Coleman Technologies Blog

An expiration date helps to make sure you aren’t buying fast-turning foods at the grocery store, and now, the technology industry is making strides to establish a similar standard. A new industry report recommends new legislation pushing for End-of-Life (EoL) disclosure, which would, in theory, allow businesses and consumers alike to make more informed purchasing decisions. What does this mean for your business?

The Connected Consumer Products End of Life Disclosure Act

A joint report issued by Consumer Reports, US Public Interest Research Group, and the Secure Resilient Future Foundation recommends the above-titled (please don’t make us type it out again) legislation.

While the name of the legislation might be a mouthful, it’s an important step to informing consumers about anticipated timelines for updates and end of support. This standard might be more important than ever since devices are inherently produced with connectivity in mind. Unsupported devices will no longer work as intended, creating problems for both consumers and businesses alike.

While technology cannot last forever, quick turnaround time for end-of-life and end-of-support events leads to the following detriments to the consumer.

More Electronic Waste

All electronic devices that no longer work can be considered e-waste. Of course, all devices eventually reach this state, and more e-waste is produced today than ever before. Plenty of it goes unrecycled, too, lending itself to massive landfill problems around the world. Since many devices don’t work without their connectivity, you can imagine how much waste an EoL creates.

Security Issues

Even if devices stop working as intended after an EoL, they still hold data, especially if they haven’t been properly wiped. Additionally, EoL devices left on a network could be attacked by an attack they aren’t prepared to defend against since they no longer receive security updates.

Consumer Outrage

It’s frustrating to say the least when you spend money on something that is almost immediately obsolete. According to the US Federal Trade Commission, 89 percent of 184 total product websites offered no information regarding how long support would be provided.

This Law Would Promote (or Require) Consumer Transparency

The proposed regulations would require any Internet-connected device to disclose a timeframe for how long support would last, thus encouraging companies to place a greater focus on user security.

It seems like it would be a win for consumers, as manufacturers would be held legally responsible for communicating to consumers just how long they can expect their device to last. This would also keep businesses from making too many simple “smart” devices, as they would have to maintain them all. Any business owner with connected devices knows how much of a pain this is already.

On that note, security is always an issue, even for non-EoL devices, so why not make it a little easier by working with Coleman Technologies? Learn more by calling us today at (604) 513-9428.

Rotate the Document

It is very easy to accidentally scan a document into your computer so that it doesn’t appear upright on your display. A program like Adobe Acrobat Pro offers an in-menu option that allows you to do just that - in Document, find Rotate Pages. This option will allow you to select the pages that need to be rotated, and how to rotate them. Other programs may feature a toolbar button that allows you to rotate each page.

Fixing your pages, despite taking a few moments of time, is certainly a worthwhile thing to do, as it makes the document easier to read, promoting accuracy and convenience.

Password Protecting the Document

As long as the person or people who need to see a particular PDF have the proper password, protecting the document in question with a password is a generally good idea - especially if it contains “for your eyes only” information. To make these files as secure as possible, make sure that the passwords are distributed through secure means.

In Word, you can save your files as a PDF using the “Save as” function, simply selecting the PDF option as you do so. You will also see a button offering More options, which brings up a second dialogue box where you can find “encrypt document with a password” in that box’s Options button. By selecting encrypt document with a password, you will have the option to provide a password (and confirm it). At that point, anyone opening the PDF will need to enter that password to view it.

Merging PDF Files

It isn’t uncommon for different parts of the same document to be saved as different PDF files, or for multiple copies to be saved with different information filled in. It is usually better to have all of this information consolidated, to make reviewing it much easier. While many free and paid software titles can allow you to do this, you should reach out to us before you select one, as we can help you make the right choice for your needs - you probably don’t want the program’s watermark on your finished document, or find yourself needing to merge more documents than a free program will allow.

If you’ve already acquired Adobe Acrobat, merging your files is fairly simple. After opening the program, access the Tools menu and select Combine files. Doing so will give you the ability to Add Files… and once you have selected all of the files that should create your new PDF, click Combine. Once they are combined, clicking Save as will allow you to store it where it belongs.

Signing a PDF

Many times, a contract that needs to be signed will arrive as a PDF. While many resort to printing these documents out to sign them, there is an easier way - signing them electronically.

This time, the free Adobe Reader software can get the job done, but you should still check with your IT resource before using it.

If Adobe Reader is approved and installed by IT, you can easily sign PDFs electronically. By opening the PDF file with Reader, you have access to a Fill & Sign button. Click it, then Sign and Add signature. You’ll then have access to three options:

• Type - you simply type your name into the field, and an electronic signature is rendered (which will not look like yours).
• Draw - you use your mouse to draw out your signature.
• Image - you use a scanned image of your actual signature that is then saved for future use.

Once you’ve positioned your signature where it should be, click apply and make sure you save your revised PDF.

Always remember to check with your IT team before you download any software! For more IT tips and other useful pieces, make sure you subscribe to our blog!

