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In our increasingly connected world, it's getting harder to avoid Internet-connected devices. The Internet-of-Things is here to stay. As a consequence, businesses and home users alike need to take into account how to both secure these devices and keep them reliably connected to their local networks. For businesses, the challenges presented by the growing complexity of networking are real. When you rely on your security system, point-of-sale terminals, cordless phones, and store computers to be constantly connected to the Internet, essentially any downtime becomes a nightmare. Twenty years ago, we still had landline phones and manual credit card processing options as failsafes if the Internet went down; today, few businesses are equipped to handle a network outage, whether the outage is local or on the Internet provider's end. In many cases, these small businesses just either don't have the budget to throw at additional hardware or they simply haven't reviewed their IT infrastructure in a while. More often than not, when a small business loses network or Internet access, the reason is that they have single points of failure within their IT systems. In this instance, a single point of failure is a link between two devices that has no backup or redundancy. Consider a small business with a wireless access point/router/modem combo unit supplied by their Internet service provider. They might have an Ethernet switch connected to this device, which is then connected to everything else in their business, including deskphones, wireless access points, printers, barcode scanners, and so on. If the single Ethernet cable connecting the switch to the modem fails, everything in the shop goes offline. Similarly, if the switch itself fails, everything goes offline. Worse yet, smaller businesses tend to rely on ISP-supplied hardware alone, which is rarely robust enough to handle guest WiFi networks and the demands of many connected devices. These cheap, consumer-grade devices rarely support VLANs (virtual local area networks) and the more advanced security features that businesses need. Redundancy is key in many aspects of life, but especially when it comes to the devices and services on which your livelihood depends. I've never been an advocate of overspending on hardware, though many IT service providers will try to convince you that throwing money at a technical problem is the best solution. At Geek Housecalls, I advocate for strategic IT spending, getting the most bang for your buck. Of course, I could make more money by selling $80,000 Cisco switches to medium-sized companies that don't need them, but in my opinion, that's a great way to lose clients. Often, a relatively small investment of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars can net big improvements in your business's network redundancy, so you aren't left hanging if one switch goes offline, one cable fails, or even if your primary Internet service provider experiences an outage. By combining a landline Internet connection with a cellular (4G/5G) connection through an affordable dual WAN (wide area network) router, you'll be able to keep your business running even if your main Internet connection goes down. Likewise, by installing two less expensive Ethernet switches, rather than one expensive switch, you've improved your local network's resiliency and kept important resources available to yourself and your employees in the event of a hardware failure. When budgeting for adding this kind of redundancy to your business or home IT systems, consider that a redundant Internet connection can often be had for as little as an additional $40 a month, or less if your bandwidth needs are lower. This is the kind of strategic spending I'm referring to when I say "don't overspend on IT". What's most important, moreso than agonizing over hardware choices, is having a reliable IT partner that's available when you need them. I routinely hear stories from our current clients about month-plus lead times just to get Internet installed at a new home--and these long wait times are from multibillion dollar corporations who should have the manpower at their disposal to get things done quickly. I consider that unacceptable. Tech companies seem to be getting worse at earning their customers' business, and are instead taking it as a given. This is not the way. Get in touch with Geek Housecalls today for a free analysis of your home or business's IT needs and let us give you the information you need to make the right choices rather than the expensive ones.

