Let’s face it, meetings can be boring sometimes, but you’re supposed to be paying attention, right? Here are some useful tips to help you stay sharp when the meeting seems to be droning on forever.

Leave Your Smartphone Behind

The first thing you’re apt to do when you start drifting and getting fidgety is to reach for your trusty smartphone.

The signs are everywhere, and they are disturbing. Now more than ever before in history, everything you do is being watched, recorded and stored for later. It seems that not a week goes by that some new affront is revealed. The attacks on privacy are constant and unrelenting, and worse, they are being carried out by an agency that has virtually unlimited resources.

You’ve probably heard the term before. Such and so company got hit with a Denial of Service (DOS) attack, but do you know what that actually means? If not, this will give you a quick overview.

First, The Bad News

There’s no defense against a Denial of Service attack.

Sooner or later it will happen to you, no matter how careful you try to be. You, or someone using your computer, will wind up deleting that uber-important file you’ve just got to have. The good news is, there’s at least a chance to get your badly needed data back.

If you hear the phrase ‘Two-Step Verification’ and roll your eyes, thinking to yourself that someone has just figured out yet another way to waste your time and make it harder than ever to get into your accounts, think again. There are some really good reasons for adopting that approach to account security.

Social media has become such a big, important aspect of our daily digital lives that people are inclined to panic when they get locked out of one of their cherished accounts. Twitter’s policy is to lock your account after too many failed password attempts, and if you’re a business owner, this can mean bad things for the day.

Identity theft is the second fastest growing crime in the nation, behind only smartphone theft. In recent months, we have seen some high profile cases of hacking making the news, most recently at Target, which lost control of literally millions of customer account numbers, precipitating a full on panic in the world of online retail.

If you need to bulk up your staff during the summer months and are looking for outstanding summer hires, then you’ve got to go where the people who have your desired expertise will be hanging out in significant number. The talent you want isn’t likely to magically show up at a jobs fair, you’ve actually got to go looking for them, and if you’re in any kind of tech oriented business, then finding them can sometimes prove to be a challenge.

With all the news from the NSA in recent months, and all the reports of that agency spying on pretty much everyone, friend and foe alike, concern for privacy has become more pronounced than ever. It’s always been important, of course, it’s just that these days, there’s a very real, tangible reason to take it seriously because they really are spying on you.

Study after study has shown that people who outsource their IT functions offshore don’t generally wind up saving either money or time. There is a huge expense involved in making such a move to begin with. Of course, there is more time and expense involved in marrying two very different business cultures, language barriers to overcome, plus the headache and hassle of having to juggle schedules.