Our views on technology, security, marketing & design
This Sunday is Flag Day — the day, back in 1777, that a new country chose a single symbol to represent who it was. Your business has a flag too, and you fly it every day to everyone deciding whether to do business with you: your website. So here’s an honest question for Flag Day — is the flag you’re flying online one you’re actually proud of, or has it quietly become the tattered banner sending the wrong message about a business that does great work? Here’s what a website worth saluting actually does.
This week Meta announced that the things you do off of Facebook and Instagram — purchases on other websites, games you play, your activity across the internet — will now shape the content in your feed and the answers its AI gives you, not just your ads. Meta says you can opt out. Technically true. But the setting is buried on purpose, and almost nobody will ever find it. Here’s what really changed, how to turn it off, and why ‘you can opt out’ is the most important phrase in digital security to learn to question.
This week, the company behind one of the world’s most widely used business backup products announced a critical flaw and urged customers to patch immediately — a flaw that could let an ordinary user take control of the very server holding a business’s backups. For most owners it reads like distant technical news. It’s the opposite. Your backup is your last line of defense, the thing that saves you when ransomware strikes or disaster hits — and attackers go after it first. Here’s why a backup is never set-it-and-forget-it, and how to know if yours would actually hold.
Charter, the company behind Spectrum, just confirmed a breach exposing the personal information of millions of customers. But the detail every business owner needs to sit with isn’t the size of it — it’s how it started. No malware. No malicious link. No software flaw. The attackers got into one of the largest telecom companies in America by making a phone call to one employee. Here is exactly what happened, why no firewall or antivirus could have stopped it, and the one defense that actually works.
Ask almost any small business owner if they’d fall for a scam and you’ll hear the same confident answer: ‘I’d catch it. I’m careful.’ That belief is the single most dangerous assumption in small business security — because today’s attacks are built specifically for the careful, capable person who is sure they’d never be fooled. We built a short, free quiz to put that belief to an honest test. Here’s why your instincts matter more than you think, and why your team’s matter even more.
A new attack discovered on June 3, 2026 shows how a careful person who does almost everything right can still lose total control of their computer. It hides behind a trusted Google web address to slip past spam filters, shows the victim a fake page built to look like their own company, and — after a single click — quietly disables their security, hides itself, and hands an attacker full remote control of the machine. Here is exactly how the takeover happens, what it means once they are in, and where real protection actually comes from.
On June 1, 2026, attackers slipped malicious code into trusted software components belonging to Red Hat — the software giant headquartered right here in downtown Raleigh. If it can happen to one of the most security-conscious technology companies on the planet, it raises an uncomfortable question for every business owner in the Triangle. You don’t have to understand a line of code to understand the lesson. Here is what a supply chain attack is, why it’s so dangerous, and what actually protects a small business from one.
On June 1, 2026, Google patched 124 Android flaws — and one is already being used in real attacks, with no action required from the victim. The phones it affects are in your employees’ pockets right now, connected to your email, your files, and your accounts. Here is why a personal phone nobody is managing is one of the biggest unwatched risks in a modern small business, and what to actually do about it.