I don't think you can get much better than that."

Sleepy Hollow's Ichabod Crane (2nd from left) cut fans heads off during an Oculus Rift demo at San Diego's Comic Con. (FOX)

​Pietro Gagliano is the Creative Director of Toronto company Secret Location that recently created a virtual reality experience to promote the Sleepy Hollow TV series. Thousands of people at San Diego's Comic Con were able to enjoy an immersive experience created for the Oculus Rift that featured the character Ichabod Crane cutting your head off. 

Gagliano says he's sold on the future of VR. "I definitely see virtual reality as a technology that is going mainstream. We are on the cusp of it breaking out of the nerdy basements and becoming a viable commercial product."

An Oculus Rift development kit is available to developers for about $350. A consumer version of the headset is expected sometime next summer.

In the meantime, Sony, Samsung and Google are all racing to get their VR devices into the hands of consumers.

These devices should hit the market sometime in 2015. If the advance hype is correct, the world of entertainment will never be the same. 

TAVES Consumer Electronics Show runs until Nov. 2 at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto.

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