Heart of Texas Network Consultants Blog

The Disney brand has long cultivated an image of magic and wonder. However, this image has yet to materialize any magical effects in reality. For example, people still suffer from food allergies while visiting Disney’s various parks.

This makes it especially dangerous that a former Disney employee was allegedly still able to access a specialized menu-planning app and make alterations, like changing prices, adding language that Disney certainly would not approve of, switching text to the unintelligible “Wingdings” font, and worst of all… changing menu information.

In June of this year, publisher Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, best known for its book series of the same name, filed for Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 bankruptcy and had many of its assets liquidated. One of these assets was the movie rental service Redbox and its eponymous scarlet rental kiosks, rendering the service defunct.

However, many kiosks remain standing outside businesses even now, which makes us wonder… what about all the data they collected while they were in use?

Modern wisdom states that if you’re not paying for a product, you’re the product.

For all the good the Internet is capable of doing, it is equally capable of being extremely harmful… especially when data is involved. Websites and social media platforms collect data from their users and track their movements across the Internet, sell it to advertisers, and more recently, use it to train AI.

Let’s go over what you can—and arguably should—do to limit these platforms' ability to do so.

It isn’t rare for people to subscribe to things and only stay subscribed because the cancellation process is so challenging and inconvenient. However, the Federal Trade Commission is looking to stop this, adopting a rule that eliminates the capability for businesses to put hurdles in front of cancellation processes.

Sextortion scams are scary. The scammer contacts the victim, claiming to have gotten access to their computer and captured video footage of their target partaking in some private and decidedly adult activities, as well as the content that was onscreen at the time. The threat: pay up, or I send the footage to all of your contacts.

Lately, however, hackers have added another layer of “proof” to these claims, now referring to victims by name and including pictures of their homes. Let’s walk through what one of these scams looks like and what you should do if one appears in your inbox.

In recent years, several workplace trends have emerged that many employers find challenging. One such trend is "quiet quitting," where employees do only the bare minimum required to keep their jobs. A more recent trend is to "act your wage."

It was very recently revealed that a global law enforcement effort took down a massive botnet that was in action for almost a decade. In light of this, we wanted to review what a botnet is and how it works, drawing from these events for some context.

The topic of net neutrality has had a tumultuous past few years, with steps forward canceled out by steps taken back. However, new efforts are being considered to restore the policies that made net neutrality what it was in the first place.

On Wednesday, April 10, 2024, Apple deemed it necessary to send a rare alert to certain users via email, spread out across 92 nations. As Apple’s website states, these threat notifications “are designed to inform and assist users who may have been individually targeted by mercenary spyware attacks.” Let’s review these attacks so we all understand this threat better.

The constant fear of falling victim to scams has become a harsh reality and is far from ideal. However, the good news is that there is always time to acquire the skills needed to avoid such scams. Let's explore ways to enhance awareness regarding the challenges posed by scams, not only in a business context but also in everyday life.

2023 was a banner year for artificial intelligence, with the technology exploding into the mainstream and being more accessible by the public than ever before. Let’s explore how what we’ve seen in the past year in terms of AI has changed things for workers and workplaces everywhere.

One major nonprofit has become the victim of a disclosed major data breach, affecting 890 schools all across the US: the National Student Clearinghouse, or NSC. The organization has announced that they have experienced a considerable data breach that has put their clients’ data at risk. What does this mean for affected organizations and their clientele?

It seems that you can’t turn your head nowadays without seeing artificial intelligence being incorporated into some software or platform. However, many leaders in the technology space have expressed their concerns about—as they put it—the “profound risks to society and humanity” that AI poses, outlined in an open letter. 

For many years now, there’s been a bit of a fear of AI—artificial intelligence—in the workplace, all while it has been put into practical use more and more often in many businesses. This all ties back to the work of Alan Turing, who (amongst his accomplishments in computing) created what we know as the Turing Test as a means of gauging how intelligent a computer is. 

Have you ever heard of the Uncanny Valley? It’s the theory that explains why the human race tends to prefer humanoid robots, but only up to a point, after which we find them unsettling. It’s one reason why so many people found the 2019 film Cats bothersome to watch. The Uncanny Valley has also been present in film in recent years, especially when actors who have passed are recreated digitally to make an appearance, or when talent needs to look older or younger than they are.

There’s no denying that the economic forecast at the moment is a bit bleak, with murmurings of a recession growing louder by the day. As this situation develops, many companies are likely seeking out opportunities to trim the fat. Despite this, however, we anticipate that artificial intelligence will actually see a bit of an uptick. Let’s go over why.

No matter how big your business is, you’ll always have technology expenses. It’s just a fact of the current workplace, and your profits will be inexorably tied to how well your IT works for you. Furthermore, the more IT costs rise, the more impact small and medium-sized businesses will feel from them. Today, we wanted to address this issue and how you can minimize the frustrations that stem from seemingly uncontrollable technology costs.

While we typically focus on how various technologies can be used in business applications as a way to boost a small or medium-sized organization’s capabilities, we occasionally come across a topic that is just undeniably cool (and that we can bring back around to business concerns, to boot). We recently heard about the development of a flexible new wearable that uses AI to monitor the health of the wearer that we wanted to discuss with you.

Quiet quitting…it’s a buzzword that many might misunderstand that has seen increasing virality on social media. Let’s take a few moments to honestly evaluate what quiet quitting really means, and what it means for your business.

Cloudflare has foiled the plans of yet another major hacking attack, a record-breaking DDoS attack of the likes we have never before seen. Let’s examine what goes into such an attack and what you can do to keep your business safe from their influence.