Canada Computers & Electronics continues to investigate a data breach affecting hundreds of people that has left customers frustrated over how the company handled the episode and communicated about it.

“This is something that shouldn’t have happened,” said Eric Pimentel, an IT professional who cancelled a credit card after being warned by the company that he’d potentially been affected — and was later told he was not.

Toronto’s Brad Seward likewise cancelled a card after getting a notification from Canada Computers, before he was advised that he had not been affected.

“It really sounds like this company is all over the place,” Seward said via email.

Canada Computers told CBC News on Tuesday that its “current investigation indicates this incident affected 1,284 customers.”

The Richmond Hill, Ont.,-headquartered retailer previously stated that, on Jan. 22, it learned of a data breach incident involving “unauthorized access to the system supporting our retail website,” which left personal customer information — including credit card information — compromised.

Canada Computers says it took immediate steps to contain the breach. It also notified authorities and launched an investigation. Affected customers were alerted on Jan. 25.

The breach has been reported to the federal privacy watchdog as well as to police in York Region.

Pimentel and Seward are among a half-dozen customers who told CBC News they received notification from the company about the breach and were then subsequently told that was not correct.

The company confirms it sent messaging of this nature out and says it apologizes for the confusion.

“This was a miscommunication,” the company said Tuesday. “Canada Computers sent the original notice to both affected customers and to some who were not impacted. We followed up with [the latter] to confirm that their customer information was not affected.”

The company did not say how many people had received this follow-up messaging.

Breach affected ‘guests’ only, company says

According to the company, the breach affected customers who checked out their purchases as “guests” on its website, and who also entered their personal information, between Dec. 29 and Jan. 22.

Pimentel said he did not check out as a guest. But the company’s explanation has not left him feeling more secure.

“I don’t feel confident at all,” he said, adding that he expects more transparency from a retailer as big as Canada Computers. The company operates more than 30 stores across four provinces, in addition to its retail website.

“It’s not a small mom-and-pop shop in some strip mall,” said Pimentel, who lives in Hamilton, Ont., within driving distance of two of the company’s stores.

Seward similarly said he did not check out as a guest when making his recent at…

Recently, Project Eleven (a quantum computing research group) announced a 1 bitcoin reward for the first team able to complete a challenge to demonstrate breaking a ECC (elliptic curve cryptograph) key using Shor’s algorithm on a quantum computer. 

The deadline for this challenge is April 5th, 2026, meaning in order to qualify for the prize a team must demonstrate breaking a key pair it must be done before that deadline. 

This is frankly a completely absurd and meaningless prize for a number of reasons, the first of which is the deadline of just under a year from today. Even highly optimistic projections about the progress of quantum computing put the timeline of practically achieving such a goal at more like 5-10 years. Expecting a workable proof of concept demonstration that actually breaks a keypair in a single year is pretty laughable at face value, even if you do view quantum computing as a material threat in the short term. 

Next is the factor of economic incentives. A single bitcoin is currently worth approximately $80,000. That is frankly not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Especially when it comes to the application of a cutting edge technology like quantum computing that can perform an entire class of computation exponentially faster than a classical computer. Imagine how much more valuable things could be done with a working quantum computer. 

You could eavesdrop on internet connections regardless of TLS, breaking secure connections to banks, equity brokerages, private corporate networks not using post-quantum cryptography. You could break every private messenger application on the planet, you could decrypt any PGP encrypted message sent over email that you knew the public key for. You could break the entire DNS system’s certificate authority hierarchy, allowing you to impersonate any server in the world a user tries to connect to. 

All of these things have immeasurable value beyond just a mere $84,000. Why on Earth would someone with a working quantum computer publicly reveal that fact to claim a single bitcoin when they could take advantage of all these other things they would be capable of doing?

Okay, let’s sweep all of those possibilities aside and pretend the entire world magically migrates to post-quantum cryptography aside from Bitcoin. It still makes no sense to try to publicly claim this prize if you have a functional quantum computer. 

Let’s assume you have a barely performant enough quantum computer, that it takes a decent amount of time to crack a single key. How many bare public keys are there securing 50 BTC outputs from the first mining epoch? THOUSANDS of them. Why on Earth would you crack one, and then go tell everyone publicly to claim a single bitcoin? You would just try to crack as many of those early coinbase rewards as possible before people detected you. 

Finally, the timetable on its own is just absurd. Quantum computers currently are not even capable of factoring prime…

The Trump administration late Friday said it would exclude electronics like smartphones and laptops from “reciprocal” tariffs, a move that could help keep the prices down for popular consumer electronics that aren’t usually made in the U.S.

The move would also benefit big tech companies like Apple and Samsung, and chip makers like Nvidia.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection listed some 20 products that would qualify for the exemption. They include hard drives, memory chips, flat-panel monitors and solid-state storage devices, as well as machines used to make semiconductors.

That means they won’t be subject to the current 145 per cent tariffs levied on China, or the 10 per cent baseline tariffs elsewhere.

Trump previously said he would consider exempting some companies from tariffs.

The move takes off “a huge black cloud overhang for now over the tech sector and the pressure facing U.S. Big Tech,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a research note.

Trump’s latest tariffs have raised fears of a U.S. recession and drawn criticism from his fellow Republicans, who do not want to lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate to Democrats in next year’s midterm elections.

Neither Apple nor Samsung responded to a request for comment early Saturday. Nvidia declined to comment.

The notice did not provide an explanation for the Trump administration’s move, but White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement after the exclusions were made public that Trump had secured trillions of dollars in U.S. investments from companies including Apple and Nvidia.

In late February, Apple announced it will invest more than $500 billion US over the next four years in the United States, some of that going toward a new manufacturing facility in Texas. In March, Nvidia promised to spend “several hundred billion” dollars to make semiconductors and other electronics in the U.S. over the same period of time.

Trump ran for re-election last year largely on a promise to bring down prices, which, fuelled by inflation from the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine, had tarnished the economic reputation of then-president Joe Biden and his Democratic allies.

But Trump also promised as a candidate to impose the tariffs that have become a central part of his economic agenda, and the U.S. president has dismissed the turbulence in financial markets and expected price increases arising from the levies as a disturbance that was a necessary part of realigning the global economy and world trading order with his vision.

Apple has manufactured most of its iPhones in China since the first model hit the market 18 years ago.

“The concept of making iPhones in the…