Imagine scrolling through your social media feed only to find a targeted ad for a product you were casually discussing with a friend. Moments like these make us pause and wonder: how much of our lives are truly private anymore? I want to delve into the ever-changing landscape of privacy, tracing its evolution from pre-digital norms to the era of […]
The Changing Landscape of Privacy: From Pre-Internet Days to Future Implications
Podcasts – learning on the go, wherever you are
Right after the first iPhone came out (so somewhere around a decade ago), the company issued me an iPod Touch at work. That way, I could have the experience of working with the phones that many of our users were getting. I didn’t need a company phone at that time. Podcasts were still in their infancy at that time, but […]
Consumer Security Book Launch Update
update 11/1/17: My book is in the hands of a great editor, at this point I’ve missed my hard deadline and I don’t want to launch during the holidays. It’s too late to make Christmas sale dates, so I’ll shoot for the beginning of 2018. from 7/4/17: I am so excited about the upcoming book launch. The title is Your […]
The Math Behind a Good Password
Embed from Getty Images This post is actually a preface to another one I’m in the middle of right now, on password managers. But I wanted to take a minute and explain why your workplace insists on bizarre passwords, and how you can capitalize on that in your personal life. Why are there password requirements? When you have to change […]
Hoax List – 5 Things That Will Never Happen
Is this meme real or is it a hoax? We want to be good people and help others. And we would like to think that wealthy people and huge companies want to pass along some goodies. Unfortunately, there are people and groups that will take advantage of your good nature or your trusting tendencies. There are also people who […]
Limit Your Exposure
Unless you always save to your external drive or your mapped drive on your home server, you might consider disconnecting when not in use. The encrypting malware is getting really sophisticated and extends its reach to your mapped drives. That means if your offsite online backup solution operates as a mapped drive, your safety net could become no more useful […]
Sometimes It’s the Little Things
…or, in this case, the Itty Bitty. I get my news and information from a wide variety of sources: websites, newsletters, YouTube channels, and podcasts, primarily. Today’s media content lends itself well to consumer contribution, and that increases the value of each medium as well as each producer. I currently follow 17 podcasts, and the only reason I can do […]
Is Your Heart Bleeding?
What have you heard about the vulnerability called Heartbleed? More than you wanted to? Less than you needed to? Let me unpack it for you, only the part that you need to know, and then I’ll get a little deeper for those who want to stick around for the full meal. Let’s do a Good News/Bad News thing. What […]
The End of Support for XP–All is Not Lost!
Microsoft ended support for Windows XP today. The camps are divided as to whether that was just another ploy to get you to spend more money on another operating system, or whether it was time for XP to go gently into that good night. Keep reading to the end for a bit of a surprise. Let’s face it, XP was […]
What is “The Cloud” and Should I Be Using It?
This is a very simplified network drawing done in Microsoft Visio, using commonly accepted symbols. Something like this, only much more complex, would be used for planning a new network or an upgrade or change, or to identify where the technology components of a network are. In the center of the diagram, you see a Cloud symbol. This symbol has […]