Learning Café

No fooling; on April 1, Internet marketing giant Epsilon announced that its confidential data had been breached.  Epsilon sends about 100 million emails every day on behalf of customers like JP Morgan, Target, and Best Buy.  The compromised data appears to be limited to names and email addresses of people who do business with Epsilon’s customers.  If you have given your email address to any of the following, you may be affected:  AbeBooks, Ameriprise Financial, Barclays Bank of Delaware, Best Buy, Brookstone, Capital One, Citi, The College Board, Disney Destinations, Hilton Hotels, Home Shopping Network, JPMorgan Chase, Kroger, LL Bean, Marriott Rewards, McKinsey & Company, New York & Company, Ritz-Carlton Rewards, Target, TiVo, US Bank, Verizon, or Walgreens. 

If you live in the Kansas City metro area, you’d have to have been hiding under a rock to have missed Google’s announcement last Wednesday.  Google has selected Kansas City, Kansas (KCK) as the location to build a gigabit-fiber-to-the-subscriber network.  This is of course a huge boost to KCK, but what does it do for the rest of the Kansas City metro area? 

In the world of unsolicited commercial email (a.k.a. spam), the perpetrators who send these messages often count on you being polite, or at least they count on your mail server being polite.  Back in 1982 when the whole idea of email was first taking form, the Internet Engineering Task Force set some standards.  One of the requirements for a properly-functioning mail server was this:  if you receive a message to an invalid address, you should politely return the message telling the sender that you could not deliver it.

Those of you who follow my blog know that we established a partnership with Trend Micro a couple of months ago and began recommending their Worry-Free Business Security (WFBS) product to our small and medium business customers.  Our staff has completed the basic training on the new product, and we’ve now implemented it at three different sites.  When I announced our partnership, I promised an update to let you know how it was going. 

As a business owner in the technology world, I’ve always enjoyed taking on big projects for customers.  There’s nothing like developing a plan, assembling the resources to execute it, and seeing it all come together in the end.  Usually our client is very happy with the solution we build and I can count them as another satisfied customer. 

Unfortunately in this world of technology, much effort is spent maintaining systems that have already been installed.  This is where frustration comes in.