Month: November 2021

Week 12 – Mobile Apps

by

Remember when you got your first mobile phone? No, I’m not talking about those 90’s flip phones. I’m referring to the modern-day phones that have a single screen with almost everything you need inside of it. Aside from using phones for communication, people may also use the applications- or just “apps”, for other purposes. Whether it’s business, scheduling, personal care, entertainment or an alternative for communication, apps come in many different forms and uses. Let’s take a look at two of the most popular ones.

  • YouTube
    • YouTube is an online video sharing platform that expands across several devices, eventually releasing their site as an app, being downloaded over 10 billion times across the world by users of all ages.  YouTube’s general audience is teenagers and adults in the age range of 14 to 45. There’s sometimes people older than 45 who use YouTube, but due to YouTube’s explicatory style, they also have a “YouTube Kids” for younger kids. Since their app allows people to upload and publish videos to the public, certain people can create YouTube accounts to make video content for money via a partnership service. As long as they follow YouTube’s community guidelines, they can earn revenue from the videos they upload just as long as they get enough views from users across the globe. On an average according to the Influencer Marketing Hub, a YouTube influencer (or just “YouTuber”) earns $0.18 per view on their video; and if you do the advanced math, that calculates  $18 per 1,000 views on a YouTuber’s video, equating to $3-5 per 1,000 video views. Due to this info, there’s not exactly an “annual” average salary YouTubers make per year; it all depends on how many views they can keep hooking. If you’re a very social person and willing to spend some time making videos to get a quick buck, becoming a YouTuber may be on your plate.
  • Facebook
    • Facebook (or what is now being called “Meta”?) is a social media that can span across different devices like YouTube. As of 2020, their mobile app has over 540 million downloads, trailing behind WhatsApp at 600 million and TikTok at 850 million downloads. On the media’s app, you can create an account to join the metaverse and interact with thousands of people globally by making posts or commenting and reacting to posts by other people. You can also share different things like videos or connections you didn’t even know you had; you can even join groups and view more about your community.  Facebook doesn’t have a general target audience, but they do appeal more to people who want to connect more with society by using their media, or those who want to start a business since Facebook lets you make or advertise your business through their media; possibly through an average age range from 18 to 50 depending on what people want to use it for. On average, a Facebook employee earns $114,943 per year, making this job a risk-reward for any tech-savvy people looking to expand on their career. If you want to get the most out of this media, it’s only a matter of what you want to do: make friends? support your or another business? catch up on some community news? It’s all available with a few taps of your fingers.

Sources:

Week 10 – The Cloud: Service Review

by

The Cloud. An interesting feature that has snuck into our daily lives- and I’m not referring to those fluffy white things in the sky. The Cloud, as defined by cloudfare, is a system “made up of servers in data centers all over the world” as it saves money for thousands of people and adds convenience for others. But what does that mean for people who use the internet regularly? Let’s take a look at a few instances where the Cloud is used, or what is known as “Cloud Computing” by DigitalCloud.

  • File Storage
    • Not to be confused with more “basic” storage systems like hard drives, external drives or USB drives. File Storages allows you to access and edit your files with ease just as long as you have an internet connection; some examples of these storages include Amazon S3, DropBox, and OneDrive. Unfortunately as previously mentioned, they will only work under an internet connection, so you may have to improvise with the classics in case you’re in a situation where the internet will not be available for an extensive period of time. Personally I haven’t used most of these services aside from OneDrive, but with the fact some of them can be easily linked to different emails or other services helps me find them in case I lose track of a file on my computer.
  • Disaster Recovery
    • Everyone’s going to want a form of “failsafe” for their data if something uncontrollably bad were to happen to it. Unfortunately, some systems might not always provide the security needed to save anything that could be lost to a failed save, file corruption, or even theft. DigitalCloud mentions that after seeing some research, at least 75% of businesses that don’t have a Disaster Recovery system or strategy in place end up failing within 3 years of said disaster. But with Cloud Computing, the difficulty in building your own Disaster Recovery system can be significantly reduced. By using a Disaster Recovery system, you can replicate your site with its data and save it for any “unsuspecting” disaster. I have never experienced the scenario of building and need a Disaster Recovery system, but I have seen those face the consequences of not having one ready. (This also reminded me that USBs exist and how to clean them.)

Sources:

Week 8 – Cybersecurity

by

In the online space, there’s almost always something going haywire whether it’s a function breaking or a connection being severed, but today we will talk about intentional issues caused by individuals often known as “cyber criminals”. It’s not difficult to pinpoint any particular incidents caused online, so let’s take a look at one of them and see why it’s such an incident.

