MSPNetworks Blog

Google Search is a cornerstone of the internet, used by billions of people daily to find information quickly and efficiently. But have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes when you type a query into Google and hit "search"? Let's dive into the intricate process that powers the world's most popular search engine.

The past several years have brought about dramatic increases in internet speeds, further fueling online activity and allowing businesses to innovate in all kinds of ways. Here are five of the best benefits that these increased Internet speeds have brought about for small and medium-sized businesses.

Augmented reality is one of the more intriguing technologies that have come along in recent years, and businesses have begun to use it in pretty interesting ways. In today’s blog, we thought we’d go through three of the most popular and effective use cases of AR and the effect it can have on your business. 

The Internet is pretty great. You can watch videos of cats being weird, and then watch the London Philharmonic Orchestra perform Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Then you can go on Reddit and learn how to replace the drywall in your bathroom. Just another typical Sunday afternoon with the Internet, right? 

Unfortunately, the Internet isn’t always perfect. It can be pretty dangerous, and we’d like to share some surprising terms that can lead to dangerous websites and malware if you search for them on Google.

Quick disclaimer: None of these topics are necessarily dangerous on their own, and there is bound to be a lot of great, wholesome and family-friendly content about each of these terms out there on the Internet. That being said, we’re going to explore how these terms ended up being so dangerous to show you why you, your family, and your coworkers should be careful online.

Threats Lurk Beyond Innocent Family-Friendly Topics

A lot of the things that kids really enjoy are often targeted. Cybercriminals know that a child might not be as well-versed in cybersecurity as an adult, so if they can spread malware to kids doing innocent searches for shows and movies, they will.

According to Home Security Heroes, an organization dedicated to helping families stay safe online, over half of the search results for terms like “The Boss Baby,” “Sonic the Hedgehog,” and “Pokémon” could lead to malware or other online threats.

Video game-related search terms like “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” carries a pretty strong risk of malware as well, with 46 percent of the results containing malware-infected domains. This is a cute game where players move onto an island and make friends with talking dogs, frogs, and other adorable animals and give each other gifts. The content of the game itself is extremely kid-friendly, but websites offering guides or illegal downloads of the game could be dangerous.

The Most Dangerous Celebrities to Search For

Several years ago, long before the pandemic, Emma Watson was one of the most dangerous celebrities to Google search, with a shocking number of websites having links to malware or other potential threats. 

Today, the prom king and queen of dangerous search results go to the fabulous Chris Hemsworth and Anne Hathaway—so the mighty Thor and 2012’s Catwoman for the comic book nerds out there. Interestingly enough, Chris Hemsworth and Anne Hathaway were set to star in a movie together back in 2013 called Robopocalypse, but it doesn’t seem to have come to fruition.

To no fault of their own, these two celebrities suffer from a similar affliction to the family-friendly movies above, but an estimated 75 percent of the search results for their names potentially contain harmful content or malware.

Other actors and actresses like Kaley Cuoco, Olivia Rodrigo, Neil Patrick Harris, Chris Pine, Chris Evans, Chris Pratt, and Zendaya also have a ton of risky search results.

But We Can’t Ignore the Queen

She’s always having her best year ever, and is loved and adored by fans of all ages. Yes, we’re talking about the infamous Taylor Swift. Tay-tay, or T-Swizzle, or Queen America herself might be one of the greatest musical icons of our time, but a whopping 79 percent of her search results are potentially dangerous.

That doesn’t mean you can’t search for her and find safe content, but it does mean that there are thousands of websites out there that are trying to trick users into reading up on the brightest star in the music industry, only to infect your computer with malware or steal your personal information.

If you are a little more old school, the Backstreet Boys are right behind her with 76% of their results being sketchy and potentially dangerous.

The Huntsman Spider

What’s bigger than your hand, has eight legs, and eats mice?

You don’t really want to know, but it’s the huntsman spider.

We’re not sure what percentage of websites about this horrific monstrosity have malware; in fact, Googling it is probably a lot safer for your computer than searching for Chris Pratt. Still, these spiders are huge and anyone without ironclad constitutions should probably avoid giving themselves nightmares and not go down that rabbit hole.

All Joking Aside, the Internet Can Be a Dangerous Place

There is a lot of great information and opportunities on the Internet, but there are plenty of people trying to take advantage of everyone else as well. In order to protect yourself, you need to have the proper security measures in place, including antivirus and anti-malware. Your organization needs to be monitoring your endpoints and security, and equip your network with firewalls and security policies that keep your employees and customers safe.

If you want help securing your business, give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

Effective communication often operates behind the scenes, yet it serves as a vital cog in the smooth operational ability of business, lending support to a multitude of functions. Consequently, making judicious investments in the right tools can markedly elevate your business. In the contemporary landscape, one such indispensable tool is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Let's delve into VoIP and explore why it has emerged as the preeminent choice for businesses seeking a robust and feature-rich communication platform. VoIP, in a nutshell, delivers more value for less.

VoIP is a telecommunication method that harnesses your internet connection, removing the necessity for a dedicated phone line to cater to your business' communication needs. This not only reduces ongoing telephone service expenses but also confers access to a host of supplementary features, some of which would typically come at an additional cost or might not be available at all. By leveraging the power of the internet, VoIP offers a broader spectrum of capabilities compared to conventional phone services.

Naturally, VoIP emerges as the optimal solution for modern businesses. Furthermore, it's adaptable for mobile use, with user-friendly mobile applications at your disposal.

If you believe that VoIP could be a valuable asset for your business, don't hesitate to reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Since its domain was first registered on September 15, 1997, Google has exploded from a relatively simple search engine to the massive assortment of platforms and services that fall under the Alphabet umbrella. That being said, most people tend to think of very specific aspects of Google’s Search function… like the amusing Easter Eggs that the platform has become somewhat famous for.

Let’s explore some of the many, many jokes and entertaining features that Google has added to Search over the years. Who knows, you might find out about a new favorite.

Full Disclaimer: Google Has WAY Too Many Easter Eggs to Cover Here Comprehensively

Honestly, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. With these Easter eggs first being secreted into Google’s assorted offerings back in 2000, the sheer volume of these hidden features has grown to be truly significant. Plus, some of them are no longer active, being tied to a specific day or event—for example, the search for “2/22/22” made the phrase “Happy Twosday 2You!” appear on that day, but no longer. 

Others have been rendered inoperable with Google’s shift to an infinite scroll format, rather than pages, as the “Goooo…gle” indicator housed many of these Easter eggs as well.

Many, many of them, however, are still active, with more being added all the time… just do a quick search for “Barbie” for a practical example of how up-to-date these Easter eggs are kept. So, let’s explore some that are (as of this writing) still active.

A Tiny Sample of Google’s Easter Eggs

• Searching for “dvd screensaver” will cause the Google logo in the top left corner to begin bouncing around the screen, changing colors as it goes, similarly to—you guessed it—the screensaver that DVD players would display after remaining idle for too long.
• Searching for “text adventure” and then using the Ctrl+Shift+J shortcut to open the developers console will give you access to a Google-themed text-based adventure game, where you set out in search of the letters in the word “Google.” As a bonus Easter egg within an Easter egg, responding “no” to the introductory prompt “would you like to play a game” produces a reference to the 1983 movie WarGames.
• Searching for “puppy/puppies/dog/canine” or “kitten/cat” will produce a button that, when clicked, will cause a paw belonging to the corresponding animal to swipe up and leave a paw print behind.
• Searching for “define anagram” asks you if you meant to search for “nerd fame again,” which itself is an anagram of “define anagram.”
• Searching for “pi” will produce the Google calculator with the pi symbol prominent. Clicking it will start a memory game that takes the player through the digits of pi.
• Searching for “meteor shower” will darken the screen momentarily as three meteors pass by, shifting back to the way it was once they have passed.
• Searching for “netwon/Isaac Newton” will produce a button with an apple tree on it, which causes an apple to fall down the screen when clicked, just as the legend goes about how the physicist conceptualized the theory of gravity.
• Searching for “han/greedo shot first” will show the alternate result, posed as a “Did you mean” at the top of the screen. 
• Searching for “the one ring” will ask if you meant “my precioussss,” in a nod to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings.
• Searching for “world’s best boss” will ask “Did you mean Michael Scott” as a reference to Steve Carell’s character from The Office.
• Searching for “breathing exercise” will pull up a functional breathing exercise that you can follow along with.
• Searching for “pac-man/google pacman/play pacman” will pull up a functioning game of Pac-Man with a board designed around the Google logo. 
• Searching for “the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything" brings up the Google Calculator, presenting the answer “42.” This is a reference to the Douglas Adams novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and has been around since the first Easter eggs were developed—even predating the calculator feature it now appears in. 

When We Said This Was a Tiny Sample, We Meant It

There are dozens more Easter eggs to have fun with, and we encourage you to seek them out and see what the developers at Google do in between major projects to keep themselves sharp. If you find a fun one, be sure to let us know when you call us to learn more about our managed services!

There is no denying that Quick Response codes—better known as QR codes—are a handy little invention. Just a few years ago, many businesses heavily adopted these contactless communication tools, allowing customers with a smartphone to access menus, documents, and more with ease. Having said that, we unfortunately can’t deny that cybercriminals are taking advantage of how handy QR codes are, too.

Let’s talk about the rise in QR code fraud, as well as how you and your team can avoid it.

How Do QR Codes, and QR Code Fraud, Work?

First developed in 1994, a QR code is a two-dimensional version of a barcode, meant to adjust for the limitations of its predecessor. A traditional barcode is limited to 20 alphanumeric characters due to it only being able to be scanned horizontally. The QR code was then developed to hold exponentially more information in its combination of vertical and horizontal data as well as allow this data to be accessed at any angle.

While this makes the QR code a very appealing option for businesses, it also gives cybercriminals a relatively easy means of sharing malicious links and malware that has become largely trusted by people everywhere.

After all, if major brands are now displaying QR codes in their advertisements, they must be safe, right?

Unfortunately not. The utility offered by a QR code also applies to cybercriminals and scammers, who can use them to augment their attacks in numerous ways.

QR Codes Make Effective Phishing Tools

Phishing is one of the most unpleasant cyberthreats out there today, largely because it requires a user to be engaged and aware about their own cybersecurity at all times. It relies heavily on the target to not see it coming.

Now let me ask you this: would you hesitate to scan a QR code on a poster or a menu if prompted? If you’re like most people…probably not. It just isn’t how most people see a threat coming in.

This makes us vulnerable. This is why many of these threats have been spotted that pose as parking tickets, or as offers or loyalty programs attached to storefront doors.

Making this bad situation even worse, these attacks often don’t go into effect immediately. Instead, malware can be uploaded to the device that scans the malicious code where it will lie in wait until the opportune moment to strike arises. Many of these attacks will simply take notice if you use your device to access an account and record the credentials you use to access it, giving the attacker the keys to the castle.

Alternatively, some QR phishing tools will send users to a phishing website—one that poses as a legitimate one to fool the victim into handing their credentials over willingly. Some scams cover what were once legitimate codes with their own, diverting payments to their own accounts.

This Makes It Critical that You Protect Yourself

Whether you’re talking about your business or your personal life, QR code scams need to be avoided. Fortunately, there are a few somewhat familiar steps that you can follow to help ensure that you do so:

• Just like with other forms of phishing, any suspicious QR codes should prompt you to separately reach out to the party that supposedly shared it to confirm its legitimacy.
• Similarly, don’t hesitate to manually seek out what a QR code seems to offer.
• Using the security tools at your disposal, like antivirus or scam alert applications, to mitigate the risks associated with these scams helps protect you from falling victim to these attacks.

MSPNetworks is here to help protect your business from all types of threats, like this one and others. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more about what we can do for you.

The Internet is used for a great many things in business nowadays, but some may not realize just how much Internet speeds have changed over time. This week, we thought we would take a brief look at the evolution of Internet speeds and what today’s speeds allow businesses to do. 

Before we get started it’s important to understand how internet speeds are measured. The speeds are measured in megabits. 1,000 kilobits (technically 1,024 KB) is equivalent to 1 megabit and 1,000 megabits (technically 1,024 MB) is equivalent to 1 gigabit. 

Dial Up

It has only been about 25 years since Internet connections have become commonplace in the office and the home. When the Internet was first introduced to the mass market, the main way people would access the web was through their phones. If you were on the Internet in the 1990s, people would often have one telephone line for both home and their computer. As the now antiquated model of telephone long distance was in place, many people would have to pay huge phone bills because their Internet service provider was accessed through a long distance call (even if that call was to the next village over or in the same city). 

The typical modem around the year 2000 was 56 KB/s which means that when the modem is working optimally with an uninterrupted signal, a one megabyte file could be downloaded in about 20 seconds. Obviously, those speeds wouldn’t work in today’s mobile world where people are getting over 10 GB/s in some places. This connection made instant messaging possible, but any media—including all the media we take for granted today—would take days and weeks to transmit over a dial-up connection.

DSL

Around the turn of the century “high-speed” Internet became popular. Using cable connections, ISPs were able to transmit data much more effectively. This is because the bandwidth of a cable wire has substantially more data transmission capabilities than a telephone wire. Called a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connection, this is, to this day, the lion’s share of the connections that you will find available. A DSL connection delivers internet at speeds up to around 100 MB/s but it’s more known to sit in the 5 MB-to-20 MB range. 

In this range, users can do a lot of more complex tasks. Today’s cloud-hosted email services require these speeds as do music streaming services and solid website browsing. The widespread use of DSL around 2010 began to spur on application development that is a major part of today’s computing ecosystems. While video streaming is relatively new—and resource intensive—standard definition video (think early YouTube) is capable through a DSL connection.

Fiber Optic

Many of today’s high speed connections are run through fiber optic cables. Fiber optics uses light to transmit data, making it much faster than DSL connections. Most DSL cable systems would lose speed and performance the longer a signal would have to travel through wires. With fiber optics, however, Internet speeds and bandwidth grow exponentially. Today, there are fiber connections that are capable of tens of gigabits per second. 