A report published by Barracuda Networks in 2021 found that almost 40% of Internet activity, globally, is produced by malicious bots and bot networks; these include web scrapers, advanced persistent threats, and attack scripts, among others. Bot activity generally makes up about 64% of all web traffic, Barracuda found. Key findings from the report include: most bot traffic originates in the two largest public clouds: Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). e-commerce applications and login portals are the biggest targets for advanced persistent threats North America accounts for 67% of bad bot traffic bad bots follow a standard workday, to avoid raising suspicions of victim organizations Unpacking the last point a bit more: bad bots are designed to follow a standard workday to blend in with other legitimate traffic. In doing so, the developers of these bots avoid raising human suspicion while they perform attacks against online resources, such as impersonating legitimate security vulnerability scanners. Another example of malicious bot activity during the workday: bots accessing the login page of a medical service provider by altering browser header strings. By posing as a standard installation of Internet Explorer (which is now deprecated by Microsoft) on Windows 10 and appending seemingly random UTM parameters to the end of the URL. The bot used a brute force technique with stolen login credentials in an attempt to access wider company resources. Finally, a malicious bot was found doing large scale scraping of a business-to-business e-commerce site in the UK. In this instance, browser header information appeared normal but Barracuda's network detected the client using Web SDK, typically used for automation (such as web scraping, which has plenty of legitimate uses). Additional red flags were raised in this instance since the site was being accessed from a residential IP address, which would be very rarely seen in a B2B website's network logs. In most of these malicious bot scenarios, things like browser header manipulation and unusual traffic patterns give away the bot's true intent, but only if businesses have an IDS/IPS (intrusion detection/intrusion prevention) system in place. As web-based attacks grow more sophisticated and particularly costly and damaging variants like ransomware-based attacks grow in number, your organization needs a coherent web security system in place, with access control and credentialing policies to minimize your attack surface. The good news is that, along with the increase in sophistication of malicious bot activity on the Internet, defenses have also grown appreciably more sophisticated, to boot. AI and machine learning have allowed threat detection and prevention platforms to evolve rapidly over the past decade, from comparatively crude programs relying on simpler heuristics to detect zero-day and advanced threats, to agile systems that can detect and stop threats that haven't been previously seen. Is your business at risk? Get in touch with Geek Housecalls today for a free security assessment and let us help you protect your critical online resources.

Netflix's latest effort in stanching its hemorrhaging user base has proved unpopular but, perhaps, ultimately necessary. The stalwart streaming giant has recently announced plans to crack down on users who share password (which, ironically, Netflix encouraged during the early 2010s). Set to go into effect on August 22nd, the new policy creates 'homes', which are physical locations (like your home--thanks for the clarification, Netflix) that are tied to your Netflix account. By default, each plan includes one home, and more can be added for an additional cost. See all the gory details below: This seems to be Netflix's ham-handed attempt at dealing with a problem it has historically had very little control over: password sharing. These aren't good optics for Netflix, but the decision is probably good and necessary, from Netflix's point of view, in light of declining customer numbers, an increasingly threadbare catalogue of shows, and Netflix's own poor spending decisions . Will this drive away more customers? No doubt. But the bean counters have no doubt done their calculus that the increase in revenue will offset the losses from alienated watchers. Why all the focus on Netflix? Because Netflix is a bellwether. They've been around for a long time and they have the video-as-a-service thing down to a cold science. When it comes to password sharing, no streaming platform is excepted; the Hulus and Amazons of the world are probably tangling with the same problem, and if they aren't now, they will be, soon. What does this have to do with you, the subscriber? You were used to your cable bill going up at least once a year-- and being the most expensive utility you pay for --right? So who cares if Netflix charges another $3 a month so you can watch stuff in more than one 'home'? Philosophically, maybe some readers out there don't care about being nickel-and-dimed during a historic cost of living crisis , but I imagine many of you do care. What can be done? We're probably all feeling a bit wistful for the days of DVD collections, as it stands. Price increases in digital services, coupled with onerous digital rights management and constantly shifting availability of digital catalogues, are indicative of a much more troubling problem in our digitized economy: you don't really own much of anything, anymore. We've reached a point in the evolution of capitalism where even heated seats have become a service , not a tangible product you bought when you bought the car they were attached to. There are plenty of status quo'ers who will defend the right of publicly traded companies to maximize profits for their shareholders, no matter how bad things get. Good for them--I'm sure the companies they've invested in will be there for them when they fall on hard times. As for the rest of us, it's time to reconsider ownership in the digital age. Streaming video platforms have become the new cable TV, as was predicted by some, years ago, at the genesis of the 'cord-cutting' phenomenon and the rise of streaming services like