Meta Muse avatars

Hold Off on Muse, Dots

AI agents aren’t safe enough – not yet, anyway. Too Cute by Half Meta has recently released a powerful new AI agent app called Muse. And before I get to the actual problems, I simply can’t resist being petty and jaded first. The Muse app comes with an adorable avatar which you can (of course) […]

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AI-like god

Solving the AI Paradox

We can’t let artificial intelligence replace human skill. Star Trek warned us decades ago. The Automation Paradox I recently read a great article from IEEE Spectrum titled AI Efficiency Could Cost Us the Next Generation of Experts. It’s well worth a read, particularly if you’re in the software industry – but I’ll summarize the key

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Flint 2 wifi router

Use a Secure Wi-Fi Router

You should have a secure home router that you fully control. It’s probably the single most important security device on your home network. NOTE: I’ve written several detailed articles about securing your home network. Be sure to check those out, too. Why You Should Own Your Router For most people, the only thing between every

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young man helping older man at computer

Digital Citizen: Phase 2

Phase 1 was about improving your own security and privacy. For Phase 2, we’re paying it forward: help someone else do the same. Most of the reasoning behind this campaign to celebrate my upcoming 500th podcast was laid out in the first post here for Phase 1. If you haven’t read that, please start there.

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AI Tech Support: Trust, but Verify

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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Microsoft Patch Tuesday Fix History

Update All the Things

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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Celebrating 500 Episodes!

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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crowd of people on street

We Can Do This

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

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Backup Your Email Archive

[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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email library

Verify Your Email Archive

[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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