With mobile computing growing in popularity every year, and more and more people relying on Wi-Fi signals to keep from going over mobile data caps, people now rely on these faster internet speeds. Fiber has created an environment of innovation that is driving the on demand computing resources that businesses and individuals rely on. This has made mobile computing more possible and has fueled the work-from-home revolution, online schooling, real-time data collection, telehealth, and communication and collaboration tools including video conferencing. 

If you want to quickly determine what your current internet speed is, you can use any number of speed test applications that are available. A good standard is https://www.speedtest.net/. These will give you an idea of what your current internet speed for downloads and uploads are. If you need help ascertaining what type of speeds you need for your business, you should contact the IT professionals at MSPNetworks today at (516) 403-9001. 

There are further innovations in the works that will push Internet speeds faster and faster, with less latency. This type of technology can completely revolutionize the way we view the world. In this new digital landscape, expect to see more and more work to be done on this front in the near future.

We often talk about scams and cyberthreats, and lately our advice for dealing with a potential phishing threat is to simply avoid it altogether.

That is, when you get any kind of email or text message with a link you weren’t expecting, whether it’s from someone you know or from your bank, just don’t click it. Instead, log into the account in question the way you normally would, and verify the information there, or confirm with the sender through some other means to make sure what they are sending is valid. While this is still a good practice, sometimes you need to click on a link. Here are a few tools you can use to check if a link is safe, before you click.

Why Would a Link Be Dangerous?

First of all, why wouldn’t you want to trust a link that someone you trust sends you?

There are a lot of reasons. Even if it looks like a video message from your dear sweet Nana, or a virtual Christmas card from your youngest niece, there is a chance that the sender has been compromised and is trying to spoof their contacts. 

You want to know when it’s probably not a scam or a threat? When your dear sweet Nana or your niece calls you up on the phone and asks you to look at it.

That simple two-step confirmation makes all the difference in the world. Otherwise, you should consider the risks that maybe, just maybe, the sender was compromised and that the link you are being sent is malicious.

The same goes for the business end of things. 

Your coworker, business partner, vendor, or client might have no reason to do anything malevolent to you. If they fall for a trick themselves, though, a part of that trick might include spreading to all of their contacts.

A malicious link could contain malware that infects your computer, tries to steal your data or access your online accounts, and also spreads itself as quickly as possible to anyone in your contacts list. Not only will you be the victim, but your friends, family, and colleagues will be YOUR victim, and so-forth.

How to Safely Identify and Copy a Link

Before we get into the tools, let’s quickly run through what we mean by a link.

Basically, any text or graphic that is clickable and takes you to another page in your browser is a link. Sometimes, that link will be written out, with the https:// and the full URL. 

For example, if it is a link to PayPal, it might look something like this: https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/PAYPAL_HELP_GUIDE/getting-started-with-paypal-icf29 

Links could also just be text that is clickable. So instead of writing out the URL, the link might be something like this: Get Started with PayPal

Now here’s the thing. If you’ve been paying attention, we’ve already proven to you just how easy it is to trick a user into thinking they are going to one website, and taking them somewhere totally different. Both of the links above don’t actually go to PayPal. We assure you that they are safe, but they are taking you to goofy fake mustache glasses on Amazon.

Sometimes, links are graphics, like buttons, icons, pictures, or virtually anything else. If you can click or tap it and have it take you somewhere, it’s a link, and any links can be spoofed very easily.

If you want to tell where a link is going to take you, you need to copy the actual link:

 On a Desktop or Laptop:
-Hover the mouse over the link.
-Right-click on the link.
-Select “Copy Link” or “Copy Link Address” or “Copy Hyperlink”

Now you have the link copied, and you can paste it into one of the following tools with CTRL+V (or right-click and select Paste)

On a Tablet or Smartphone:
-Be careful not to accidentally just tap the link to open it!
-Hold your finger over the link for a few seconds to pop up the context menu.
-Select “Copy Link” or “Copy link address” or “Copy Hyperlink”

Now that you have the link copied, you can paste it into one of the following tools by holding your finger down over the URL field within the tool and selecting Paste.

Safely Check a Link Before You Click it with These Tools

You can use the following tools to check the safety and legitimacy of a link. Keep in mind, this won’t protect you from one hundred percent of all scams, as these tools can only check for known threats. It’s also a good idea to use multiple tools to cross reference, in case some of the tools just haven’t been made aware of the link you received.

Use Norton Safe Web to Check a Link
Norton Safe Web is a free online tool that lets you paste a link to check to see if it’s safe.

It will give you a quick rating on the link. If the link is untested in Norton, it’s a good idea to try a few of the other tools. If Norton states the link is dangerous, it’s a pretty safe bet you should avoid it.

https://safeweb.norton.com/

Check the Link With PhishTank
The cleverly named PhishTank site will tell you if a link you received has been reported as a phishing scam. Phishing links tend to look pretty similar to legitimate web pages. For instance, a phishing link for PayPal might look almost exactly like the regular login page for PayPal. The problem is that it won’t log you into PayPal, but it will send your PayPal credentials to someone else.

https://www.phishtank.com/

Google’s Transparency Report Might Tell You If a Link is Unsafe
Google’s search engine works by crawling the Internet and indexing everything it finds. Sometimes, it might run across dangerous content such as malware or phishing risks. Google’s Transparency Report tool will tell you if a link you’ve been sent is found in their massive database of unsafe content.

https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search

Scan the Link with VirusTotal
Finally, there’s VirusTotal. This tool takes a little longer to give you an answer, but it can be a little more thorough than the others. This is a good last-ditch effort if you aren’t happy with the results from the other tools. 

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/url

It’s important to keep in mind that a phishing scam or malware attack could still sneak through these tools, especially if the URL was just generated and you are among the first people to get it. These tools are designed to spot known phishing attacks and malware that has already been reported. With that in mind, it’s still a good idea to err on the side of caution.

If you feel like you’ve received a suspicious email, text message, or other correspondence, and you would like us to take a look for you, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Even if you lived under a rock, you’ve probably done a Google search or two. There are, in fact, other search engines, each with their own pros and cons. We’re going to compare some of the most popular search engines and talk about what makes them different.

Google is By Far the Most Popular Search Engine on the Planet

At the time of writing this, it’s calculated that every single second, a search is performed on Google 99,000 times. That adds up to 8.5 billion searches every day. It’s predicted that more than 92 percent of all internet searches are done on Google, but it’s possible that number is even higher.

Either way, people all over the world are more likely to say “I’ll just Google it” instead of “I’ll just search the web.”

You don’t hear anybody say “We’ll let me just Bing that,” and use Google’s closest search engine competitor, which handles about 3.5 percent of all searches, worldwide.

So what makes Google so special?

Accuracy.

Google is extremely good at giving you accurate results based on what you are looking for.

Google uses hundreds of different signals to determine what should and shouldn’t come up when you search for something, and it does it all within half a second or so, while sifting through over 30 trillion web pages to give you the best results possible.

Is it perfect? Of course not.

Can Google be tricked? Eh, sometimes. People are always trying to get their websites to rank for certain terms. This process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is a legitimate process for businesses trying to compete against their competitors on the search engines, but it can lead to bad, misleading, or undesirable results showing up on the search results page. That being said, Google is good about making it very difficult to manipulate your ranking without actually putting in a lot of hard work, so it’s less likely that inaccurate results will show up compared to the other search engines.

