#management software enables

[jensitechnology]

AI-enabled business management & workflow automation software

How to Grow Your Agency and Run it Like a SaaS Business

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, agencies are increasingly looking for ways to grow efficiently and sustainably. One innovative approach is to run your agency like a Software as a Service (SaaS) business. By adopting SaaS principles, you can streamline operations, enhance client satisfaction, and scale more effectively. Here's How to grow your agency and run it like a saas business.

1. Adopt a Recurring Revenue Model

Why It Matters:

A recurring revenue model provides financial stability and predictability, allowing you to plan and invest in your agency's growth confidently.

How to Implement:

Subscription Services: Offer your services as monthly or annual subscriptions. This could include ongoing marketing support, content creation, SEO maintenance, or social media management.

Tiered Pricing: Develop tiered packages that offer different levels of service, catering to a range of client needs and budgets. This encourages clients to upgrade as they see more value in your services.

2. Automate Workflows and Processes

Why It Matters:

Automation can significantly reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks, allowing your team to focus on higher-value activities that drive growth.

How to Implement:

Use Workflow Automation Tools: Invest in AI-enabled business management and workflow automation software to handle routine tasks like scheduling, invoicing, and reporting.

Standardize Procedures: Create standard operating procedures (SOPs) for common tasks and automate them where possible. This ensures consistency and efficiency.

3. Focus on Scalability

Why It Matters:

Scalability is crucial for growth. A SaaS approach ensures that your business model can handle increased demand without compromising on quality.

How to Implement:

Cloud-Based Solutions: Utilize cloud-based tools for project management, communication, and file storage. This facilitates collaboration and allows you to scale your operations seamlessly.

Outsource Non-Core Activities: Partner with freelancers or other agencies to handle overflow work or specialized tasks. This way, you can scale up quickly without the long-term commitment of hiring full-time staff.

4. Invest in Client Success

Why It Matters:

In a SaaS model, client retention is as important as acquisition. Ensuring your clients achieve their desired outcomes will foster loyalty and long-term relationships.

How to Implement:

Onboarding Programs: Develop comprehensive onboarding processes to help clients understand and utilize your services effectively from day one.

Regular Check-Ins: Schedule regular check-ins to review progress, gather feedback, and adjust strategies as needed. This shows clients you’re committed to their success.

5. Leverage Data and Analytics

Why It Matters:

Data-driven decision-making allows you to optimize your services and demonstrate the value you provide to clients.

How to Implement:

Performance Metrics: Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as client retention rates, campaign performance, and ROI. Use these insights to refine your strategies.

Client Dashboards: Provide clients with access to dashboards where they can monitor their own metrics in real-time. Transparency builds trust and keeps clients engaged.

6. Develop a Strong Online Presence

Why It Matters:

A robust online presence enhances your agency’s credibility and attracts potential clients.

How to Implement:

Content Marketing: Create valuable content that showcases your expertise, such as blog posts, whitepapers, and case studies.

Social Media Engagement: Maintain an active presence on social media platforms where your target audience is most active. Share insights, engage in discussions, and promote your services.

Conclusion

Transforming your agency to run like a SaaS business requires a shift in mindset and operations. By adopting a recurring revenue model, automating workflows, focusing on scalability, investing in client success, leveraging data, and enhancing your online presence, you can achieve sustainable growth and stay competitive in the digital age.

Ready to take your agency to the next level? Start implementing these SaaS principles today and watch your business thrive!

[eatos-blog]

Culinary Commerce: The Role of AI-Enabled Restaurants in Sales

Technology is playing a more and larger role in the constantly changing fabric of the culinary world, profoundly influencing our culinary adventures. The rise of culinary establishments with AI integration represents a ground-breaking and paradigm-shifting development in this field. These eating establishments use artificial intelligence's ability to advance both financial feats and the culinary the journey. In this essay, we set out on a fascinating journey into the universe of AI Enabled Restaurant and try to understand their enormous impact on the food industry. 

Enhanced Cooking Skills in the Kitchen 

The conduits in the kitchen are being carefully optimized by AI while being hidden from customers' sight. It ensures the most cost-effective use of the ingredients, avoiding waste. AI-driven kitchen automata manage the production of food with an unparalleled level of accuracy, consistency, and speed, hence reducing the length of time that customers must wait. This promptness not only results in cost-efficiency for the restaurant but also in the happiness of the customers. 

