This week, with online spending in Canada is on the rise online retailer Newegg is getting in on the action. Plus, viruses are being found on Mac computers, hitchBOT’s adventures come to a grisly end, and a clever way to get the family together for dinner.

Canadian online retail market “growing rapidly”

Newegg is expanding its lineup of products available in Canada through a new program, the Canada Global Seller program. It gives international vendors access to the Canadian market, where eMarketer projects online sales to reach Cdn$44 billion by 2018.

Newegg is an online tech retailer based in Los Angeles. A Canada Post report referenced by Newegg claims that 42 percent of Canadians seek “international sellers offering more aggressive pricing than domestic sellers.”

The report uses Statistics Canada information from 2011 and also suggests that:

• 66 percent of Canadians had items shipped from outside Canada in a three-month period
• 37 percent of Canadians purchase items from outside Canada that are not available here

No information yet on how Newegg will handle the customs, duty, and shipping costs that are associated with buying outside our borders. But for consumers, more choice often leads to better options.

New viruses prove that Macs can be vulnerable

Black Hat, the annual hacker convention where programmers and software engineers gather to talk about code, started today in Las Vegas. Earlier this week, two of the people presenting revealed to Wired that they had created a viral worm that can be passed from one Mac computer to another through peripherals that get connected to the computer.

The two programmers exploit the firmware of the computer, which runs before the operating system of the computer, when security and antivirus programs kick into gear.

It’s not likely you have to worry about this anytime soon, but it is worth noting that the era of Apple Computers being effectively immune from such attacks, in part because they had fewer users but also because the operating system was more robust, has come to an end.

hitchBOT is dead. Long live hitchBOT

The social experiment has ended, and the result is, well, not very surprising.

hitchBOT was designed as a collaborative art project. It could Tweet and post photos to Instagram, and its creators wanted to know whether the goodwill of humans could get the robot across Canada. The robot completed the trip in 21 days in the summer of 2014.

In February 2015, hitchBOT travelled through Germany and then “vacationed” in the Netherlands.

The next trip began in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 17. On Saturday, August 1, hitchBOT Tweeted, “Oh dear, my body was damaged, but I live on with all my friends. Sometimes bad things happen to good robots!”

When hitchBOT first took to the road, co-creator Frauke Zeller, a professor at Ryerson in Toronto, said, “Usually, we are concerned whether we can trust robots … but this project takes it the other way around and asks: can robots trust human beings?”

hitchBOT did okay in Canada. And Germany. And the Netherlands.

It was in the United States that hitchBOT was killed. Two weeks into its trip. Like I said: not very surprising.

Pepper mill aims to bring families together at mealtime

The “PepperHacker” was announced in April, but I just learned about it’s existence last weekend.

With a twist, the grinder shuts down televisions and Wi-Fi routers, and mobile devices, rendering them dormant for 30 minutes.

The device was commissioned by Australian food manufacturer Dolmio as part of a campaign around getting families to sit down at the dinner table together. To eat pasta made with Dolmio products, if you’re of a mind.

The pepper mill doesn’t seem to work like TV-B-Gone, which sends an infrared signal out to televisions to shut them off. The Telegraph reports that the hack affects devices that are plugged into a power hub. Which limits its functionality.

And it’s not actually available for sale, but was created to make a point. Just look at how happy families become when they share a meal together without any distractions.