Netflix. If you're spending $70 a month on streaming stuff and renting movies, are you doing much better than a basic cable package, in terms of value? It should come as a shock to no one that streaming services and the companies that own them are largely the same players from the cable television age of yore: Comcast owns Xfinity, Walt Disney owns Hulu, Dish Network owns Sling, and so on. The names and faces may have changed, but the song remains the same. And what happens when these media monoliths decide to sell the rights to a movie or a TV series, or to simply memory-hole it and pretend it never existed on their platform? Too bad for you--you can simply enjoy a mediocre selection from their rotating catalogue of garbage! It's a bit dystopian, isn't it? "You will own nothing and be happy", to paraphrase Ida Auken, Dutch MP, in her essay to the World Economic Forum in 2016. At least, as far as digital video goes, you do have another option: host your own content. We used to warehouse VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray collections in our homes, which no one really seemed to mind until the siren call of on-demand video hit the scene in the early-to-mid aughts. What I propose is even simpler: purchase two large capacity hard drives, configure them in a RAID-1 array, build up a modest home server around that array, and put all your music, movies, and TV shows on it. Easier said than done, right? The fact is you still can own your own content. You can buy movies on discs and rip them to a digital format that can then be streamed, with an assist from an app like Plex, to your smart TV, computer, tablet, or smartphone. In the case of Plex, there still may be a monthly fee involved (although they sell pay-once 'lifetime' subscriptions), but that alternative is much more palatable to me than handing my money and my dignity to a panoply of streaming video giants who couldn't give a damn about my time, my privacy, my security, or my interests. Geek Housecalls would like to help you cut the cord from cutting the cord. 'Everything-as-a-service' has become perverse; in this simple way, you, the customer, can democratize the shows and movies you love and tell the likes of Netflix that you're not going to pay for something you never really owned anyway.

On June 24th, 2022, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade . Roe v. Wade was a landmark case decided by the Supreme Court in 1973. The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of one 'Jane Roe' (Norma McCorvey) that it was unconstitutional for states to make access to abortion unduly restrictive or illegal. The basis for this ruling was that denying access to abortions violated the Fourteenth Amendment, specifically, the Amendment's due process clause. Though Roe later became enshrined in subsequent case law and upheld for nearly fifty years through other judicial challenges, it is no more. As a consequence, women must now consider data that tech companies are collecting from health apps, such as menstrual cycle tracking apps. In fact, women, their families, and loved ones must now think of the way they use technology for accessing certain medical services in a new light, thanks to the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe. Hostile governments have historically engaged in dragnet surveillance, wire-tapping phones of political enemies, and hacking the computers and digital services of both foreign adversaries and allies. Tech companies serve as convenient data brokers in this surveillance state. It's no secret your smartphone is a trove of data both for corporate third-parties as well as state and federal governments. When women are in need of a critical medical service, such as abortion care, they must now consider their anonymity when searching for and accessing those services, as well as when communicating with medical professionals. Call it paranoid, but in an age where the Supreme Court can disembowel judicial precedent for basic human rights on a whim, we must take more extraordinary measures in order to protect our online privacy. So what can you do? Vet your apps, both on your phone and on your computer. Read the Terms of Service, and if the Terms of Service aren't readily available, demand that the app developer make them available to you. Examine what data are being sent to the app developer as well as to third-party data brokers. Assume that some or all of the data produced by your app may at some point be accessed by state or federal government. Uninstall apps you don't trust, especially those which contain sensitive medical or personally-identifying information. Use a VPN (virtual private network) when on public WiFi. Assume that unsecured, public wireless networks are being monitored, potentially by law enforcement or the state. If your traffic is encrypted, your data is much more difficult to analyze or to connect to an individual person. Use anonymous browsing mode in your web browser of choice. Deny all trackers, cookies , and do your best to disable browser fingerprinting Use an ad blocker extension for your browser, such as uBlock Origin . Advertisements have been known to bundle in malicious content, such as malware, cryptocurrency mining programs, and ransomware. Advertisements also collect information from your browser when they're allowed to load. Consider using the Tor Browser for additional anonymity online, such as when researching medical services. The Tor Browser is developed by the Tor Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving people's right to digital anonymity. This is a tech blog, first and foremost. I don't really relish the thought of mixing in politics; however, this issue goes beyond 'politics' as it concerns human rights. Technology, as you can imagine, regularly intersects with, and runs afoul of, those rights. I also make no reservations in considering this decision by the Supreme Court to be another step toward transforming our country into a dystopian theocracy. During times like these, it is imperative we do everything we can to fight against the state weaponizing technology to achieve its goal. Hopefully, the tips above help in that cause.