Restaurants with AI-Enhanced Business Models 

Revenue Maximization Using Data-Driven Cognition 

Data is king in the world of food commerce. The power of data analytics can be utilized by restaurants with AI to gain profound understanding into customer behavior. They are more equipped to make intelligent decisions about pricing, menu changes, and marketing strategies since they can recognize the apex of dining traffic, beloved menu items, and seasonal vogues. This data-driven strategy helps restaurants increase sales and financial benefits since they are adept at making adjustments that are laser-focused on successfully meeting the needs of their customers. 

Enhancing Patron Adherence 

The ability to cultivate strong customer loyalty is one of the restaurants using AI as their main asset. Customers are more likely to return to the restaurant because of its cozy atmosphere of personalized menus and sleek service. AI also has the ability to provide specific customers personalized promos and incentives based on their preferences, thereby strengthening the relationship between the business and its customers. AI-assisted restaurants increase brand loyalty and contribute to the steady increase in financial entrance by creating an environment of exclusivity and attending to the unique needs of each customer 

The Human Dimension 

While AI is a crucial part of these organizations' successes, the importance of human interaction should not be underestimated. Staff who are friendly and attentive continue to be the foundation of any successful restaurant. AI just supports their efforts by optimizing processes and improving the eating experience. 

The Future Route 

AI-infused dining establishments are expected to spread further as the landscape of culinary commerce continues its continuous evolution. Customers are becoming more interested in dining experiences that offer them not only delicious meals but also a streamlined, tailored experience that meets their needs. It is projected that this development will increase AI's involvement in the restaurant industry. 

In conclusion 

AI-enhanced dining experiences with quick service POS system and represent a seismic shift in the culinary industry, redefining the eating experience while increasing efficiency and financial gain. These businesses are without a doubt ready to meet the constantly changing needs of the smart modern diner thanks to their use of artificial intelligence.

[clikycrmsoftware]

Sales CRM Software for Small Business, Manufacturing Industry - Cliky

Enhance customer interactions and boost sales with Cliky's powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Best CRM and Automation for Small Business.

[fieldforcetracker1]

HVAC Service Software

[gavstech]

Customer expectations are ever-changing, and the BFSI industry must keep up with the current trends to stay ahead of the competition. To create a positive and inviting user experience with digital services, banking and fintech products must maintain a clean and helpful UI/UX design while investing in newer fintech app development technologies.

[mttconnect]

While providing IT support McKinney, MTT Connect ensures investment in information technology provides the maximum ROI to its stakeholders through IT roadmapping, planning and strategy. With one of the highest client satisfaction rates in the industry, they build lasting & trusted relationships.

[digitalmanufacturing]

Successful asset management software is a key to growth, industry 4.0 offers significant opportunities for manufacturers to improve asset management practices and machine performance.

[heattimernj]

Internet Connectivity

The Farmer’s Almanac is calling for a particularly cold winter, just as fuel prices are spiking and OPEC is cutting oil production. Overall, the winter of 2022 is shaping up to be an expensive heating season.

As building owners and HVAC professionals get their buildings ready for the heating season, dormant boilers are fired up and unexpected Startup problems arise all over.  HVAC professionals must be able to see when a Startup problem occurs in a building so that they can get on site and fix it quickly, then be able to move on to the next issue.  Buildings equipped with internet capable boiler management systems have an added level of convenience, thanks to all parts of their heating system operation being available and modifiable remotely.  BuildingNet® by Heat-Timer® is such a system, available as an ad-on to our Platinum Series Controls (large buildings), or included with our newest Heat-Timer Genesis® Controls (Small Buildings). 

Why is BuildingNet® a better boiler management software interface? 

To a user, the connection between a Heat-Timer® controller and the BuildingNet® web portal or mobile application is seamless.  BuildingNet’s highly reliable backend server software, running on a redundant network ensures 24/7 availability of control visibility. BuildingNet’s servers scale to support its customers reliably, even during the busiest time of the season. 

