ZR Systems 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s no doubt that smartphones are one of the greatest achievements in modern technology. Compared to computers from several years ago, the average smartphone is vastly more powerful. Coupled with mobility, the smartphone is a productivity machine that helps you get more done in your day. Despite these advantages, you might be a little too attached to your device.

When you store your data in the cloud, you assume it will be safe and that nothing bad will happen to it. But what if the real clouds hovering above your virtual cloud are literally full of lightning? Google experienced this last month when one of its data centers in Belgium fell to the wrath of Zeus.

It’s the time of year when we reflect on scary things. For an IT company, it doesn’t get much scarier than an organization’s network getting slammed with a malicious computer virus. There are a variety of really bad viruses out there, each one with its own unique ability to cause some scary results. The way we see it, each computer virus is kind of like a classic monster.