No one wants to be the victim of a hacker,...
Read Article Editor’s Note: This is a post by Jackson Bond who is the...
Read Article It wasn’t long ago that social media played a relatively...
Read Article Editor’s Note: This article was written by Sam Phippen, a...
Read ArticleThe ability for enterprises to have employees get behind company firewalls through their Android devices has been a desire for businesses for some time now. With the introduction of Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of the Google-made smartphone operating system, that’s now looking possible. Cisco recently released a preview version of its Anyconnect Android app back in late February, which is currently available on the Android Marketplace. While the app may not be as advanced as a virtual private network, it is still pretty advanced.
But while every smartphone app “preview” is sure to be a little buggy, it’s safe to say that as far as telecommunications related releases in recent memory are concerned, the Anyconnect app for Android Ice Cream Sandwich takes the cake. While it shows promise for usability at some point, it doesn’t appear to be in the new future, and especially not in time for when they surely plan on releasing the final version.
Foxconn, a manufacturing contractor that operates the Chinese plants of Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and other major tech companies, announced this week that it would substantially increase worker salaries at its factories in Asia.
The introduction of new programs or software often has the effect of fundamentally changing the way we interact with long-established ones. The Street View program turned Google Maps from a resource for directions into a photo gallery of the world. YouTube MP4 converters turned a video website into a legitimate music source. And, now, the Timeline redesign has turned Facebook from a traditional social media site into a more encompassing life scrapbook or autobiography.
The Facebook Timeline is an overall of the website’s regular user profile. In the old profile, the most recent status updates, pictures, and wall posts appeared at the top of the screen. To see a post from several months or years ago, a viewer would need to do a good deal of scrolling and searching. The Timeline changes this by adding a sidebar on the left side of every profile. The sidebar lists off all the years during which that profile registered activity. A viewer needs only to click on a year if they want to see pictures or wall posts from that time.
For a business, providing the most fool-proof security system available to your network isn’t always feasible. Information security systems are often incredibly expensive, and difficult to set up and maintain. However, not spending the extra time and money to have the security that you need is a huge risk.
Having your information hacked into can literally put you out of business. Some of the biggest and most detrimental consequences to having your business’ information hacked include:
Ruined Reputation
Once you put something on the web, you can bet that it will forever live on – no matter how hard you try to erase it. If you send something through email that you would rather not have the public know, it could easily be made public if your account is hacked. If you keep private documents online, they could easily be made public if your computer is hacked.
These days, with new tech products regularly being released and an almost limitless number of websites dedicated to them online, it’s no surprise that the internet is brimming with reviews of the latest technology. Trying to decide which new smartphone to purchase? There are many people online willing to offer you input and advice. Looking for laptop reviews? A quick Google search will bring you thousands upon thousands of results.
Of course, this saturation of information is largely a good thing. Without ever seeing a product, the consumer can learn all of its specs, see pictures of it from every angle, and gauge the opinion of both normal customers and technology experts. A person with very specific interests or needs can almost certainly find someone out there who directly addresses those issues. From a free market, capitalistic, consumer-oriented perspective, the mass of available online reviews is incredibly beneficial.
The condensing and popularizing of online social interaction is happening so fast that speculating on its future simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Specifically, the fate of computer-based remote learning through video lectures, e-learning, the best online colleges and the like is fairly foreseeable. Combined with the decades-long determination that traditional education techniques are for some reason failing many American children these days, its obvious online education is going to play a dominate role in 21st century academia. But there are many ways to teach through instant Internet access, so what form will it take? In order to figure that out, projections for the future of communications technology must be addressed, as well as the inhibitors of current education models and what said technology can do to fix such problems.
Education has Historically Been a Lesson in Time/Space Learning Limitation
“I know that I know nothing” were words attributed to the Greek philosopher Socrates, the founder of Western education. Indeed, this has been the universal prevailing sentiment held by the truest of scholars throughout time; so long as there remains horizons yet to be crossed how can we ever be satisfied that we’re truly aware of everything there is to know? We may never satisfy this desire to become entirely educated in an ideal sense, but technology has certainly allowed the peoples of the world to benefit from global knowledge in a way that has never been accomplished before. We’re now able to take our learning experience beyond any horizon without leaving the living room.