In the information tech service industry, things break, constantly. As an IT manager, yours is a Sisyphaen task; during any given day, you’re responsible for keeping many plates spinning. From a customer’s perspective, it probably looks like you’re not doing anything until something breaks. When it breaks, you’re not working fast enough to fix it. This reality has been made more complex as the business world adopts the “everything-as-a-service” model for its IT needs. With an unseen litany of interlocking pieces that must work together day in and day out, it’s not surprising that when things go wrong within your infrastructure or across the broader internetworked world, the solutions may not be fast, cheap, or easy. In the early days of the Internet, there was no cloud–not in the sense that we understand it today, at least. The mainframe/dumb terminal paradigm was still in force (having since been rebranded as the server/thin-client paradigm) and resources were highly localized: when something broke, you had an on-site IT staff to deal with it. Businesses still leverage on-site engineers and technicians to keep their infrastructure running, but it’s no secret that the amount of stuff they have to manage at a physical location has dwindled over the last two decades, in particular. Does this then spell the end of on-site sysadmins and network engineers? Hardly. If anything, while the venues have shifted, the workload of the typical IT employee hasn’t dwindled. With technologies in the networking world such as SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking), IT providers are more able to do their work without being on-site. As you might imagine, reducing the number of IT people who need to be on-site at any given time reduces your costs as a business owner. As cloud management capabilities continue to grow in scope and performance, the idea of on-site anything seems at first glance outdated and rather technologically quaint. This is true, to some extent. A small business owner doesn’t need a 42U rack of servers and routers roaring away in their back office. A florist doesn’t need a dual-socket workstation with loads of memory to do their daily business. The fact is most businesses have become more reliant on technology and the Internet to process transactions, order from suppliers, reach clients, monitor inventory and so on. This has pointedly emphasized the need for competent IT service providers. If you think you can’t budget for managed IT services, or if you consider your current spending on IT services too large already, we at Geek Housecalls would love a half hour or so of your day to change your thinking and reduce both your IT costs and complexity. IT audits generally reveal that the average small business owner is paying for redundant cloud services, software licenses they don’t need, hardware that’s totally out of spec for what their employees do. As more of what we do and rely on moves to the cloud, our data counterintuitively becomes harder to manage. Our digital footprints grow and become harder to secure. Technologies like password-based authentication have fallen out of favor as security threats grow more sophisticated and ransomware poses a serious risk to businesses of all sizes. An entire industry has grown up around information security alone, and for good reason: the average cost of recovering from a ransomware attack reached nearly $2 million in 2021, according to research done by Sophos. These numbers are potentially debilitating for a small business. The landscape has changed, for better and for worse. By all metrics, information security should be top of mind for individuals and business owners. A single security incident could bring about disastrous results; the implications become more grim when sensitive or personally-identifying information is lost, such as HIPAA-protected medical records, payroll, or tax records. In partnership with Sophos and other leading security solutions providers, Geek Housecalls is here to help you run your business with the peace of mind you deserve.