Still, Google tends to get you to the best result, and it gets you there the fastest.

Google Searches are Custom-Tailored to You
Here’s the other really cool thing about Google. Everyone’s search experience is a little bit unique to them. Google takes a lot of context into consideration, including your location, your past search history, the device you are on, and other information that Google knows about you, and provides curated results.

This means when you are traveling, as long as the device you are using knows its location and is letting Google know this info, you can search for a pizza place and get localized results. Google takes a ton of data points into consideration for every single query.

This isn’t always a good thing though.

Studies have been done in the past that show that Google’s search engine can sometimes contribute to a filter bubble. While this is much more common on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the same can apply in some ways to Google searches.

Think of it like this. If you surround yourself with people who, for instance, truly believe that the moon is made out of cheese, you might start to see more and more information about the cheese moon than you did before. Your newfound cheese-moon friends will share news articles about how the moon is cheese. They will share memes and come up with silly nicknames for cheese-moon non-believers (like Non-Brie-lievers). They will get into fights on social media about whether the moon is more like Mozzarella or more like Gorgonzola. They will claim that all the non-brie-lievers are trying to shutter and bury any facts about how the moon is made out of cheese by sharing peer-reviewed articles from “fringe” agencies like NASA.

The point is, this creates sort of a bubble effect based on the way content algorithms work. If a platform like Facebook or Google knows that you’ll spend more time using them by keeping you happy with all the cheese-moon-affirmational content your heart desires, it’s going to be a little less accurate. If you spend a considerable amount of time seeking out results based on any particular filter bubble you are in, platforms like Google will likely curate some results that keep you trapped inside that filter bubble.

The trouble is that you won’t mind, your opinion about the cheese moon isn’t going to change, and everything you use online is helping you affirm this.

So yeah. Google is neat, and generally accurate, but it has been proven that sometimes it can go a little too far for some people. Over the last few years, Google has taken major steps to find a balance, which is actually the main reason Google doesn’t have the 98 percent market share it used to. Many folks have walked away from Google simply because it started to cater less to their fringe beliefs when it comes to hot button issues.

What are the Alternatives?

Now that the Big G is out of the way, in our next blog, we’re going to go over some of the alternatives. Be sure to stay tuned to our blog and social media.

Last time, we started our discussion on the best search engines by talking about the behemoth, Google. While Google is, by far, the most popular and commonly used, and arguably the most accurate search engine, it doesn’t mean it’s always the right search engine to use. Let’s talk about some other alternatives and see where they might fit in.

Microsoft Bing - Kind of the Same, but Different

Bing gets the silver medal for being the world’s second most popular general search engine. Even so, it only gets about 3.5 percent of the world’s internet searches. 

Bing is also the most similar to Google, at least as far as how it works under the hood. It’s focus is on providing accuracy and uses anonymous information from you and your search history to curate the results.

Whereas Google takes a very minimalistic approach to search, Bing usually has a visual treat for its users everyday. Each day, Bing decorates the background of its search page with a photograph with a little snippet of information about the photo. It might be some event happening somewhere in the world, a rare animal from a rainforest, a historical photo, a beautiful skyline, or literally anything else. No, it’s probably not what you were looking for, but it is kind of neat.

But on top of that, Bing also throws curated headlines, local weather, and sponsored posts right at you too. You’ll either love it, hate it, or have no feelings about it. Either way, the first impression you’ll have with Bing is that it’s busier, even before you do a search.

Something we didn’t mention last time when talking about Google—Google uses a mobile-first approach. That means sites that load well on mobile devices tend to get prioritized on Google. If your website is old and doesn’t scale properly for smartphones and tablets, you’ve probably noticed a drop in traffic over the last several years—this is why.

Bing doesn’t really care about this, but it also indexes a much smaller number of pages than Google, so the results are going to be pretty different. If you are looking for images or videos, Bing also has more options for filtering and displaying information, so it slightly outperforms Google there.

The user experience with Bing isn’t horrible, it’s just different. If you are used to using Google everyday, the transition to Bing will just feel a little strange, but it’s a decent alternative, and making the switch for a week or two is a fun experiment. We’d love to hear what you settle on.

Duck Duck Go - The Private Search Engine

Most popular search engines collect user data to curate search results. For instance, Google uses it to improve the results it gives you. Google also uses that data to help advertisers make informed decisions.

First and foremost, this data collection probably isn’t going to hurt you. It’s definitely a little weird to think about, but in the long run, it’s not necessarily tied to you as a human being. Let’s put it this way:

Let’s say, in the course of a week, three thousand people do a search for “soda,” two thousand people do a search for “pop” and a thousand people do a search for “coke.” Of those six thousand people, you are somewhere in there, looking for a soft drink. Google gathers this level of data to tell advertisers what words people use to look for certain types of products. Those advertisers can then make the decision on how they word their ads and what terms they pay money for. The data is, more or less, anonymous. Not every single company works this way (Facebook and Zoom have had data privacy scandals involving personally identifiable information), but that’s generally the gist of how this information gets used.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, however, and some people have just decided to take more steps to be as anonymous as possible online, and Duck Duck Go is a good search engine for those who don’t want Google to know what they are looking for.

Duck Duck Go will give you totally different results from Google and Bing, but it doesn’t use any information about you, anonymous or otherwise. It also does little to warn you when something is fraudulent. Don’t get us wrong, you can run into scams, malware, and other threats from Google results, but Duck Duck Go has fewer layers of protection. 

It also means the results aren’t going to be as localized. Looking for a nearby restaurant will only base your location on the location of your Internet Service Provider, so it might not be as accurate.

All that said, Duck Duck Go is a relatively safe option, and if you are uncomfortable with Google knowing what you search for and using that to curate your results, it’s a pretty solid solution.

An alternative to Duck Duck Go that follows a similar privacy philosophy is Qwant, a French search engine that doesn’t collect user data.

Which Search Engine Is Right For You?

It’s pretty unlikely that another search engine is going to topple the big G, but if you are more concerned about your online privacy, Duck Duck Go or Qwant are pretty good solutions. As with anything, you should always be mindful of what information you are giving up, and be careful what you click on. Even if the search engines themselves are safe, the websites they point to might not always be secure.

For small businesses, having a fast, reliable Internet connection is needed to run all the digital tools that your staff has come to depend on. If you don’t have the bandwidth in place, you can deal with bottlenecks that can ruin communications, stall productivity, and cause operational issues of all types. Today, we’ll take a look at how to determine the amount of bandwidth you need to support your business’ computing infrastructure.

What Exactly Is Bandwidth?

There is a misconception that bandwidth is the speed of the Internet that you obtain through your chosen service provider. It does play a role, but it is not synonymous with connection speed. Bandwidth is actually the measurement of the amount of data that can be sent over your Internet connection and across your network in general in a designated time frame; typically measured in megabits per second (Mbps). The more bandwidth you have, the more data can be transmitted at one time. With a lot of businesses now leaning quite heavily on digital tools, knowing how much bandwidth your company needs is extremely important.