BuildingNet® also allows the creation of monitoring accounts which allow a boiler service and maintenance company to receive and respond to programmable alarms and service warnings. The non-proprietary and customizable nature of BuildingNet® allows the property manager to choose any service company or companies that are right for their needs, rather than be locked into a service contract like some other building management software solutions. 

BuildingNet® Organizes your entire Building Portfolio

BuildingNet® was designed from the ground up to scale easily and robustly from a single Heat-Timer® control to a portfolio of buildings with multiple controls and boiler rooms. BuildingNet® can be used for large property portfolios because their building addresses are organized in a clean hierarchy where data is presented by property address/control/data.

Other hierarchies exist within the BuldingNet® interface.  For instance our programmable alarm feature allows a tiered response to alarms.  With tiered alarms, a manager responsible for 5 apartment buildings in a complex will not receive every alarm from every building. The alarms will go first to the on-site technicians responsible, then to the technician’s supervisor. Only the alarms that are not answered after a set time period will be escalated to the designated manager.

Another way that BuildingNet® manages the complexity of a multi-building portfolio is its rich set of data analysis tools that allow building managers to spot trends and potential problems before they become emergencies.   The new alarm executive summary gives a daily summary of alarms, while the customizable report features in BuildingNet®, can give managers the ability to generate reports down to the sensor level, or create summary reports that show overall trends.  These reports can be configured to be emailed to their team at recurring intervals.

Different buildings need different controllers.  

The last reason that BuildingNet® works so well for a range of building sizes and types, is because Heat-Timer® offers the widest selection of boiler controllers in the industry.   Heat-Timer® has a Platinum series controller optimized for every type of boiler configuration, whether its hydronic or steam boilers, staging or modulating burners, single or multi-boiler configurations. And now with Heat-Timer® Genesis, we have the solution for the smaller buildings in your portfolio as well, all under the same BuildingNet® user interface.

For more information visit https://heat-timer.com

This blog was originally published at

https://www.heat-timer.com/internet-connectivity/

[mariacallous]

If you’ve rented an apartment in the US in the past several years, you may have had the sense that the game was rigged: Prices creep up not only at your building but at others throughout the city, seemingly in lockstep. A new civil lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice today alleges that in many cases it’s not just in your head—and that a single company’s algorithm is to blame.

That company is RealPage, a Texas-based firm that provides commercial revenue management software for landlords. In other words, it helps set the prices of apartments. But it does so, the DOJ alleges in its lawsuit, by effectively helping its clients cheat; landlords feed rental rate and lease terms into the system, and the RealPage algorithm in turn spits out a suggested price that enables coordination and hinders competition.

“By feeding sensitive data into a sophisticated algorithm powered by artificial intelligence, RealPage has found a modern way to violate a century-old law through systematic coordination of rental housing prices,” deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco said in a statement.

RealPage’s reach is broad. It controls 80 percent of the market for software of its kind, which in turn is used to set prices of around 3 million units across the country, according to the DOJ. It already faces multiple lawsuits, including one from the state of Arizona and another in Washington, DC, where RealPage software is allegedly used to price more than 90 percent of units in large apartment buildings. RealPage’s algorithmic pricing first gained broader attention when a 2022 ProPublica investigation detailed how the company’s YieldStar software works.

The DOJ civil lawsuit, which was joined by the attorneys general of eight states, is a significant escalation in legal action against the company. It’s also a first for the DOJ, according to officials speaking on background during a call to discuss the complaint. While the government had previously filed criminal charges against an Amazon seller for algorithm-enabled price-fixing, this is the first civil action in which the algorithm itself, the Justice Department official says, was effectively the means of the violation.

The complaint itself quotes RealPage executives allegedly acknowledging anticompetitive aspects of its product. “There is greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps the entire industry down,” one RealPage executive allegedly wrote.

RealPage has repeatedly denied any allegations of antitrust violations, going so far as to publish a six-page digital pamphlet that claims to tell “the Real Story” about its products, along with an extensive FAQ page on a dedicated public policy website. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “Attacks on the industry’s revenue management are based on demonstrably false information,” one section of that site reads. “RealPage revenue management software benefits both housing providers and residents.”