It’s incredibly important to keep your personally identifiable information secure, but what exactly constitutes PII? Today we offer a definition and suggestions or strategies to help you keep your PII safe.

The Definition of PII Depends on Who You Ask

If you want to protect PII to the best of your ability, you first need to understand what it is, but the answer to this question is not exactly clear-cut.

The United States identifies a couple-dozen identifiers in its legislation, but other countries have different ideas for what is considered PII. The European Union, Brazil, China, and even various US states like California and Virginia have different ideas of what makes for PII. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sees race, political opinion or affiliation, religion, and sexual orientation as PII, but the California Consumer Privacy Act does not.

With so many different factors and variables in place, it’s hard to define PII, which in turn makes it hard to protect it. Five US states want to hold companies more accountable for failing to protect PII, and regulators are in the same boat. For example, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney failed to properly dispose of consumers’ PII on servers and drives that they wanted to sell following a big move, resulting in a $35 million fine.

Avoiding Fines for PII Security

The first and foremost thing you need to account for is the PII as it is outlined for your industry. Take this information into consideration right from the start so there is no room for error or confusion. Implement it into your data handling and sharing practices immediately to ensure compliance.

Furthermore, you’ll have to test your protections to make sure that you are keeping your data as safe as possible. Be sure that the data, even if stolen, cannot be used to identify the individual.

To top it all off, implement solutions designed to protect your data on all levels, including encryption, identity and access management, and role-based permissions.

Coleman Technologies can help to make sure that your business is protecting its personally identifiable information. All you have to do to get started is call us at (604) 513-9428.

Do you ever think about how incredible technology is? In a world where it’s easy to take advantage of technology and devices that were practically inconceivable just a few short decades ago, it’s really amazing to just look at how far we’ve come, and how something so small can fit so much information.

Breaking Down What Data Actually Is

Let’s go back to before there were modern computers and smartphones. The prominent form of data storage throughout the centuries has been the book.

A typical novel has somewhere between 60,000 and 110,000 words (unless you are reading something by Brandon Sanderson—his novels tend to be three or four times that). 

How much data is that though? If you want to parse this down into smaller numbers, we can look at one of the most common forms of bite-sized information on the planet, the text message.

A text message has a maximum length of 160 characters. You can usually squeeze 1-3 sentences into that on average. Characters in the English language are 7-bits. A bit is represented by a 1 or a 0. The letter “A” is translated to 01000001, and “B” is 01000010. We’ll get back to this shortly.

A text message can contain a maximum of 160 characters, or 1120 bits (1120 ones and zeroes). There are 8 bits in a byte, which means a text message is 140 bytes.

There are 1,000,000 bytes in 1 Megabyte. Figure that the average word is around five characters, so a novel could have somewhere between 300,000 and 550,000 characters

Take 550,000 characters and multiply that by 7 (the number of bits in a character) and then divide the result by 8 (the number of bits in a byte) and you’ll get 481,250 bytes, or 0.48125 Megabytes.

That means a book on the larger side of things is technically around half a Megabyte of information. Once you add some of the hidden meta information, the cover, and some other data, a typical ebook sits around 1 Megabyte. If there are illustrations or images, then there is a lot more to calculate, so we’ll just assume that we are dealing with text for this thought experiment. 

How Much Data Does a Library Hold?

Many books are much larger than the average novel, considering that there are textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, massive reference books, and a lot of other larger format texts out there. Plus, it’s easier to work with round numbers, so let’s just assume that on average, a book rounds out to about 1 Megabyte.

A typical library tends to hold somewhere between 5,000 and 500,000 books. The world’s biggest libraries tend to put their book counts in the millions. The US Library of Congress holds more than 51 million books, and 75 million manuscripts, plus millions and millions of other items.

Let’s assume those 51 million books are all text. How much data would that actually be?

51 million Megabytes is 51 thousand Gigabytes, which translates to 51 Terabytes. It’s pretty common to buy 1 or 2 Terabyte drives for a home PC, so if you were conservative about your data, you could easily fit the entire Library of Congress book library in a pretty small office with 25 or so computers. Of course, you could just put multiple 2 TB drives into your workstations and store the entire Library of Congress on fewer machines too, or build a media server with an array of high-capacity drives… you get the idea.

We’re not quite to the point where a mobile device can hold that much information, but we’re getting there.

Keep in mind, this is just assuming we are taking the text. If instead, you wanted to scan every single page as a grey-scale image, you would be looking at an average size of around 8 Megabytes per book, so it would take about 408 Terabytes to store the Library of Congress. At that point, you’d be looking at a large rack-mounted device or a very small section of a data center.

How Much Data Does Your Organization Produce?

We’re going to make this a two-part blog since there is still a lot more to talk about! Next time, we’ll break down how much data human beings have ever produced, how much data you can fit into the palm of your hand, and more! Be sure to subscribe and bookmark our blog and keep coming back for more!