Beyond the Square - Networking technology specialists

How to secure your iPad and iPhone

Posted on November 30, 2017December 4, 2017 by Beyond the Square

Here are a few tips on how to keep your iPad and or iPhone secure by locking down a few settings

Disable Voice Dial when the device is locked

To stop the device from making random calls due to an oversensitive mic you can disable the facility under the Settings, Touch ID & Passcode, look for and toggle off Voice Dial.

Enable Erase Data on iPad or iPhone

Everyone has a fear or our mobile device getting lost or stolen. All the data, photos and sensitive information stored on there. One way to ensure that this data does not fall into the wrong hands should your device go missing for one reason or the other is to set the Erase Data options after X amount of tries.
This option can be found the Settings, Touch ID & Passcode, look for Erase Data and toggle the option to enable

Disable Siri when the device is locked

Siri can be very handy but let’s face it there are some instances when we need her to be quiet. Like when our device is locked.
This can be done with Settings, Touch ID & Passcode, find Siri and toggle the option to off

Change the time it takes the device to sleep and lock the screen

Shorter auto-lock times is more secure.
This can be changed from Settings, Display & Brightness, Auto-Lock, select the desired length of time to auto-lock when idle.

Use a STRONG auto-lock release password

A strong access password is always an option for securing the device. Make use of capital, numeric and special characters.

Disable return missed calls on the lock screen

Disabling this feature ensures that no one but you returns missed calls from your device.
Settings Menu, Touch & ID Passcode, look for Return Missed Calls option and toggle the option to off

Disable Wallet from the lock screen of the device

Wallet is a very handy IOS tool but you really do not want anyone able to use it on the lock screen so it is advisable to switch this feature off.
At the Settings screen, Touch ID & Passcode, find Wallet and toggle the option to off

Disable notifications on the lock screen

You do not always want notification messages to appear on your lock screen so it is best to turn the feature off.
Launch Settings, Touch ID & Passcodes, find Recent Notifications and toggle the option to off.

Always backup your device to the cloud or another device to decrease the risk of data loss.

Posted in Mobile Devices

8 things to know about the Internet

Posted on November 25, 2017December 4, 2017 by Beyond the Square

The internet is quite taken for granted these days, we have the big world-wide-web popping up answers to our questions, giving us hours of entertainment and fun and connecting us to each other.
But how much do we really know about it or rather what don’t we know about it, here are a few interesting facts to ponder:

Just over 40 years ago in a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles the internet was born.
The internet is used by an estimated 3.2 billion people and if it had to go down for a day about 200 billion emails and 3 billion Google searches would be queued.
In China they have treatment camps for people who are addicted to the internet and about 40% of those addicted are said to suffer from ADHD.
There are an estimated 204 million emails being sent across the internet every minute and around 70% of those are spam.
The recent internet download speed capability is 100Mbps whereas in 2005 it had a maximum speed of 2Mbps. Experts are now worrying that science may have reached its limits as they debate how much more data fiber optics may be able to take or if it has finally reached its threshold.
The first ever YouTube video uploaded was called “Meet At Zoo” and was done by Jawed Karim on Saturday 23 April 2005 at 8:27 p.m.
61.5% (nearly 2/3 of website traffic is caused by Internet bots, the majority of internet traffic is not generated by humans but by these bots and malware.
The first ever website on the Internet is still alive and running the following link address will take you to have a look at this historic site – http://info.cern.ch

Posted in Internet

What are the benefits of moving to cloud-based solutions?

Posted on November 20, 2017December 4, 2017 by Beyond the Square

More and more companies and even individuals are moving to cloud-based solutions here are a few of the reasons why they are worth a look:

Subscription-based solutions for cloud-based services make it a very attractive to your bottom line. With little to no capital-expenditure and heave equipment cost outlays. With the added benefit of ease of configuration and management, it makes monetary sense to seriously consider looking into it.
Sliding window bandwidth scalability in demand makes the usual fluctuating bandwidth demand problems fall away. As the service to increase and decrease your clouds capacity is usually built into your service contract and is done in a blink of an eye. Should you no longer need a large capacity it is just as easy to down-scale.
Working remotely has never been easier which make cloud-based workflow and file sharing real time, giving better team access and collaboration to share, edit and access data anywhere at any time.
There is no longer a need for large costly fallback data centers as most cloud-based services offer very robust disaster recovery and backup options.
Cloud computing offers excellent security with the ability to recover data from that lost mobile device and the power to remotely wipe data from the lost device.

Posted in Cloud