Today's blog was written by our employee Ashton Fortuna who recently attended his first convention, Scalecon 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This year, I had the incredible opportunity to attend ScaleCon 2024, the very first of its kind, hosted in Las Vegas.

While much of the eastern side of the country continues to grapple with the effects of Hurricane Helene (in particular western North Carolina which had many towns wiped off the map), restoring cellular communication has been a top priority to locate and aid those currently affected.

We are all aware of the devices in our home that are vulnerable to attacks, from the usual suspects like our PCs, laptops and phones to the less obvious like our internet capable smart home devices, but now we even have to worry about hackers when it comes to our cars?

In the past, hacking a car required a great deal of skill and time.

Originally touted as the wave of the future “the cloud”, which is nebulous phrasing that basically means putting your data anywhere besides your direct location, is often seen as the solution for corralling data into one central online location that’s managed by someone else (IE cloud providers).

However, rising costs of data storage and uncertainty surrounding data security and availability in the wake of ever-increasing data breach threats has meant more businesses are seriously considering their options when it comes to the best strategy for data storage in their business.

August and September are big back to school months in the United States and while you’re prepping your children’s backpack for their return with pencils and markers it’s also worth taking the time to go over safety tips for utilizing the internet.

“The internet is down” is a phrase no one enjoys hearing. Beyond the disruption to your day, troubleshooting network issues is also a notoriously frustrating experience. Questions like why is it down, is it us or our service provider, when will it come back up? are common place in this universally shared experience.

Initially labeled Q* for Q Star, Project Strawberry is set to become ChatGPT5 and OpenAI is prepared to launch this update any day now at the time of writing.

AI competition continues to stiffen up, but many would argue OpenAI has a commanding lead in the AI space with it’s a comparatively more mature model that many believe is more accurate than competitors such as Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s CoPilot.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you’re probably well aware of the worldwide outage that occurred last Friday effecting millions of Windows users and causing disruptions for airlines, healthcare facilities, banks and more.

CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity technology company that provides endpoint protection and cyberattack response services to numerous Fortune 500 companies was behind the outage which was linked to a software glitch.

Love it or hate it, internet connectivity in everyday devices is here to stay. Whether you’re a staunch believer that “smart” devices are unnecessary or if you are just waiting for the day when the 1999 Disney movie “Smart House” becomes a reality (minus the over reactive AI of course) – chances are you have some devices in your home or office that are connected to the internet just like your laptop or desktop computer is and that means they need to be managed in almost the same way from a cyber threat perspective.

With Amazon’s Prime Day starting next Tuesday we know a lot of people will be interested in taking advantage of any laptop sales the e-commerce giant will have available to refresh an older device or bump up to better hardware, but is this the best time to buy a new laptop?

There are actually several times throughout the year we see laptop (and devices in general) sales spike, including:

Back-to-School Season (July to September): Retailers often offer discounts to attract students and parents preparing for the school year.