“We are disappointed that, after multiple years of education and cooperation on the antitrust matters concerning RealPage, the DOJ has chosen this moment to pursue a lawsuit that seeks to scapegoat pro-competitive technology that has been used responsibly for years,” said Jennifer Bowcock, senior vice president of communications and creative at RealPage, in an emailed statement. “RealPage’s revenue management software is purposely built to be legally compliant, and we have a long history of working constructively with the DOJ to show that."

The DOJ disagrees. “Algorithms don’t exist in a law-free zone,” said Monaco in a press conference to discuss the case. “Training a machine to break the law is still breaking the law.”

In this case, the complaint alleges that those algorithms consistently drove rental prices upward. “RealPage’s software tends to maximize price increases, minimize price decreases, and maximize landlords’ pricing power,” said the DOJ in a press release. RealPage also doesn’t just recommend prices; in many cases, it actively sets them.

“RealPage actively polices landlords’ compliance with those recommendations,” said US attorney general Merrick Garland in today’s press conference. “A large number of landlords effectively agree to outsource their pricing decisions to RealPage by using an ‘auto-accept’ setting that effectively permits RealPage to determine the price a renter will pay.”

The DOJ also claims RealPage has created a “self-reinforcing feedback loop” with its data intake and pricing recommendations structure that also gives it an alleged monopoly in the apartment revenue management software industry. Any competitor who plays by the rules, the DOJ claims, is at a distinct disadvantage.

The Justice Department has spent the past several years staffing up with technologists and data scientists, better enabling them to “interrogate the code,” as multiple officials described the investigative process. While this is the first major algorithmic collusion case, DOJ officials suggested it would be far from the last.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Cloudburst

Enshittification isn’t inevitable: under different conditions and constraints, the old, good internet could have given way to a new, good internet. Enshittification is the result of specific policy choices: encouraging monopolies; enabling high-speed, digital shell games; and blocking interoperability.

First we allowed companies to buy up their competitors. Google is the shining example here: having made one good product (search), they then fielded an essentially unbroken string of in-house flops, but it didn’t matter, because they were able to buy their way to glory: video, mobile, ad-tech, server management, docs, navigation…They’re not Willy Wonka’s idea factory, they’re Rich Uncle Pennybags, making up for their lack of invention by buying out everyone else:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

But this acquisition-fueled growth isn’t unique to tech. Every administration since Reagan (but not Biden! more on this later) has chipped away at antitrust enforcement, so that every sector has undergone an orgy of mergers, from athletic shoes to sea freight, eyeglasses to pro wrestling:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/07/09/the-importance-of-competition-for-the-american-economy/

But tech is different, because digital is flexible in a way that analog can never be. Tech companies can “twiddle” the back-ends of their clouds to change the rules of the business from moment to moment, in a high-speed shell-game that can make it impossible to know what kind of deal you’re getting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

To make things worse, users are banned from twiddling. The thicket of rules we call IP ensure that twiddling is only done against users, never for them. Reverse-engineering, scraping, bots — these can all be blocked with legal threats and suits and even criminal sanctions, even if they’re being done for legitimate purposes:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enhittification isn’t inevitable but if we let companies buy all their competitors, if we let them twiddle us with every hour that God sends, if we make it illegal to twiddle back in self-defense, we will get twiddled to death. When a company can operate without the discipline of competition, nor of privacy law, nor of labor law, nor of fair trading law, with the US government standing by to punish any rival who alters the logic of their service, then enshittification is the utterly foreseeable outcome.

To understand how our technology gets distorted by these policy choices, consider “The Cloud.” Once, “the cloud” was just a white-board glyph, a way to show that some part of a software’s logic would touch some commodified, fungible, interchangeable appendage of the internet. Today, “The Cloud” is a flashing warning sign, the harbinger of enshittification.

When your image-editing tools live on your computer, your files are yours. But once Adobe moves your software to The Cloud, your critical, labor-intensive, unrecreatable images are purely contingent. At at time, without notice, Adobe can twiddle the back end and literally steal the colors out of your own files:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

The finance sector loves The Cloud. Add “The Cloud” to a product and profits (money you get for selling something) can turn into rents (money you get for owning something). Profits can be eroded by competition, but rents are evergreen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

No wonder The Cloud has seeped into every corner of our lives. Remember your first iPod? Adding music to it was trivial: double click any music file to import it into iTunes, then plug in your iPod and presto, synched! Today, even sophisticated technology users struggle to “side load” files onto their mobile devices. Instead, the mobile duopoly — Apple and Google, who bought their way to mobile glory and have converged on the same rent-seeking business practices, down to the percentages they charge — want you to get your files from The Cloud, via their apps. This isn’t for technological reasons, it’s a business imperative: 30% of every transaction that involves an app gets creamed off by either Apple or Google in pure rents:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

And yet, The Cloud is undeniably useful. Having your files synch across multiple devices, including your collaborators’ devices, with built-in tools for resolving conflicting changes, is amazing. Indeed, this feat is the holy grail of networked tools, because it’s how programmers write all the software we use, including software in The Cloud.

If you want to know how good a tool can be, just look at the tools that toolsmiths use. With “source control” — the software programmers use to collaboratively write software — we get a very different vision of how The Cloud could operate. Indeed, modern source control doesn’t use The Cloud at all. Programmers’ workflow doesn’t break if they can’t access the internet, and if the company that provides their source control servers goes away, it’s simplicity itself to move onto another server provider.

This isn’t The Cloud, it’s just “the cloud” — that whiteboard glyph from the days of the old, good internet — freely interchangeable, eminently fungible, disposable and replaceable. For a tool like git, Github is just one possible synchronization point among many, all of which have a workflow whereby programmers’ computers automatically make local copies of all relevant data and periodically lob it back up to one or more servers, resolving conflicting edits through a process that is also largely automated.

There’s a name for this model: it’s called “Local First” computing, which is computing that starts from the presumption that the user and their device is the most important element of the system. Networked servers are dumb pipes and dumb storage, a nice-to-have that fails gracefully when it’s not available.

The data structures of source-code are among the most complicated formats we have; if we can do this for code, we can do it for spreadsheets, word-processing files, slide-decks, even edit-decision-lists for video and audio projects. If local-first computing can work for programmers writing code, it can work for the programs those programmers write.

Local-first computing is experiencing a renaissance. Writing for Wired, Gregory Barber traces the history of the movement, starting with the French computer scientist Marc Shapiro, who helped develop the theory of “Conflict-Free Replicated Data” — a way to synchronize data after multiple people edit it — two decades ago:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-cloud-is-a-prison-can-the-local-first-software-movement-set-us-free/

Shapiro and his co-author Nuno Preguiça envisioned CFRD as the building block of a new generation of P2P collaboration tools that weren’t exactly serverless, but which also didn’t rely on servers as the lynchpin of their operation. They published a technical paper that, while exiting, was largely drowned out by the release of GoogleDocs (based on technology built by a company that Google bought, not something Google made in-house).

Shapiro and Preguiça’s work got fresh interest with the 2019 publication of “Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud,” a viral whitepaper-cum-manifesto from a quartet of computer scientists associated with Cambridge University and Ink and Switch, a self-described “industrial research lab”:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/static/local-first.pdf

The paper describes how its authors — Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg and Mark McGranaghan — prototyped and tested a bunch of simple local-first collaboration tools built on CFRD algorithms, with the goal of “network optional…seamless collaboration.” The results are impressive, if nascent. Conflicting edits were simpler to resolve than the authors anticipated, and users found URLs to be a good, intuitive way of sharing documents. The biggest hurdles are relatively minor, like managing large amounts of change-data associated with shared files.

Just as importantly, the paper makes the case for why you’d want to switch to local-first computing. The Cloud is not reliable. Companies like Evernote don’t last forever — they can disappear in an eyeblink, and take your data with them:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23789012/evernote-layoff-us-staff-bending-spoons-note-taking-app

Google isn’t likely to disappear any time soon, but Google is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA program (“I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further”) and notorious for shuttering its products, even beloved ones like Google Reader:

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social

And while the authors don’t mention it, Google is also prone to simply kicking people off all its services, costing them their phone numbers, email addresses, photos, document archives and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches

There is enormous enthusiasm among developers for local-first application design, which is only natural. After all, companies that use The Cloud go to great lengths to make it just “the cloud,” using containerization to simplify hopping from one cloud provider to another in a bid to stave off lock-in from their cloud providers and the enshittification that inevitably follows.