Atlassian, cloud software giant and developer of popular tools such as Jira and Confluence, suffered a service outage on April 5th, 2022, according to their service status page (https://status.atlassian.com/). Atlassian claims only around 400 of its 226,000 clients are affected, but that the process to restore service to those clients may take as long as another two weeks. In the meantime, Atlassian can't guarantee the affected customers won't lose data either due to the outage or during the rebuild process. Outages caused by botched updates or poorly-reviewed scripts aren't new in the cloud service provider world. Even giants like Amazon Web Services have unplanned downtime. The issue in Atlassian's case is that the company just doesn't seem to care very much about the losses this outage are causing for its clients. Aside from updates posted on the company's Twitter account, there has been a deafening silence about the prolonged service outage. The restore process appears to be very manual, requiring hundreds of Atlassian engineers to be deployed. Atlassian seems proud of the fact that they're working hard to fix an issue they and only they caused. The optics here really aren't great for Atlassian. Here, we arrive at a more general problem with the entire SaaS (software as a service) paradigm. We're entrusting giant tech companies who don't have very much accountability or external oversight with not only our data, but our livelihoods. Smaller tech companies have failed because bigger tech companies were incompetent. The trickle-down effects here are real. In absence of sweeping regulation of giant, abusive tech companies, having a local, proactive tech solutions provider like Geek Housecalls can only improve your chances of surviving a widespread or long-lasting cloud service outage. We are advocates, always, of local backups and on-premises infrastructure specifically because of the spotty reliability and ever-changing service terms of big cloud service companies. Your data is not backed up if it is only backed up to the cloud. Your software isn't really your software if it exists purely as a service on a cloud provider's servers. This isn't to say you don't *need* cloud services to achieve greater operational efficiency in your own business, or that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater; it is to say, however, that consolidation in tech is bad for all of us and that redundancy can mean the difference between life and death for your business. Get in touch with Geek Housecalls today for a free review of your business's IT situation and let us offer you peace of mind that, in the next outage, your business doesn't go down with the ship.

In 2015, the nascent Windows 10 was heralded as a return to form for Microsoft's Windows division, after a frustrating couple of years with the touchscreen-focused Windows 8 tarnished its brand. Windows 10 was mostly lauded by critics for jettisoning the things Windows 8 did poorly (the Metro UI, the Charms Bar, the ill-considered Start menu experience) and reinstating the things that Windows 7 did well. Generally, it was a positive release for Microsoft, in spite of dragging along the same ancient, rickety NT codebase that dates back to the early 2000s. As time went on, however, various 'feature' updates degraded the experience of Windows 10. These feature updates, along with Microsoft's more frequently released cumulative updates, often broke core operating system functionality, such as the ability to print, to connect to wireless networks, and to sign in using fingerprint sensors. I can't speak for everyone in the tech provider sphere, but managing Windows on both my personal computers and those belonging to clients, became more of a nightmare with each passing year. Microsoft's sysadmin tools for Windows have gotten better over time, but the Windows experience has gotten markedly worse. Besides the litany of functionality complaints that new updates to Windows 10 brought, there were also unwelcome changes to the user experience; to wit, Microsoft's idea that 'nagware' is something users would respond to. Enter Microsoft Edge. After the Windows 10 October 2020 update, users were hit with a specific nag from Microsoft to change their preferred browser back to Microsoft Edge. This was not well-received, as one might imagine. Not content to stop there, Microsoft implemented a perpetual nag that suggested users would be happier if they switched back to Edge, pinned at the top of the Windows Settings menu. As of September 2021, these nags cannot be disabled in consumer-facing versions of Windows (that is, versions other than Enterprise and Education). During Windows 7's tenure, such blatant intrusion into the user experience, a study in the definition of 'overweening', would've been rightly dismissed at the drawing board by the Windows division. The world has changed since Windows 7's introduction in 2009, alas. Advertising has become a dark art, and