You shouldn’t know any of your passwords. You should only know one password: the master password for your password vault. That is, you should be using a password manager to generate, store and auto-fill super-strong passwords. There are other “passwordless” technologies on the horizon, but for now, passwords (with two-factor authentication) are still the best …
Convenience is often at odds with security and privacy. In other words, we often need to add some friction to our lives in order to be more secure and private. There are many inconveniences we’ve all learned to live with in the physical world. We lock our houses when we leave. We hide valuables in …
You are tracked mercilessly today when you surf the web, either on your computer or your smartphone. Websites use several different techniques to identify you and record as much data about you as they can. While marketers will claim that you have the power to opt out of most tracking, this is frankly impossible to …
[NOTE: This promotion has ended, but I’ll be doing more this year – watch this space.] You asked for it, you got it: the challenge coins are back! Last year, over the course of several months, I designed and commissioned a set of 100 super-cool, security-enhancing dragon challenge coins to give out to new patrons …
Several years ago, I wrote a comprehensive article on choosing a secure and private browser. I called it Browser Safety: Choose Your Weapon. But I decided it was time to update this article and focus instead on privacy. Security is not really a key differentiator these days. Of the top five desktop browsers today – …
Privacy and security are related, but they’re not the same thing. I would say security enables privacy – for example, using encryption to hide the contents of files and messages. But many companies market virtual private networks (VPNs) as security products, with terms like “military-grade encryption” that are supposed to sound impressive. Much of these …
One of my personal goals for 2022 was to “de-Google” my life. I’ve been a huge user of Google’s products for years, so this was not going to be easy. But Google is an ad company and they’ve hoovered up way too much of my data. So I wanted to reduce my dependency on their …
[This is a multiple-part series – go here for the full list] Welcome to Part 4 of my De-Google series. If you haven’t done so already, I’d start with the first article (strategy), even if you want to read the other articles out of order. You’ll find nice jump links as the bottom of the …
[This is a multiple-part series – go here for the full list] Welcome to my series on reducing my Google footprint, where I explain how to de-Google your life. So far, I’ve explained how to asses your Google privacy “damage” and staunch the “bleeding” of further information. Then I explained how to replace Android, Google …
I started my podcast, Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons, on March 8th, 2017. Hard to believe I’ve been doing this every week for five years! The show has come a long way over these years. And I decided to celebrate this milestone with a massive giveaway! Scroll down to see the prizes and enter the giveaway! …