The nimbleness of containerization acts as a disciplining force on cloud providers when they deal with their business customers: disciplined by the threat of losing money, cloud companies are incentivized to treat those customers better. The companies we deal with as end-users know exactly how bad it gets when a tech company can impose high switching costs on you and then turn the screws until things are almost-but-not-quite so bad that you bolt for the doors. They devote fantastic effort to making sure that never happens to them — and that they can always do that to you.

Interoperability — the ability to leave one service for another — is technology’s secret weapon, the thing that ensures that users can turn The Cloud into “the cloud,” a humble whiteboard glyph that you can erase and redraw whenever it suits you. It’s the greatest hedge we have against enshittification, so small wonder that Big Tech has spent decades using interop to clobber their competitors, and lobbying to make it illegal to use interop against them:

https://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

Getting interop back is a hard slog, but it’s also our best shot at creating a new, good internet that lives up the promise of the old, good internet. In my next book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso Books, Sept 5), I set out a program fro disenshittifying the internet:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

The book is up for pre-order on Kickstarter now, along with an independent, DRM-free audiobooks (DRM-free media is the content-layer equivalent of containerized services — you can move them into or out of any app you want):

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Meanwhile, Lina Khan, the FTC and the DoJ Antitrust Division are taking steps to halt the economic side of enshittification, publishing new merger guidelines that will ban the kind of anticompetitive merger that let Big Tech buy its way to glory:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/biden-administration-corporate-merger-antitrust-guidelines/674779/

The internet doesn’t have to be enshittified, and it’s not too late to disenshittify it. Indeed — the same forces that enshittified the internet — monopoly mergers, a privacy and labor free-for-all, prohibitions on user-side twiddling — have enshittified everything from cars to powered wheelchairs. Not only should we fight enshittification — we must.

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad- free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers

Image: Drahtlos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motherboard_Intel_386.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

—

cdsessums (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monsoon_Season_Flagstaff_AZ_clouds_storm.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[amalgamasreal]

So I don't know how people on this app feel about the shit-house that is TikTok but in the US right now the ban they're trying to implement on it is a complete red herring and it needs to be stopped.

They are quite literally trying to implement Patriot Act 2.0 with the RESTRICT Act and using TikTok and China to scare the American public into buying into it wholesale when this shit will change the face of the internet. Here are some excerpts from what the bill would cover on the Infrastructure side:

SEC. 5. Considerations.

(a) Priority information and communications technology areas.—In carrying out sections 3 and 4, the Secretary shall prioritize evaluation of— (1) information and communications technology products or services used by a party to a covered transaction in a sector designated as critical infrastructure in Policy Directive 21 (February 12, 2013; relating to critical infrastructure security and resilience);

(2) software, hardware, or any other product or service integral to telecommunications products and services, including— (A) wireless local area networks;

(B) mobile networks;

(C) satellite payloads;

(D) satellite operations and control;

(E) cable access points;

(F) wireline access points;

(G) core networking systems;

(H) long-, short-, and back-haul networks; or

(I) edge computer platforms;

(3) any software, hardware, or any other product or service integral to data hosting or computing service that uses, processes, or retains, or is expected to use, process, or retain, sensitive personal data with respect to greater than 1,000,000 persons in the United States at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered transaction is referred to the Secretary for review or the Secretary initiates review of the covered transaction, including— (A) internet hosting services;

(B) cloud-based or distributed computing and data storage;

(C) machine learning, predictive analytics, and data science products and services, including those involving the provision of services to assist a party utilize, manage, or maintain open-source software;

(D) managed services; and

(E) content delivery services;

(4) internet- or network-enabled sensors, webcams, end-point surveillance or monitoring devices, modems and home networking devices if greater than 1,000,000 units have been sold to persons in the United States at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered transaction is referred to the Secretary for review or the Secretary initiates review of the covered transaction;

(5) unmanned vehicles, including drones and other aerials systems, autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles, or any other product or service integral to the provision, maintenance, or management of such products or services;

