It’s been a bad few days for consumers’ data. One of the nation’s largest hospital operators, Community Health Systems Inc., said Monday that hackers from China stole personal information belonging to 4.5 million patients. While the data was pilfered between April and June of this year from Community Health System [Keep reading]
Can you change your luck in life just by thinking differently? Let me break free from this stream of bad news to talk for a big about The Plateau Effect again. If your summer didn’t bring what you’d hoped, and if the arrival of back-to-school sales is making you feel [Keep reading]
Buy food at a grocery store? You’ve probably been hacked. In the latest in a never-ending chain of credit card hacks, Albertson’s grocery stores announced Friday that its payment processor had been victim of a massive cybercrime. Impacted brands include Albertson’s, ACME Markets, Jewel-Osco, and Shaw’s and Star Markets. The hack [Keep reading]
Consumers using Yahoo or AOL email addresses report less satisfaction with customer service encounters that those using Gmail or Apple “.mac” address, according to research released this week by Zendesk. Regardless of whatever email service you use, everyone should receive the same level of customer service. The experience of customers [Keep reading]
A funny thing happened the other day when I whimsically posted a picture of what seemed to be a $0 parking ticket I’d received in Iowa City, Iowa. NO ONE BELIEVED IT. Gotcha-weary drivers from all around the country — well, big cities anyway — seemed utterly convinced that [Keep reading]
Every high-profile death by apparent suicide launches a public discussion, often temporary, about the terrifying power of depression. Perhaps Robin Williams’ death can help generate additional discussion about the connection between financial trouble and suicide. It’s already far too early to know anything definitive about the brilliant comedian’s state of [Keep reading]
Since the invention of inventions, folks have debated a very basic question: Do advances in technology create or kill jobs? Clearly, innovation disrupts jobs. Think of all the tasks done by machines that were once done by humans, such as highway toll collection. It creates quite a paradox. Perhaps there [Keep reading]
We need drugs to sleep at night. Nearly half of us don’t have enough in a bank account to cover next month’s expenses, let alone any real head start towards retirement. We buy homes with mortgage payments our parents couldn’t fathom, or we make student loan payments almost that large. [Keep reading]
As tensions escalate around the world, and the temperature of conflict rhetoric between Russia and the West continues to rise, security professional Richard Stiennon asked an important question recently: Will Russian hackers take the conflict into cyberspace? Russian officials this week have already announced tit-for-tat sanctions against U.S. meat, fish, [Keep reading]
I ended up being forced to spend a night in a smoking room during my recent road trip, even though I had booked a non-smoking room on Expedia.com. I would have rather shared a room with someone who use something like a PAX vaporizer. At least this way, you know [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan