XFER Blog

What have you watched on TV lately? Actually, never mind; if you don’t want to tell us, we can just ask Vizio. Relax--we’re not actually going through with this, but the fact remains that 11 million owners of Vizio televisions had their viewing habits tracked by the manufacturer. Were you one of them?

Hackers are notorious for committing cybercrimes and exploiting what seems like everybody and anybody. Yet, just as there exists honor among thieves, there’s an unwritten rule within the hacking community: leave hospitals alone.

Businesses are turning to the cloud because it’s designed to make operations easier and save them money. In light of these benefits, organizations that have yet to move to the cloud may be missing out on some serious advantages by continuing to do IT the hard way. If you’re still unsure about the cloud, then consider how these three features of cloud computing can change how you do business.

While San Francisco residents might not be happy that they’ll again have to pay fares to ride the city’s rail system, the reason they again have to do so is understandable. Plus, it provides an excellent example of the importance of maintaining a backup and using complex passwords.

You’re already a business owner, but let’s say that you want to pick up some new skills. You want to be known as an expert in a new field, and you’re pretty dedicated to doing so. Perhaps you’re familiar with the 10,000 hours rule, which attempts to explain how someone becomes a master of a particular craft. Well, we hate to burst your bubble, but this rule might not be as simple as it sounds.

It’s not an understatement to suggest that hackers are a hindrance to business. They take what doesn’t belong to them, and worse than that, they use that stolen information to make off with money, misrepresent individual actions, and ultimately, just cause a degree of added entropy that any business simply doesn’t need. Recently, with the hacker group Anonymous consistently in the news and dozens of corporate hacks resulting in millions of people’s personal information being compromised, hackers have been an increased part of the public consciousness.

Whether we like it or not, memes have had a profound effect on how the world’s population views current events and popular culture. In part, this is thanks to the prevalence of the Internet, which has fostered these absurd images and provided them an outlet to flourish. Due to how viral they are, it would be foolish to dismiss them as inconsequential; in fact, when leveraged properly, memes can make a statement about your business and its specific brand.

After implementing their current infrastructure for almost a decade, the U.S. Department of Education have plans to upgrade, directing their attention toward ensuring that the new initiative keeps mobile capabilities as a high priority.

Stress is a natural part of the workplace. It’s almost impossible to make it through the workday without getting stressed out about at least one thing or another, especially when you’re a business owner. In these stress-filled circumstances, it’s important to remember that stress isn’t always a bad thing; it has some redeeming factors that are often lost amongst the cacophony of shuffling papers and constant phone calls.

It all goes to show: don’t mess with the IRS. The prison system has two new residents, after Anthony Alika, 42, and his wife Sonia, 27, were sentenced for filing fraudulent tax returns through the often-exploited “Get Transcript” site maintained by the Internal Revenue Service. In addition to their incarceration, the Alikas will each be responsible to pay restitution to the IRS.

When you picture an old computer, do you see a giant machine that takes up an entire room? These days, people might consider even something like a CRT monitor and a device running Windows XP to be ancient. Yet, the oldest “computer” in the world may actually be a bronze contraption found off the coast of Greece; the Antikythera mechanism, which was used to predict and track astronomical events, like the movement of the planets and occurrence of eclipses.

It’s well-known that publishers are a major component of an author sharing their work with the world, but recent innovations threaten to disrupt the status quo of the industry. Like many industries, the publishing industry has been changed significantly by the introduction of new technologies that afford writers more liberty when producing their work. What can the business owner learn from these changes?

Not that long ago, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange was filled with business-tie clad gladiators, climbing over each other in what looked like a capitalism-induced mosh pit. The Open Outcry pit had its language, its own weather, its own smell. Nowadays, these pits are more subdued. They still are populated with people, and some are gesturing to buy and sell, but most of the transactions are done digitally. It is this role where the computer has changed the way financial markets work; from the ground up.

Are you familiar with the protections in place that ensure that your digital communications remain private? What’s keeping an entity like the government from going through your emails? In the United States, the government uses a loophole in an outdated law to access the digital information they want from its citizens. If you’re concerned about privacy, you need to be informed about such laws and loopholes.

We’ve all become so adapted to the conveniences of the Internet that it’s difficult to remember what society was like before it. This becomes especially obvious when watching old movies. How odd is it to see characters do pre-Internet activities like go to the library to research information and use a phone book? These are just some of the ways that the Internet has dramatically changed society, for better and perhaps for worse.

Perhaps one reason why Google is so popular is because the company knows how to have fun and not take themselves too seriously. One way that Google shows us their silly side is with Easter eggs they’ve incorporated into their search engine. Here’s a list of ten of our favorites.

If someone asked you to throw your expensive smartphone high up into the air and risk dropping it, just for the fun of it, you would probably say no. However, for the hundreds of thousands of smartphone users who have downloaded an app designed to do just that, they may have fallen for one of the best (or dumbest) technology pranks of all time.

Do you remember the good old days of Windows 95? The nostalgia factor might be one reason to bring this up again, but the fact remains that Windows has changed significantly over the past twenty years; so much so that teenagers who were born just twenty years ago, after the introduction of Windows 95, may have no clue what they’re looking at.

IT can be like baseball. When a team is up to bat in a game of baseball, the team at bat is allowed to keep two coaches on the field. They are called the first base coach and the third base coach. While both coaches’ responsibilities mostly have to do with baserunning, the third base coach also takes on the responsibility of relaying “signs” from the manager in the dugout to the batter at the plate.

Sometimes it’s a pain trying to figure out what you’ll be getting your loved ones during the holiday season. Thankfully, there are some relatively fail-safe options for those who love entertainment, like watching television or going to the movies. A subscription to the right video-streaming service might be able to help you save a trip to your local department store and all of the madness that comes with it.