(6) software designed or used primarily for connecting with and communicating via the internet that is in use by greater than 1,000,000 persons in the United States at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered transaction is referred to the Secretary for review or the Secretary initiates review of the covered transaction, including— (A) desktop applications;

(B) mobile applications;

(C) gaming applications;

(D) payment applications; or

(E) web-based applications; or

(7) information and communications technology products and services integral to— (A) artificial intelligence and machine learning;

(B) quantum key distribution;

(C) quantum communications;

(D) quantum computing;

(E) post-quantum cryptography;

(F) autonomous systems;

(G) advanced robotics;

(H) biotechnology;

(I) synthetic biology;

(J) computational biology; and

(K) e-commerce technology and services, including any electronic techniques for accomplishing business transactions, online retail, internet-enabled logistics, internet-enabled payment technology, and online marketplaces.

(b) Considerations relating to undue and unacceptable risks.—In determining whether a covered transaction poses an undue or unacceptable risk under section 3(a) or 4(a), the Secretary— (1) shall, as the Secretary determines appropriate and in consultation with appropriate agency heads, consider, where available— (A) any removal or exclusion order issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Secretary of Defense, or the Director of National Intelligence pursuant to recommendations of the Federal Acquisition Security Council pursuant to section 1323 of title 41, United States Code;

(B) any order or license revocation issued by the Federal Communications Commission with respect to a transacting party, or any consent decree imposed by the Federal Trade Commission with respect to a transacting party;

(C) any relevant provision of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation and the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and the respective supplements to those regulations;

(D) any actual or potential threats to the execution of a national critical function identified by the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency;

(E) the nature, degree, and likelihood of consequence to the public and private sectors of the United States that would occur if vulnerabilities of the information and communications technologies services supply chain were to be exploited; and

(F) any other source of information that the Secretary determines appropriate; and

(2) may consider, where available, any relevant threat assessment or report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence completed or conducted at the request of the Secretary.

Look at that, does that look like it just covers the one app? NO! This would cover EVERYTHING that so much as LOOKS at the internet from the point this bill goes live.

It gets worse though, you wanna see what the penalties are?

(b) Civil penalties.—The Secretary may impose the following civil penalties on a person for each violation by that person of this Act or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization issued under this Act: (1) A fine of not more than $250,000 or an amount that is twice the value of the transaction that is the basis of the violation with respect to which the penalty is imposed, whichever is greater. (2) Revocation of any mitigation measure or authorization issued under this Act to the person. (c) Criminal penalties.— (1) IN GENERAL.—A person who willfully commits, willfully attempts to commit, or willfully conspires to commit, or aids or abets in the commission of an unlawful act described in subsection (a) shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000, or if a natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both. (2) CIVIL FORFEITURE.— (A) FORFEITURE.— (i) IN GENERAL.—Any property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, used or intended to be used, in any manner, to commit or facilitate a violation or attempted violation described in paragraph (1) shall be subject to forfeiture to the United States. (ii) PROCEEDS.—Any property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, constituting or traceable to the gross proceeds taken, obtained, or retained, in connection with or as a result of a violation or attempted violation described in paragraph (1) shall be subject to forfeiture to the United States. (B) PROCEDURE.—Seizures and forfeitures under this subsection shall be governed by the provisions of chapter 46 of title 18, United States Code, relating to civil forfeitures, except that such duties as are imposed on the Secretary of Treasury under the customs laws described in section 981(d) of title 18, United States Code, shall be performed by such officers, agents, and other persons as may be designated for that purpose by the Secretary of Homeland Security or the Attorney General. (3) CRIMINAL FORFEITURE.— (A) FORFEITURE.—Any person who is convicted under paragraph (1) shall, in addition to any other penalty, forfeit to the United States— (i) any property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, used or intended to be used, in any manner, to commit or facilitate the violation or attempted violation of paragraph (1); and (ii) any property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, constituting or traceable to the gross proceeds taken, obtained, or retained, in connection with or as a result of the violation. (B) PROCEDURE.—The criminal forfeiture of property under this paragraph, including any seizure and disposition of the property, and any related judicial proceeding, shall be governed by the provisions of section 413 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 853), except subsections (a) and (d) of that section.