What You Need to Know to Get the Bandwidth Your Company Needs?

The first thing that you need to get the bandwidth your company needs is to find a reliable ISP (Internet Service Provider). Not all ISPs are created equal and for business purposes having an ISP that can easily scale your bandwidth to your needs is an important factor. You also don’t want to overpay, and waste your operational capital.  

Let’s look at the variables you have to consider when choosing the right amount of bandwidth for your business:

The Number of Connected Devices

This is pretty simple. The more devices that need to be connected to the Internet, the more bandwidth you are going to need; especially if these devices are consistently being used to access Internet-fueled applications. You also need to take into account all the mobile devices that are connected to the network. In many cases they will outnumber workstations and other hardware. 

The Type of Applications Used

Your business has a unique profile that is made up of all the tools you use and the processes that govern the use of them. For basic use, such as online browsing, email, and social media, a company would only need about one Mbps per user. Most businesses nowadays use their Internet connection for much more than this. Activities like VoIP calling, video conferencing, video streaming, and cloud computing can multiply this by up to five times. 

This is why it is important to get a good read on all the potential uses your business has to build a connection that works to support your business’ computing requirements. 

At MSPNetworks, we know how important the Internet is for your business. Our consultants can help you estimate the level of bandwidth you need, and can actively help you acquire that bandwidth so that you can operate as efficiently as possible. Give us a call today at (516) 403-9001 to talk to one of our IT professionals to set up an assessment of your Internet connection and applications to give your business the best chance of success.

When you go to a website you have never been to before, there is often a splash page that asks if you would like to accept cookies. It doesn’t mean you are getting a care package, it just means that you accept a formal interaction with the website you’re on. Let’s take a look at browser cookies

What Are Browser Cookies, Anyways?

In a way, a browser cookie is a little bit like a name tag that your computer wears when it communicates with a network. When your computer connects to the network in question (generally speaking, the Internet) a text file is generated. That file is what is known as a cookie, and it helps the browser give you the most customized browsing experience it can.

Basically, by creating these browser/HTTP/Internet cookies, your browser retains data that is tracked during your browsing sessions—tech-talk for the time you spend on a website. The first time you visit a website, the website’s host server shares information with your browser that is saved in the browser as a cookie. The next time you visit that website, your browser shares that data with the website so it can show you information based on your prior sessions.

This is how a website can keep you logged in when your browser is closed out and reopened, or save the items you’ve put in a shopping cart. Cookies are actually what makes the “back” button work in your browser.

However, Some Cookies are Different

It is important that we acknowledge that, so far, we’ve exclusively discussed first-party cookies—those created by websites you visit directly. These cookies are for the most part harmless, provided you’re not visiting unsafe websites.

There are also third-party cookies, which come from other websites than the one you’ve navigated to. Online ads often generate these to help track a user’s online behaviors.

Session cookies are those that help you retain information only during a specific browsing session, and marketing cookies track your activity to customize advertisements to your apparent interests. Have you ever noticed Amazon ads that display items similar to what you’ve recently been looking for? These marketing cookies are the reason that’s possible.

There are also cookies that give webmasters the information and metrics they need to improve their websites, called performance cookies and analytical cookies. These track things like the amount of time a user spends on different parts of the website and which pages are the most popular amongst visitors.

Of Course, Cookies Have a Bad Name for a Reason

It isn’t a secret that there are malicious cookies out there, those that collect more data than you’d like to share and potentially leave it on the table for threats. This is why you should be sparing in the number of cookies you enable on your company devices, and it doesn’t hurt to clear out your cookies every so often.

Removing Cookies in Different Browsers

In Google Chrome:

• Click into the three-dot menu
• Click into Settings
• Click into Privacy and security
• Click Clear browsing data
• Select Advanced
• Determine the time period to delete cookies from, and click Clear data

In Mozilla Firefox

• Click into Options
• Click into Privacy & Security
• Click into Cookies and Site Data
• Select Clear Data

In Microsoft Edge:

• Click into Settings
• Click into Privacy and services
• Find Clear browsing data, and Choose what to clear
• Select your time range and click Clear now

It is important to understand what your technology is capable of, or at least have a resource who does. We can be that resource for you. Call (516) 403-9001 to learn more about our IT support and consulting services.

It feels like streaming is everywhere these days, from video content to music to video games. Coincidentally, it also happens that innovations in cloud streaming have allowed these entertainment mediums to flourish in “as-a-service” type offerings. Just how have the innovations in technology allowed streaming services to grow and expand? Let’s investigate.

What is Streaming?

Remember the good old days when you couldn’t stream video without it being a massive time sink or spending loads of time waiting for the video to buffer? Gone are those days. Streaming is the continuous transmission of video or audio content over the Internet. It’s what powers services like YouTube, Spotify, and other music and video streaming services. Even some games can be streamed over the Internet now. Essentially, the data for these files are stored on a server somewhere, then get sent a little bit at a time to the user.

The Difference Between Downloading and Streaming

It used to be the case that you would have to download the entire file before you could use it on your PC, but streaming offers a better approach. Rather than saving a copy of the file to your hard drive, streaming allows users to simply play them from their web browser through an Internet connection.

All that said, a big difference between downloading and streaming is that, well, it requires an Internet connection. Without a good one, your connection will not be stable, creating problems for whatever you are trying to stream. For example, a video might need to buffer if your Internet connection cannot keep up with the rate of download. In a lot of ways, you can compare it to the way that many companies rely on the cloud for their computing. While it is great to have the content ready and available locally, sometimes accessing it through the Internet is easier and more efficient. However, without that connection, access is cut off.

The Technology

When you stream something from the Internet, the file is split into data packets containing video and audio. These data packets are essentially compressed files that are designed to be sent and unpacked at their destination. Ultimately, how the streaming provider goes about doing this is up to them, and it is largely based on the purpose of the streaming and what value it provides to their customers.

For example, when streaming video content from Netflix, the quality of the video and audio is a pretty big deal. In comparison, a video conference with multiple attendees might prioritize connection with others for real-time interaction over the quality of video and audio.

Two of the more common transfer protocols used by streaming services are user datagram protocol (UDP) and transmission control protocol (TCP). They are typically used for two different types of streaming. TCP provides a dedicated connection between the server and the client to ensure that all of the content is received properly. UDP, on the other hand, cuts some corners, so to speak. The result is that TCP makes for a more reliable connection compared to UDP, but UDP offers a faster and more efficient connection.

In the aforementioned example, you might see how the two can be used for two different purposes. TCP is better when the content delivered needs to be lossless, while UDP is better in situations when some loss is acceptable. In the end, streaming providers go with the option that allows them to provide the best services possible to their clients based on the goods and services they are rendering.

We hope you learned something interesting and new about the technology behind streaming services with today’s blog. What are some topics you would like to see us cover in the future? Be sure to let us know in the comments.

A lot of business is being conducted over the Internet right now, in terms of communication and transactions alike, which makes a business’ capability to remain connected to its clientele even more important. Now is not the time to wonder if your business is as connected as it should be, which means that you need to know how much bandwidth you have available—and that what you do have is sufficient.

Does Your Business Have Enough Bandwidth?

