Digital life | Winks

Here are a few watts of technological news each week more electrifying than the last.

Quiz

Which credit card company has decided to offer discounted eSIM cards to its cardholders to reduce their roaming charges when traveling abroad?

Answer

Visa. Holders of a Visa Infinite, Visa Infinite Business or Visa Infinite Privilège card will be entitled absolutely free to an eSIM card from the virtual operator GigSky valid outside of Canada and which will allow them to download up to 1 gigabyte mobile data. Visa Classic, Visa Gold and Visa Platinum cardholders will be entitled to a 10% discount on the purchase of a GigSky eSIM. We wonder if employees of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission are Visa customers… The federal agency also declared earlier this fall that Canadian travelers were paying a lot for their wireless services abroad.

AirPods Pro 2: approved!

The hearing aid feature promised by Apple on its AirPods Pro 2 headphones is getting closer to Canada. Health Canada approved earlier this month the new software announced last fall by Apple. All that is missing is the approval of provincial agencies, including the Order of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists of Quebec, for Apple Canada to update the software of its popular headphones. The hearing aid function of AirPods Pro 2 does not completely replace a specialized hearing aid, but it would make it possible to better perceive certain sounds and certain conversations, assures the Californian manufacturer. You must first perform a hearing test on an iPhone to activate the function.

Find out about the availability in Canada of the Apple AirPods Pro 2 hearing aid feature

The end of passwords

Australia's federal cybersecurity agency has ruled: passwords and cryptographic encryption as we know them now will be obsolete in 2030. It's the fault of quantum computing, explains Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), whose computing power promises to make the forms of encryption currently used throughout the digital world obsolete. The Australian agency therefore recommends abandoning SHA-256, RSA and other encryption techniques within five years, in favor of “post-quantum” algorithms. The ASD is based on US government forecasts which estimate that a quantum computer capable of breaking through the most advanced security systems to date could emerge between 2030 and 2035.

Read the Australian Signals Directorate's report on digital encryption security

20 Canadian unicorns

The total value of the 20 largest Canadian unicorns is US$52.4 billion, the New York analysis firm CB Insights calculated at the beginning of December. Unicorns are young technology companies whose value exceeds $1 billion in a very short period of time. The most valuable Canadian unicorn is Vancouver-based Dapper Labs (US$7.6 billion), which specializes in blockchain and cryptoassets, followed by Toronto-based password manager 1Password (US$6.8 billion). . Montreal travel service Hopper comes in third place at US$5 billion, followed by luxury retailer Ssense (US$4.2 billion). A sign of the times, Toronto-based Cohere is the only representative of the generative AI sector, and ranks ninth on this list with a value of US$2 billion.

Consult the list of 20 Canadian unicorns according to BestBrokers

Bankruptcy in video games

Vancouver studio Hothead Games declared bankruptcy two days before Christmas. “It is painful for me to announce that Hothead Games no longer exists,” its president Ian Wilkinson laconically declared earlier this week. Hothead was unable to find a distributor to release a console and mobile version of a AAA game that the studio had been working on for several months. The distributor previously considered for this game withdrew at the last minute, a financial blow too severe for the capacity of this studio which had existed since 2006. Among its greatest successes are the games Hero Hunters and Box Office Tycoon.

Visit the Hothead Games studio website