Articles by Jack M. Germain

Jonathan Cran, founder and CEO of Intrigue, a cybersecurity startup based in Austin, Texas, used his company's network security tools to compile a list of Fortune 500 companies still exposed to last month's Microsoft Exchange breach. Potentially, many of those companies may not know their networks are compromised Intrigue's tools discovered the ext...

Startup information security firm Intrigue on Tuesday announced a US$2 million seed round led by LiveOak Venture Partners for a new attack service management platform that helps secure enterprise networks. The Intrigue tools scan all public, exposed attack surfaces inside and outside a company The seed funding will also support the security and dev...

Social commerce -- selling products or services on social media platforms -- is a marketing tactic that can boost retail revenue with relatively little effort without overly adding to the advertising spend This new retail strategy is attracting the attention of marketers. Social shopping grew 35 percent last year, with U.S. sales reaching about $38...

Google is now paying developers more money to work on securing their Linux kernels this year. The gesture may well be the start of the company's bid to enforce a tighter grip on open source Google's action comes on the heels of rising threats to Linux that unfolded in the last year, as hackers pivot to new strategies like writing malware strains in...

If your business does not provide customers with self-service options, you might be encouraging potential customers to go elsewhere According to the 2020 NICE inContact Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Benchmark, Consumer Wave, eight in 10 consumers are more willing to do business with companies that offer self-service options. Yet only 61 p...

Over the course of the past year, adjusting to the challenges of the pandemic on business has made the customer relationship management system an essential tool for maintaining and growing a customer base. As a result, CRM platforms have evolved into something more than just a digital Rolodex to manage customer contacts A key aspect of succeeding i...

One of the most successful direct-to-consumer shopping outlets for China-based vendors outside of China's own Alibaba e-commerce platform is Amazon. This trend has been accelerating for years China-based sellers represented 75 percent of new sellers on Amazon in January, according to a report by Marketplace Pulse. This marks a significant increase ...

MakuluLinux is an unusually creative operating system that developer Jacque Montague Raymer is constantly changing with each major upgrade. Some of these changes are radical and innovative This distro has long been one of my favorite Linux offerings. Many of its features do not merely mimic those in other Linux distributions; they combine and impro...

Cloud cybersecurity -- or a lack of it -- is feeding a frenzy of companies out of the public cloud. A similar concern about managing compliance obligations is keeping organizations from moving to the cloud in general However, much of the growing concerns over cloud cybersecurity result from experiences with public and private cloud platforms. A tre...

Sourcegraph on Wednesday launched Batch Changes, an automated internal coding tool that allows enterprises to automate and track large-scale code changes across all repositories and code hosts. For software developers, this is game-changing This new tool also provides developers and enterprises with an easy way to manage the resulting change sets t...

Consumer shopping patterns continue to settle into new options after holiday digital and e-gift card sales soared at the close of last year A Blackhawk Network BrandedPay Post-Holiday Report on consumer spending showed a more than 80 percent increase in digital gift card sales. That research also showed a nearly 40 percent increase in overall e-com...

Personalization and automation, two of the hottest buzzwords in the lexicon of CRM practitioners, are all the rage for marketers these days. But only 14 percent of organizations are using artificial intelligence and/or machine learning to automate their marketing campaigns A global survey Rackspace Technology conducted in January reveals that the m...

The most vulnerable cybercrime victims are young adults and adults over 75, according to the latest research revealed in the LexisNexis Risk Solutions biannual Cybercrime Report Released on Feb. 23, the report tracks global cybercrime activity from July 2020 through December 2020. The report reveals how unprecedented global change in 2020 created n...

Those familiar with open source know that it works and comes with many benefits. A testament to the rising adoption of open source is the recent moves by software giants such as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle into the open-source community This corporate migration to open source is continuing as many organizations, both large and small, turn to open so...

One of the big marketing decisions confronting e-commerce vendors today is whether current performance is good enough. Online vendors need to consider their customers' shopping experience in order to assess existing barriers to stronger shopper responsiveness to digital storefronts According to Adobe, the 2020 year-end holiday shopping season saw a...

Trisquel Linux is one of those computing staples you wished you knew about much sooner. This Linux distribution has been around literally for years and is extremely polished Trisquel GNU/Linux is based on Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS (Bionic Beaver) but comes with the Linux-Libre kernel using Ubuntu's 4.15 kernel. That should not matter to newcomers or seaso...

A Shopper Experience Index report by Bazaarvoice, a provider of product reviews and user-generated content (UGC) solutions, shows shopping trends are expanding as the pandemic's impact on e-commerce continues, forcing retailers to adapt their marketing strategies to meet new consumer expectations and demands Consumer adoption of digital shopping is...

As consumers get comfortable with their newfound digital wallets and gift cards, marketers must continue to adapt their strategies to changes in shopping behavior to better finesse the customer experience Both consumers and vendors have had non-stop adjustments. Lockdowns and social distancing requirements accelerated the adoption of new technologi...

In a recent Linux Foundation blog post titled "Preventing Supply Chain Attacks like SolarWinds," the foundation's Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security, David A. Wheeler, adamantly pushed the need for software developers to embrace the LF's security recommendations to prevent even worse assaults on government and corporate data security in the wake of the rampant data breach.

Looking for a little something nefarious in your online shopping? Perhaps you need to spark some fresh finger traffic to your e-commerce store on Amazon. Neither of those forays is a good choice Trading in phony reviews may or not be legal, but such practices are clearly unethical and will have repercussions if underhanded activities are discovered...