nowhere is sacred. This is not the legacy Microsoft should want for its flagship product. Now, in 2021, Windows 11 is set to release on October 5th, bringing with it a revamped user interface, 'deeply-integrated' Microsoft Teams, some changes to process/task scheduling, support for Android applications, and a few other technical odds and ends. Looking beyond the new coat of paint, Windows 11 is the same old Windows. Windows Updates will probably continue to break functionality and cause headaches for users and IT departments alike. Exploits that were deeply rooted in the Windows NT kernel, like the ongoing Print Nightmare exploit, will no doubt be carried forward into 11. As the Linux kernel continues to evolve, with major upstream software contributors such as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and RedHat, Microsoft faces a technical hurdle with Windows that will likely be impossible to surmount without a total rethink of the operating system. Microsoft simply can't keep dragging the decrepit NT codebase forward, in perpetuity; to reach technical parity with Linux-based operating system and with macOS, the painful work of gutting NT must be done, and soon. As the already bloated Windows kernel grows ever larger, it will become harder to manage, less stable, more unpredictable, and easier for hackers to exploit. Perhaps Microsoft's work in the Windows Subsystem for Linux is telling of its future plans--perhaps to rebase Windows around the Linux kernel? Stranger things have happened, and it is Microsoft's historical prerogative to "embrace, extend, extinguish". The problem today is Microsoft's Windows product is a dinosaur in a rapidly changing world. Its cloud platform, Azure, is a completely different experience and receives the funding and development work a service with its client base demands. Windows, however, seems fated to wither and die on the vine, as it becomes nothing more, really, than yet another platform through which to serve ads. Microsoft's lust for technical dominance within Windows, which flourished under former CEO Bill Gates, seems a distant memory now. In spite of the tidal forces working against it, Windows will probably remain the dominant desktop operating system for some time. As malware, denial-of-service, ransomware, and other sophisticated security exploits become more commonplace, Geek Housecalls is here to secure your infrastructure and provide a path to data security and business resiliency, no matter what.

After two solid years of upheaval wrought by the pandemic, prevailing winds within the U.S. corporate edifice suggest a lot of managers and executives want their employees back in the office, even if their jobs are easily done from home. Is there some hidden rationale for the sturm und drang these managers feel about their employees working from home? Is there a justification for making them return to their offices? Considering that so many tech jobs, and jobs within the larger knowledge economy , can be done from any location with a decent Internet connection, no, there is no real justification for this managerial angst over remote work. So what is the impetus for dragging people back into the offices? It's fairly straightforward: in spite of the wealth of evidence that a manager might claim he has that employees are more productive in the office, the truth is that manager just wants to be able to keep the employee under his thumb. When did so much of work become adult daycare? Companies have long had access to tools to monitor employees' computer screens, check how long they're idle or away from their desks, as well as log which websites and services employees access on company time. In fact, these tools have only gotten more powerful in recent years; managers are not wanting for employee analytics. Given this, it seems self-evident that the drive to get employees back in their cars, back to sitting in rush hour traffic for a pointlessly lengthy commute, is not a function of any empirical evidence at all. It's just desperate functionaries in middle management, trying to prove their own relevance by having asses in seats to "manage". Perhaps this says more about the necessity of a great many managers than it does about employees not wanting to return to the office. "Too many chiefs, not enough Indians", as the saying goes. What can you do, in your own white-collar job? Don't go back into the office. Plenty of outfits are more than willing to let people work remote now, in 2022, pandemic or not. The status quo is dead, in so many ways. During this Great Resignation of ours, the worker has more 'hand' than he ever did, to borrow a euphemism from Seinfeld . Let your unwillingness to knuckle under to inferior minds on this particular issue serve as a larger message to brown-shoe corporate practitioners: you're an adult human, your work life has as much value as your non-work life, you have skills, and you refuse to be monitored in a cubicle for 40 hours a week.