Anonymous Comes to Town: The hackers who took on high school sexual assault in Ohio by The Guardian, uploaded on April 18th, 2019

The video covers a shocking event of a minor high school girl who got sexually assaulted and drugged by students of the football team at the Steubenville High School in Steubenville, Ohio. What’s even more shocking was when it was revealed that this event wasn’t even informed to the media, Steubenville kept this incident a secret to “protect” their football team. Sweeping it under the rug and leaving it to be forgotten. At this point you may be wondering how this is meant to tie with cyber criminals and how it’s a cybersecurity event. Well the reason is that a “well-known” group of hackers by the name of Anonymous caught wind of this situation, and used their cybersecurity-piercing skills to investigate on this incident and bring light of it to the face of social media. Anonymous called this situation “Operation Rollredroll” as they hacked the official website of the Big Red Steubenville High School, gaining access to it so they could reveal the evidence of the sexual assault while threatening to reveal personal information behind it. With enough time and attention to this incident, the small town was exposed for its heinous secrets and the football players responsible for the assault were punished and charged.

Anonymous is often “infamous” for their widespread and almost undetectable presence on the web, being a decentralized and internationally collective movement of activists or what people call “hacktivists”. They’re often associated with their cyberattacks against several governments, institutions of governments, agencies, corporations, and the Church of Scientology. The biggest factor about them is living up to their name. Almost no one is able to find out or has even know Anonymous’ true identity, who made the hacker group, and what else they plan to do with their powers. No confirmed damage costs were found after the Operation Rollredroll incident, but one person who assisted Anonymous revealed himself as Deric Lostutter and was raided by the FBI for it, filing a legal case against him for helping the hacker group.

(source: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/steubenville-hacker/314509/)

If there were to be a lesson from all of this, it should be pretty obvious- don’t make the same mistake those football players did. Don’t do ANYTHING as malicious like that, because you never knew if a certain anonymous figure could be watching you right now to collect that evidence and eventually turn it against you…

Introduction to E-Life – Midterm: Privacy, Security, Hacks and Leaks

by

Say that you have become the role of an executive at a small to medium-sized corporation. To be specific, a gourmet food retailer with three stores and an online e-commerce marketplace that sells approximately $1,000,000 in goods each year; your retailer has more than 35,000 customers, and 135 employees total, 100 retail and 35 corporate. As many responsibilities as you might face in this position, let’s focus on one of the more critical ones: your online security. When it comes to keeping your business secure from any online threats, you need to focus on three factors: knowing your enemy, knowing yourself, and developing your strategy.

1. Knowing Your Enemy: Your enemy won’t always be a physical person or something simple enough to prevent. They can come in the forms of digital programs that can even hide as systems you’d usually trust. These “enemies” are identified as but not limited to:

  • Thievery (Physical and Digital)
    • Thieves or even competitors in disguise can infiltrate your business and steal resources, competitive business information to use at their advantage, or damage your retailer’s economic balance by disturbing the flow of consumer income via delaying orders from any merchants your retailer orders from. Shoplifting and dining & dashing are the most common type of physical theft.
  • Data breaches
    • Poor or even false security can not only put your business at risk of several incidents, but your employees and yourself as well. Competitors could steal other information besides competitive/business, if not infiltrate the personal information of you and your workers. If not them, hackers or more malicious thieves could steal your personal info and use it to blackmail you to give them stuff or even do anything for them at threatening costs. These perpetrators could also pose as your consumers using information stolen from THEM in order to gain access to resources they usually couldn’t access; therefore hurting your business whether it’s a phishing scam, false deal from a partnered business, or even trouble with the authority because the culprits framed you for something.
  • Inventory damages
    • Sometimes there can be external problems that not even your business can prepare for, whether it be a natural event causing a disruption with a resource delivery, an unexplainably drastic increase of consumer orders, or other measures that wouldn’t exactly be enough to carry on your plate. As mentioned above, thievery can be one of these problems, because not only do you lose the trusted resource from your merchant, but you also lose your consumer’s trust as well. Natural disasters in particular are one of the biggest threats to a retailer online and offline alike because they can cause several issues: damage to any buildings of your retailer, damage to the contents inside of them like your inventory, knocking out power which will prevent the flow of communication for your retailer, and causing an overall lost of products since you won’t be able to receive and distribute them.
  • Your competitors and the failure to monitor them
    • Like all businesses, competitors can become a threat if left on their own. While the point is not to always butt heads with every single food retailer that you know, you shouldn’t just act like they don’t exist because that can generate a risk that will eventually grow too much to handle. What’s worse is that these competitors could steal your best consumers which will especially hurt your income if not jeopardize your business in the long run.
  • Forced closure
    • When running a business, closure is the last thing you want to resort to if the situation becomes devastating enough; especially in the past year and a half with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing the closures of hundreds of businesses across the globe. With disasters like property damage, losses of consumers, and vandalism to the business, income losses won’t be too far behind to add to the stress. But with the accessibility to Business Interruption Insurance (BII), these disasters won’t have to stay disasters to you. insureon explains that BII helps businesses from different incidents, including “a temporary shutdown tied to a commercial property insurance claim” (source). BIIs can also cover the costs of your retailer’s day-to-day expenses, revenue lost due to the disaster(s), and relocation of your property if the current property becomes too uninhabitable for the business.