Obviously, if your business is experiencing bottlenecks, the answer to this question is no. Unfortunately, many organizations will simply adjust and adapt to these inefficiencies and “make it work” (to a point, at least). Despite this, you need to be sure that you at least know how much bandwidth your business should have to meet its needs.

In addition to this, it is important to be sure that your Internet service can support your needs. With so many options—including Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), Cable Modem, Fiber, Wireless, Satellite, or Broadband over Powerlines (BPL), and more—you need to know if your capacity is sized to match your consumption, and that you’re getting all you can for your investment.

MSPNetworks can help you figure this out by evaluating your broadband needs and work with your ISP to ensure you’re getting everything they should be delivering.

When it comes to your broadband, here are some important things to keep in mind:

Run a Speed Test

A speed test is a great way to establish your current access to bandwidth and whether it is sufficient for your productivity. An internet consultant will have plenty of testing tools to use, but you should also take a moment to visit speedtest.net or another speed testing utility to help inform your conversation with them.

Here are some measurements to examine:

• Ping, or latency, is how you measure the reaction time of your connection. For instance, how quickly a webpage can recognize that another tab has been opened. Issues here could come from your Internet service provider (ISP), an improperly configured firewall, router, or modem, and your overall bandwidth. A ping of about 20ms is good, as a lower ping indicates a better-performing connection.
• Upload and download speed are another important consideration, as the speed of the data that you push out of and pull into your computer will help you evaluate your bandwidth. As downloads are typically more common than uploads in the business setting, it is normal for bandwidth to be more focused on downloads.

How Wi-Fi Will Factor In

Wi-Fi is a significant utility in any office, especially with the mobility that so many offices rely on nowadays—particularly when personal space is as large of a concern as it is now. This makes the prospect of losing connection in the office such an issue.

Unoptimized wireless can seriously hinder business productivity, and these issues are only worsened by insufficient bandwidth. Productivity issues are often the inciting factor behind the use of shadow IT, where these obstacles lead employees to install and utilize unapproved software without your knowledge.

Does Your Business Need More Than You Have?

If its bandwidth is insufficient for its needs, your business simply won’t have the capability to support its services sufficiently for your customers. In this way, your bottom line could be seriously impacted by any holdbacks—especially with so many of your customer-focused services being based online.

Your broadband is what also allows your team to work productively. Today’s popular conferencing solutions require a large amount of bandwidth to work effectively, and while VoIP isn’t all that resource intensive, it does require some reliable bandwidth availability. Without the resources to support your processes, they are guaranteed to become a problem sooner or later.

Lean on Us for Help with Your Connectivity

It isn’t a secret that the Internet plays a mammoth role in modern business, in such a way that a prepackaged, one-size-fits-all strategy just won’t sufficiently fill. With MSPNetworks in your corner, you’ll have a resource to turn to so that you are sure to get the connectivity you need to compete and grow.

For any assistance with your company’s use of technology, give us a call at (516) 403-9001 today.

Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, online privacy has been highlighted significantly in recent years—in no small part due to the sale of our profiles by the tech giants that provide today’s most (in)famous websites… including and especially Google. Having said this, it is also important to acknowledge that some of Google’s recent policy changes could suggest that this may change at some point.

Let’s dive in and see what we can piece together.

How Google Makes Its Money

In fairness, there are a lot of answers to this question. For our purposes, we’ll focus on just one.

The short answer is simple: by selling advertisements.

Make no mistake about it: whenever you use the Internet, you are being watched. Giant platforms, including and especially Google, monitor your activities while using their services and use it to create a knowledge base of user behavior.

For instance, by using a combination of Google Search, Google Analytics, and Google Maps, Google could likely deduce that a user in Anytown, USA looking up “best pizza in anytown” would be interested in the most popular pizzeria. By analyzing which websites, phone numbers, and navigational directions got the most positive reaction after coming up as a search result, Google’s algorithms can figure out that this user would be happy to get the result for “Mario Rossi’s Fine Italian Ristorante and Pizzeria” and continue through the link to the establishment’s website.

This is that website’s goal—for more users to click into it, where they’ll be more encouraged to do whatever that website is trying to get them to do. As it stands, Google’s search results are organized based on an extensive list of factors far too numerous to go into depth with here… basically, it depends on how much Google likes how your website is put together, how other users have behaved after clicking the link to your website, and again, so much more. 

As a result, Google has some leverage here, effectively serving as the gatekeeper for a staggering amount of Internet traffic. This puts them in the position to profit from these other websites.

One way that they do so: selling advertisement space in key positions on their search results pages. Another way: selling ads that are personalized to your web browsing history.

Google’s Recent Announcement, and What it Means

Google’s revelation that they will no longer create or support trackers that can follow an individual’s behavior and activity across the Internet has some significant ramifications regarding privacy and the Internet as a whole.

This is a sizable shock, as it seems to say that Google plans to hamstring one of its profit centers. However, it is important to clarify that this isn’t the entire truth.

Rather than eliminating tracking altogether, Google is simply shifting its approach to doing so. Instead of using cookies to compose in-depth profiles for each user, Google is shifting over to evaluating trends amongst groups of similar users and phasing out the comprehensive data collection that their past efforts were based in.

This “privacy sandbox,” as it is called, will allow users to be anonymously bundled together by browsing behaviors and other interests, with the data these groups generate being sold to advertisers. The idea is that this way, an advertiser can still target their most likely prospects, without that prospect’s information changing hands more than they may anticipate.

Caveats and Conditions

Of course, Google has left themselves a few loopholes in their new strategy. First, if a user signs into a website using their Google account, that information can still be tracked and used to shape advertising. Plus, this change only applies to the websites—mobile apps are still fair game as well.

This new sandboxing approach has already inspired scrutiny from regulatory bodies, with officials in the United Kingdom investigating these tools to catch any anticompetitive features. This comes as Google is also facing numerous antitrust lawsuits stateside, suggesting that this change in tack could be construed as an effort to show how important customer data security is to the corporation.

So Really, What Does This All Mean?

In terms of Google, these tactics seem to telegraph that the company is preparing for a future where data collection is much more controlled than it is now—and that Google is in a place where the downsides of such tracking have overtaken the value that these activities once net them.

In terms of the Internet as a whole, a player as large as Google might inspire other large providers who have not yet addressed how they balance data collection and data privacy. Having said this, Facebook’s current battle against Apple’s privacy-boosting features show that this approach will certainly not be universally accepted, either.

One way or another, this move will likely create some shifts to the Internet as a whole—and should reinforce how you need to be careful about your own organization’s data collection and storage practices.

MSPNetworks can help you out in that regard. To find out how our solutions and services can make your company more secure, efficient, and compliant, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

To preserve your cybersecurity, you need to have a comprehensive view of everything involved with your technology—and we do mean everything. Let’s consider a recent close call, involving the Democratic Republic of Congo that exemplifies this perfectly that could have potentially exposed millions of Internet users to serious threats.

First, it will be helpful to go over how websites work (giving you a hint as to the nature of the close call we’ll be discussing).

How Web Browsing Works

When navigating to a website, you type that website’s URL into your address bar and you’re brought to the website, right? While this is how it appears on the surface, there’s actually a lot more going on underneath.