You read that right, you could be fined up to A MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS for knowingly violating the restrict act, so all those people telling you to "just use a VPN" to keep using TikTok? Guess what? That falls under the criminal guidelines of this bill and they're giving you some horrible fucking advice.

Also, VPN's as a whole, if this bill passes, will take a goddamn nose dive in this country because they are another thing that will be covered in this bill.

They chose the perfect name for it, RESTRICT, because that's what it's going to do to our freedoms in this so called "land of the free".

Please, if you are a United States citizen of voting age reach out to your legislature and tell them you do not want this to pass and you will vote against them in the next primary if it does. This is a make or break moment for you if you're younger. Do not allow your generation to suffer a second Patriot Act like those of us that unfortunately allowed for the first one to happen.

And if you support this, I can only assume you're delusional or a paid shill, either way I hope you rot in whatever hell you believe in.

[glassygloss]

LETS STOP GATEKEEPING

I didn't use all those, it's just all the info i could gather

My patreon (free)|Discord

Apps to use to make CC's:

sims 4 studio (must)

canva (to make thumbnails and stuff, can be also any other program but it works best for me)

Krita/ibispaint or other drawing/photo editing software (that's where most of the work happens in making tattoo's/recoloring and stuff)

sims 4 manager (to make loading screens, here again canva comes handy, and pinterest of course)

Pinterest (to look for inspo/patterns)

Blender (to make 3d objects)

Marvelous Designer (to make clothes, not free unfortunately>:( )

Gshade/ReShade (to make reshades for the game)

Apps to use to make MODS:

Mod Constructor V5 (AN ABSOLUTE MUST IF YOU DON'T KNOW PROGRAMMING LIKE ME)

Sims 4 Studio (again, a must especially if you want to translate it or smt)

PyCharm (To my knowledge python is a really handy language that can enable you to make mods!)

Good to have:

mods that show you corrupted mods and CC's in the game(and if yours is not one of them)

CurseForge (for the same reason, it shows you which files are corrupted)

reddit (handy to ask for help there)

If i'll remember/see something else I'll let you know!!!

[the-64th-gamer]

I feel like the last year has been a great push for me to slowly detach myself from giant companies and ensure what I do is in my control and ownership

Finally switched over to linux permanently

switched to firefox

enabled adblocker, sponsor blockers, and tracker removers

disabled autoplay and the recommendations sidebar on YouTube (highly highly encourage, though I still keep the homepage open so I can choose when to browse new suggested content rather than it pestering me)

downloaded all my tumblr posts and now host them parallel on my website (stuck here until we find some decentralized way of doing social media right)

cleared out 99% of my online storage to now be on multiple hard-drive backups

downloaded locally all my music

removed myself from basically every data tracking social media platform except this and YouTube

And now currently I'm trying to consolidate all my feeds into just an RSS reader.

It takes a long time and a lot of planning, but its very rewarding to take control over what you want to see, how you see it, how its formatted, ect. I find these are my steps to an easy transition off a certain service:

Download all your data and back it up. Now your account can be deleted at any time with no remorse.

Find browser extensions that enhance and modify the experience to what you might need. Use that to tangibly guide your preferences. Go ahead and remove the app on your phone if its there.

Research every alternative service and try them out. Begin moving certain activity exclusively to the alternative. Take time getting used to it and see if its better to try more alternatives.

Completely jump ship, delete the account, move all feeds or settings over.

Its an ongoing process but there's still probably a few more years of this to go through. Future plans are:

Completely remove all prior emails and self host a new one

Get off Discord entirely except for running the wiki server. It sucks that Discord is so prevalent. Probably move to various forums. Maybe look into some sort of forum management software such as how RSS feeds tame articles and videos into one place.

Setup adblockers directly into my router so ads won't even appear on phones.

Setup my phone to just straight up also run linux. There's a few mobile-designed linux platforms to look into until I decide.

[gavstech]

The goal of Adaptive Authentication is to make the login process as seamless as possible for users and provide cybersecurity and compliance services. This is done by using contextual information about the user and their device to determine what type of authentication should be used.

Read more @ www.gavstech.com/role-of-adaptive-authentication-in-access-management-for-cybersecurity/