AI has plenty of shortcomings and I don’t recommend trusting it blindly. But it’s also an incredibly useful tool when used carefully. Let me give you an example use case that almost everyone would find valuable. LLMs Are Not Like Search Engines Large Language Models (LLMs) or “chatbots” – like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Lumo […]
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Modern AI is being used to find and fix hundreds of critical software bugs. But you can’t benefit from a fix you never install. Take a look at the image above. Microsoft’s most recent software update included fixes for over 600 vulnerabilities. (Microsoft releases fixes on the second Tuesday of every month, which has become
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My podcast is about to hit a major milestone: 500 episodes! I’ve spent the last several months thinking about how I wanted to celebrate that milestone. I decided I didn’t want to celebrate by giving away prizes or making this about me. Instead, I’d like to celebrate by seeing whether we can make the Internet
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As America approaches its 250th birthday and I approach my 500th podcast episode, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’m hoping you’ll humor me for a bit as I wax philosophical. Don’t worry, I won’t get political (we have too much of that already). And yes, this will still be about cybersecurity and privacy
[This part 4 of a multi-part series – start here.] Now that we’ve painstakingly archived our online email history, it’s time to carefully protect it before we delete the online copies. Locating Your Profile Folder Assuming you used Thunderbird, it’s pretty easy to back up all of your emails (and contacts and anything else you
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[This part 3 of a multi-part series – start here.] Before we purge our online email history, we should make sure we have a complete archive. Trust, but Verify In the last article, we started downloading all of our historical emails from Google (Gmail), Yahoo and/or Microsoft (Outlook). If you had years of emails, this
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[This part 2 of a multi-part series – start here.] Before we purge our online email history, we should make a complete and searchable backup. Blazing Trails Email apps, or “clients”, are designed primarily to send and receive emails. They also have the ability to store older emails, including searching them, organizing them into folders,
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For years, we’ve been depositing personal data into online accounts. And while it sits there, it’s not just stored – it may be analyzed, correlated, shared, monetized or leaked. It may be time to withdraw that data and put it somewhere safer. Let’s start with some of the oldest online data: email. Postcards, Not Letters
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The big AI companies are simultaneously touting the promise and peril of their wares. So… which is it? So Good It’s Scary In the last week, two of the leading AI companies announced the availability of new AI models that were so good at coding that they were basically afraid to release them to the
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Spring has sprung! And right now is an excellent time to clean up your digital devices. Subtraction Makes You Safer When we think about improving security and privacy, we tend to add things: password managers, VPNs, encrypted communication apps. But one of the most effective ways to protect yourself is much simpler: remove what you