The domain name we know, as users, to go to a website is different than the actual functioning name that your Internet browser recognizes. Instead, your browser recognizes a series of numbers known as an Internet Protocol (IP) Address. IP addresses are too in-depth of a topic for us to go into much detail here, but to sum up: they tell the browser which web server it needs to direct towards to find the desired website.

Obviously, a series of numbers is more difficult to remember than a name, so this discrepancy would make the Internet much harder to use if it weren’t for nameservers.

Nameservers are the component of the Internet that helps bridge the URL to the IP address. When you type a website into the address bar, the browser references a nameserver to find out where the correct web server is before requesting content from it. In essence, the nameserver helps your browser translate your request into a language it understands—in many ways acting like your browser’s GPS.

In other words, the nameserver is a crucially important part of how the Internet functions, which means that these servers are particularly important to keep secure… particularly if the nameserver in question controls a top-level domain (the “.com”,”.net”,or “.edu” part). If an attacker were to gain control of a top-level nameserver, man-in-the-middle attacks could be used to redirect web traffic to malicious websites.

What Happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Therefore, when security researcher Fredrik Almroth noticed that one of the nameservers for the .cd country code top-level domain (belonging to the Democratic Republic of Congo) was set to expire, he took notice. When these domains expire, as did the nameserver domain scpt-network.com did in October, the governments that own them have a set amount of time to renew it before someone else could claim it.

Almroth was monitoring this domain to ensure that it was renewed, just to be safe. Once the end of December rolled around, the security researcher was quick to snap it up to protect it from ne’er-do-wells who would otherwise abuse it. Because the other nameserver to the domain was still operational, Almroth simply had any requests timeout of his nameserver and be passed to the working one.

What Was at Risk?

In short, quite a bit. With possession of such a nameserver, an attacker could potentially intercept any traffic—encrypted or not—directed to a .cd domain. This could give an attacker a frightening amount of power and control over thousands of websites.

The Congolese government ultimately opted to set up a new domain, ensuring that security was never in question.

What Your Business Can Learn From This

In short, technology can be complicated, which means that threats can potentially come from every angle.

Cybercriminals are irritatingly resourceful and will absolutely resort to cheap tricks to get their way. The size of their target is also irrelevant to them, so whether they’re targeting a government infrastructure or the website a local store keeps up doesn’t particularly concern them. As such, businesses of all shapes and sizes need to have a trusted resource they can rely on to keep their IT in order, especially in terms of its security.

As such a resource to many businesses, MSPNetworks prioritizes keeping an eye on all aspects of our clients’ technology solutions to help avoid issues like these that could otherwise have gone unnoticed. To find out more about what we can do for your operations, give us a call at (516) 403-9001 today.

Whether you are sharing them online, emailing them to a colleague, or putting them on your own website, it’s important to understand a few basics when it comes to image files and sizes. This guide will hopefully save you a lot of hassle when trying to email large images, update your website, and use social media, whether it be for your own personal use or for your business.

Why Does Image Size Matter?

There are a lot of reasons why you may need to reduce the size of an image. First and foremost is file size. If you are sharing images via email, or putting them on your website, you’ll want the image to not take up a lot of space. Most email services limit attachments to 10MB, which these days, isn’t a lot. Some modern email clients, like Gmail for example, give you 25MB, but that’s still small potatoes when it comes to sending and receiving a lot of images.

Your website is even more important. Large files take longer for users to download and view, and can slow down the speed of your website. Plus, if your visitors are on capped data plans, you are forcing them to chew through their data just to download images that are unnecessarily large.

The First Rule of Digital Images and Photos: Keep Your Original!

We’re about to talk about resizing images to make them smaller files, but it’s important to remember that you should always keep a copy of the original image—once you scale down an image, you can’t easily go back. If you purchase a stock photo, or take an image off of a digital camera, save a master version in case you need to backtrack. 

Once you make it small, there’s no going back at all.

This brings us to the next rule:

The Second Rule of Digital Images and Photos: You Can Only Scale Down!

This is super important to remember. If you have a photo, it’s generally pretty easy to reduce the size. It’s much more difficult, and even fair to say nearly impossible, to blow an image up. 

If you have a photo (or any image—for the sake of this guide, we’re mostly going to use the term photo and image interchangeably), making it larger won’t add more detail to the image. Instead, it will make your image look blurry.

Here’s an example. Let’s say we’re starting with a small image of a cafe:

It’s a nice photo, but let’s assume this is the only version we have, and we want to use it as our Facebook cover image, or a large banner on our website. We want people to be able to see the menu items and the text on the sign next to the cash register!

If we make any attempt to increase the size of the image, we don’t gain any of that detail:

Our image looked good at the small size, but it’s really hard on the eyes once we make it larger.

This was a pretty extreme case—you can sometimes get by increasing the size of an image a little bit but as a general rule, you shouldn’t. Just like whittling, you should start big, and work your way down.

Sure, there are some tricks to get a little more detail out of a blurry image, but at that point, you are paying a graphics person to attempt that kind of work for you. I once had someone explain it to me like this—digital imagery isn’t like film. With film, the tiny negative on the film holds all of the details, and as long as you have the original film, you can blow the image up.

In actuality, it is still very similar to how old film cameras work. If you have the original image that was taken with the digital camera, you likely have a massive, fully-detailed image. If the version of the file you have was already resized, however, you can’t scale it back up.

Make sense? 

In short, try to hold on to the largest version of an image, since that’s almost certainly going to have the most detail and give you the most flexibility. For some photographers, this would be called the RAW format—a format that most high-end digital cameras use. RAW images are massive, and usually not used on the web or for sharing—you can sort of think of this format as the original film version of a photo.

You probably won’t run into RAW files very often unless you dabble in digital photography, but we figured it was worth mentioning, and it segues nicely into our next topic.

“Working Image” Formats

Remember how we said that you should always keep your original file? That also includes the “Working” formats.

What do we mean by working formats? 

If you are building a graphic in Photoshop with multiple layers, you may decide you want to go back and edit your work at a later time. If you only save your image as a JPEG or PNG file, you’ll lose the ability to edit the separate layers. This flattens the image. You won’t notice a change visually, but when opening the file back up in Photoshop your work will all be on a single layer and much more difficult to edit.

Most graphic designers have this hammered into their heads pretty early on, but it’s always worth mentioning. If you are working in Photoshop, save your work as a PSD before you worry about saving any other image format.

What Image Format Should I Use?

We’re going to get deeper into image resizing in a moment, but it helps to understand what image formats work best depending on the situation. There are quite a few formats, but there are really only three that you’ll run into the most.

JPEG - Also seen as .jpg, this is the most common type of image file. It’s short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and was developed to be a small, portable file size while still preserving overall image quality. A JPEG file can hold massively large images—they max out at about 218 square inches at print resolutions. JPEG files tend to have a small file size compared to most other formats, and most image editing software gives you the ability to determine the tradeoff of image detail and quality over file size. More likely than not, you’ll be working with JPEGs.

