Author: Charles Miller (Charles Miller)

This column was originally published on May 11, 2007, and only slightly updated it explains the worldwide outage of Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram that occurred on October 4, 2021.

One of my clients emailed me complaining that her internet was not working. She was probably discomfited to learn that the problem was that she had simply mistyped the name of The New York Times website. In doing so, she stumbled upon a case of cybersquatting I had not previously known about.

A new version of Microsoft’s Windows Operating System is now on the horizon, and when Windows 11 arrives later this year, it will bring with it an acronym that everyone who wants to use the new OS will need to know.

For the most part, all my clients who suffered a data loss and did not have a backup plan ended up losing everything.

The obvious question is, “What is the best backup?” The answer is that there is not one right solution for everyone. The question asked by any knowledgeable information technology person is, “What is your threshold of pain?”

There was encouraging news last month when Ukrainian law enforcement, in cooperation with South Korean and U.S. investigators, had arrested six suspects allegedly tied to the notorious Cl0p ransomware group.

The big story making news over the last week has to be the colossal ransomware attacks that have affected hundreds of U.S. companies. In a blog post, the Russian-based REvil cybercrime gang all but admitted responsibility—and did so with impunity.

Last month the information technology world lost one of its more well-known names. John McAfee was a British-American computer programmer, businessman, and, in the 1980s, was the creator of the first commercial antivirus software.

From time to time people ask me what is the meaning of the flashing lights on their modems. The meaning of a modem’s LEDs varies from one model to another, but for one of my clients the problem was that the flashing lights on the modem in her bedroom were keeping her awake at night....

When confronted with the fact that her iPhone had a software bug, and there was nothing to do but wait to see if there would eventually be an update to fix it