Sources:

 

2. Knowing Yourself: When leading a business, you need to know how to keep it up and running yourself, especially if it has digital processes, systems and/or functions that your company places. More importantly, knowing how these processes could be exploited or manipulated in order to gain access to valuable corporate or even customer data.

  • Digital Transformation
    • Digital Transformation is defined as the “adoption of digital technology by a company” with the common goal of improving the efficiency, value and innovation of said company. This transformation can be spread out into 4 key talent areas for the business: technology, data, process, and organizational change, as identified by Thomas H. Davenport and Thomas C. Redman on the Harvard Business Review. Technology on its own contributes since you essentially need it to survive in this modern era, data will be needed, especially for something as large as your retailer, process will give that “end-to-end mindset” to help meet the needs of the consumer when you are making an exchange, and organization change- well, it’s in the name. Leadership, Teamwork, Courage and Emotional Intelligence are some of the key factors of this change to keep your retailer in a balanced order (source). With a power like this, it can be very easy to access almost any info about it as long as it’s inside your retailer’s database (if you’ve established one).
  • Digital Marketing
    • Since you’re running a retailer, the market will be one of your biggest focuses. Since it’s loosely based on using the internet and online-based technologies like computers, mobile devices and social media to promote products, it’s both easy and hard to get yourself suited in the online market. As mentioned above in Knowing your Enemy, you need to keep check with any competitors or other obstacles that could throw your retailer’s economy off-course. It’s not difficult to get passed by a rival in marketing, especially if they come up with a strategy that gives them an advantage over you.
  • Digital Security
    • With all these technological features for your retailer, you’re going to want it to be protected from anyone who will want to harm it. As a popular retailer, you’ll obviously have “those” people who don’t want you to exist, so it only makes sense to develop or purchase a security system to help prevent, if not reduce those risks. Most people might confuse this for functions like Cyber Security, but Simplilearn explains that the difference between Digital and Cyber securities is that Digital revolves around protecting your “online presence” such as your data, identity and assets. Cyber is more expansive, covering the main ground as it protects “entire networks, computer systems, and other digital components, and the data stored within from unauthorized access”. (source)
  • Communications & Partnership
    • After you get all the internal systems set up for your retailer, the next thing you’ll want to focus on is the external features, such as contacts for yourself and your retailer, social media for modern users to find your business, and efficient communication ties with any other business that will be associated with you or vice-versa, such as your merchants. One of the most common types to use for this is Digital Partnership. Veronica Stenburg explains a Digital Partnership as a “collaboration between two companies or an influencer where the two parts share an target audience as well as a service or product that benefits each other.” A cliché strategy, but having a popular influencer such as a celebrity supporting your retailer can help attract some revenue and attention.
  • Advertisement or Commercial Showcasing
    • As a big city retailer, the last thing you’ll want for the business is advertising yourself so more people can learn about your business. As recently mentioned above in Communications & Partnership, collaborating with influencers can be a big step in getting some extra consumers for yourself. Buying and selling ads across different forms of media can also hook some attention, especially on big social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Though, be cautious, because some of this can be heavily expensive; and the last thing you want when making a commercial is spending more money than what you’ll make from it. Take the Super Bowl commercials for example, spending millions of dollars just to advertise products for 30 seconds that will only play around that time.

Sources:

3. Developing Your Strategy: As your retailer’s chief technology executive, it’s up to you to know what can make your retailer’s data safer, more secure, and more reliable. Here are some basic recommendations on what to adopt for your business:

  • Hiring trustworthy associates to protect and distribute the appropriate content for your business (advertisements, business deals, external communications
  • Keeping a steady balance between satisfying the needs of your consumers and making sure you’re not secretly hurting your business in the process; including what you do to advertise, promote, or introduce yourself to the online world
  • Creating or buying an efficient security system for the business, especially one that will keep your data safe from thieves, competitors and criminals
  • Ordering resources from only some of the most trustworthy merchants in the area
  • Getting different types of insurance for yourself, your workforce, and the place you work in to be ready for any unpredictable incidents