PNG - This image format is often used for graphics and illustrations, as opposed to photographs. PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. They can have a fairly conservative file size, but they don’t lose much data or details when you save and compress them. This means their file size tends to be a little larger. One big advantage of a PNG is that it has the ability to have transparency. This is important for logos and other graphics that you might put over a background. PNGs are also really good for high-end illustration, if you are willing to sacrifice a smaller file size for quality and sharpness.

GIF - You might pronounce it like the first three letters of the word “gift,” or like the popular peanut butter brand that choosy moms choose. Either way, the GIF format is designed to be one of the smallest file sizes, but it has some major limitations, and an infamous feature. GIFs are perfect for low-quality, small images. They base their file size on the number of colors in the image—a simple illustration with only a small handful of colors is ideal. GIFs are most effective when you are working with small icons and illustrations, but they aren’t efficient for photos. They support transparency, but not as well as PNG. GIFs really shine because they can be animated. They don’t tend to look as good as an actual video file, and they can’t provide audio, but this feature is pretty unique to the GIF. Unless you are sharing an animated GIF, however, you probably won’t use this format very often.

Image Transparency

What do we mean by transparency? Here’s an example of a simple graphic. If we save it as a JPEG and put it over a tan background, it puts a white box around the image.

If we save it as a PNG, that white box goes away and it lays the graphic over the background color. This works if your original image has a transparent background. Often when you purchase graphics from stock photo sites, this can be the case. A graphic artist could also edit an image to make the background transparent for you. Here’s what our image looks like as a PNG:

This does mean we have to be cognizant of the color and brightness of the background—if our graphic is light grey and we are putting it on a white background, it will be hard to see. Here’s an example:

If we’re putting the same light grey image over a high contrast background (for example, maybe the area on our website we want to place the graphic is dark green), it’s going to look pretty good.

The same sort of thing has to be considered if you are placing the graphic over top of another image - will it be legible? In this case, you’ll want to make sure your background isn’t too busy.

This leaves you with a lot to consider—it never hurts to consult with a graphic designer once you start diving into this sort of thing.

In short, most of the time, you’ll use a JPEG, which does NOT support transparency, and when you need transparency, you’ll use a PNG.

There are newer formats out there, too. The WEBP image format has great potential, but as of writing this, it isn’t widely supported by all web browsers, so it’s a little early to start using it a lot. A new competitor to the PNG is the SVG, which is a scaling image for simple graphics and icons. It’s possible that in a few years, we’ll be seeing more use cases for these formats, but right now, your best bet for 99 percent of your image work will be JPEG, followed by PNG.

In our next blog post, we’re going to go through all of the steps to properly take a large image and resize it and optimize it for the web.

In the United States, the political scene is extremely divisive. This can be seen in nearly every political arena including the ongoing debate over who should have regulatory power over the Internet. In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission voted, three votes to two, to repeal the Net Neutrality rules that were implemented by the same regulatory body just two years prior. Today, with a new administration being sworn in in less than a month, we thought we’d revisit the net neutrality rules and see where we stand at present. 

What is Net Neutrality?

Net neutrality is the notion that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally. At its center is the debate over who owns the Internet broadcast rights. The most popular ISPs are huge telecommunications companies, and as a result, if they have control over how their services are delivered (as they do presently) they could use that power to influence how Internet services are deployed, how much they cost, and essentially operate without regulation.

The major argument today is that the more free-market approach, where the Internet should not be viewed as a utility, allows companies to build a better telecommunications infrastructure. Whether this is a legitimate reason, the FCC, led by FCC director Ajit Pai, successfully oversaw the repeal of the regulation in 2017, re-categorizing Internet services as giving complete control to the companies that distribute Internet services.

This was met with extreme frustration by the masses, who overwhelmingly believe that the Internet should be regulated as a utility to keep ISPs from being able to rake in huge profits off of massive public investment. Expect to see this debate pop back up again in the coming months.

Where We Stand Now

The Internet has been the saving grace of the world economy over the past 10 months. In the U.S., you’ve seen the ISPs rally to the aid of people for quite a while at the beginning of the stay-at-home period. So much so that the FCC decided to post an article on their website outlining how the ISPs have “Gone Above and Beyond” during the COVID-19 pandemic. To their credit, there were a few months where ISPs offered services they didn’t have to offer, but overall, with no mandate in place to keep lines of communication up, they went back to business-as-usual pretty quickly. 

If net neutrality were still in place, who knows if the ISPs would have gone that far, being that they were cutting into their organizational profitability. Regardless, without a regulatory body overseeing their business, it was good to see them take some positive action during a time when people were really confused and struggling. 

Will There Be Movement On This Issue in 2021? 

Of course, with the new administration coming in, there could be, but all signs point to political stalemate in the coming months. Ajit Pai has decided to step down on January 20th, leaving the new administration to select a replacement for FCC Director. Once that nominee is confirmed, the votes would presumably swing to a pro-net neutrality position. The thing is, getting that person confirmed may take up to eight months to happen. For this reason, there should be no expectations of a re-authorization of net neutrality laws in 2021.

What do you think about net neutrality? Do you think that ISPs need oversight to maintain fair practices or do you think that the natural market competition will keep ISPs from taking advantage of their positions? Leave your thoughts on this subject in the comments section below.

Everyone knows how to do a Google Search, right? Go to the site, type whatever it is you’re looking for into the search bar, and you’re off to the races. Fewer people are aware, however, of the ways that you can help Google narrow its search a bit. Let’s go over a few handy Google cheat codes that can make your search results more precise.

Basic Searches

There are many simple ways that you can adjust your Google search queries.

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Adding a hyphen (representative of a subtraction mark in this case) allows you to preemptively omit any search results that include a term. For instance, if you wanted to learn about computer hardware for your business, and didn’t want to see tons of gaming hardware, you could search for computer hardware -gaming.

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The pipe icon enables you to effectively run two searches at once. By separating your queries with the pipe, it effectively serves as a stand-in for or as Google considers your results. So, if you were to search for tortilla | jazzercise, your results page would become an entertaining mix of recipes and locations to take a class.

()

Parentheses can help you add some context to your search. By emphasizing it separately from the rest of your search query, the parentheses tell Google that their contents should impact the rest of the search. Let’s say that you needed to plan a bowling-themed birthday party. Searching for (bowling) birthday party ideas could provide you with a smorgasbord of resources and party supplies vendors, all dedicated to birthday parties with a bowling theme.

Search Operators

site:

Sometimes, you know that you’ve seen something on a specific website, but when you go back later, you can’t seem to find it. Adding this tag into your Google search allows you to tell Google the specific website you want to search. For instance, let’s say you were looking for a specific blog that we posted about data backup. On Google, you could search for data backup site: www.mspnetworks.com.

filetype:

Google even enables its users to define their searches down to the filetype. Adding filetype:pdf will only return results for the defined search that come in PDF form.

intext:

We’ve all had those moments where we can remember something that we read, word-for-word, but we just can’t remember where we read it. Google can help. By typing in the remembered phrase after intext:, Google will scan the on-page text for that phrase and kick it back to you.

Which of these do you see being the most useful to you? Let us know in the comments how they work out for you! For more IT tips, best practices, and support services, MSPNetworks is always here. Reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.