Yesterday was Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, WWDC, and as with every major Apple conference, it brought major news.

Per usual, rumors of forthcoming Apple hardware were rampant.

New AR glasses? Long-awaited updates to Apple TV? Servile robots?!

Alas, no robots were featured in the docket, but Apple made headlines with its marquee announcement: the HomePod, a smart speaker a la Amazon Echo and Google Home.

My nephew is acutely familiar with the Amazon Echo, somewhat addicted to shouting, “Alexa, play Bruno Mars!” at predominately inopportune times. Endearing!

If you’re unfamiliar, smart speakers have taken off in the past year, utilizing voice recognition technology, like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, to respond to verbal commands to play music, search for quick internet news and facts, and order merchandise online.

Echo and I’s relationship primarily revolves around, “Alexa, stop.”

Apple’s HomePod is a late arrival to a somewhat stacked market, but as with a few of the company’s other hardware offerings such as the iPad, Apple has shown the ability to enter the fray late and still dominate sales. Apple releases are synonymous with snaking lines, anxious crowds, and sky-high first day numbers.

Despite its late arrival, HomePod should prove no different.

Back to work and back to the blog after a nice, long weekend. I hope all of you had a safe and fun Memorial Day, a day to remember the fallen heroes who gave their lives in service to the country. PR/PR sends out its eternal gratitude to those who have gave that ultimate sacrifice, and our best wishes to the friends and families who lost a loved one to war.

They are the reason we are afforded the freedom to spend these days together.

We all long for a world without conflict, without war, without terrorism, without strife. A world free from Manchesters and Orlandos and Afghanistans and Syrias. A world where families receive loving returns instead of folded flags.

In spite of the universal desire to an end to global conflict, these brave men and women volunteer to defend their country, knowing full well that they may find themselves in the line of fire. They do what many wouldn’t. They have courage beyond comprehension.

Memorial Day ushers in the summer season. It’s filled with pool parties, slow-smoked ribs, sunscreen and an assortment of adult beverages. But the reason for this summer kick-off celebration are those who gave their lives defending the country. It’s important that we remember them, not just on Memorial Day, but each and every day on the calendar.

There’s not really much that can be said in the wake of these moments. Words alone are insufficient to effectively capture the horror, the immense grief, the stomach-turning feeling that it’s happened again.

Manchester didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserves this.

22 innocent people lost their lives last night, many of them children, simply enjoying an Ariana Grande concert with friends and family. Nearly 60 others were injured as an explosion tore through the crowd leaving the Manchester Arena. Authorities confirmed early on that they were investigating this as a terror attack.

In the same, sickening vein as the 2015 Bataclan attack in Paris, a coward targeted a concert where young people were merely trying to have a good time.

Also eerily similar to an attack that hits close to home, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting, which occurred nearly a year ago.

I witnessed first-hand how Orlandoans banded together in the immediate aftermath of Pulse; how a community stricken with anger and sorrow channeled those emotions to positively assist friends, neighbors, and strangers alike. I have no doubt that Manchester will do the same.

Our thoughts are with the United Kingdom, with Manchester, and with those who have lost loved ones in this horrific, craven attack.

Unless you’re living completely off the grid, you were most likely paranoid about the security of your computer over the weekend—and with good reason. The WannaCry hack affected hundreds of thousands of computers in over 150 countries, with costs estimating $4 billion. A ransomware virus that spread like wildfire, the hack illuminated the importance of safeguarding your hardware and avoiding suspect emails.

Ransomware is an incredibly nefarious type of computer virus. Users, many of whom clicked an email link which downloads the virus, find their files encrypted—access to them lost—and a message demanding payment to release the files.

If payment is not remitted, the program increases the cost of release and then threatens to begin deleting files until it is received. The WannaCry ransomware hack appears to be the most dangerous—and successful—of these types of viruses so far, and reinforced the necessity of keeping your operating system updated with the latest security patches.

In this particular situation, the initial infection tool was stolen from the NSA, which allowed hackers to take advantage of vulnerabilities in Windows XP software. Microsoft had released an update that rectified the weakness—but many large companies simply failed to install it.

As a result, the ransomware virus disrupted the ability of Britain’s National Health Service to conduct its work, shut down operations in France’s Renault factories, and infected the computers at FedEx. Businesses, government entities, and individuals are still reeling from this cyberattack—one which was accidentally stopped by a 22-year old who triggered a virtual “kill switch” in the code.

Authorities have already warned that the ransomware virus could immediately return after some tweaks to the coding, so use today’s blog as a reminder to update and protect your systems.

Deriding social media as an entity that has adverse effects on people and society is a well-established narrative. There’s the anecdotes about couples out to dinner and glued to their phones. Cautionary tales that detail the depths of Facebook addiction. Antisocial Media crusaders who speak on the negative impact that social media can have on social skills and interaction when you trade life for likes.

It’s no secret that social media can be a massive source of distraction; but now the state of Wisconsin is attempting to show some facts and figures and to how distracting it can be.

Four public schools in Madison, Wisconsin have announced a pilot program that will study the impact that social media has on students. Students at two high schools and middle schools will be unable to access campus Wi-Fi when attempting to use certain social media apps, such as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram.

The aim is to ascertain data to compare to other schools without the social media blackout in place, and truly see the correlation between unfettered internet access to school performance.

For most of us, the concept of Facebook in physics class is a foreign one. Text messaging was a new—and expensive—feature for those in my age bracket, so cell phones didn’t provide as much of a distractive element in school as they now do. Personally, I could not fathom trying to study geometry postulates and theorems when I’ve been tagged in a post and my notifications are lighting up. It’s a new aspect of the learning environment that has proven challenging for teachers and students alike.

Results of the study will be available by the end of 2017’s school year. It will be intriguing to see what they show.