We’ve all come to rely heavily on access to the internet. Our smartphones, in particular, are mostly useless without it. Even games that have no need to connect to the internet to function still require access anyway (pssst: probably because they want to track you to make money). But we also have Kindles and laptops
Your phone number is arguably as strong a personal identifier as your social security, driver’s license or passport number. Once it became easy and free to “port” phone numbers to new land lines and cell phones, people stopped changing their number. Phone numbers have become a life-long unique identifiers. If there’s one non-governmental ID that’s
Downloading software shouldn’t be difficult or dangerous, but sadly, these days it can be both. So I wanted to write up a short guide on how to download software safely. The Good: Operating System & App Store Software Apple, Microsoft and Google have made it easy and safe to update your operating system. That’s a
If you own a Western Digital (WD) My Live Book backup drive, you may have had a rude awakening last week when you found all your data erased. (If you do have one, but haven’t been hit by this, you should immediately unplug your drive from the internet and monitor the WD support page on
Smartphones and ubiquitous internet access have paved the way for digitizing most of our daily lives. We can surf the web and steam movies from anywhere. But modern technology has also managed to supplant much more mundane analog and physical things, like all the crap we’re used to carrying in our purses and wallets: ID,
Firefox’s new Fission security feature is at once simple and complicated. It’s simple to use, but complicated to understand. But hey, that’s why I’m here. Web browsers today are extremely powerful and complex applications. Much of what we do on our computers these days is done in a web browser. With all the cloud services
[Editors note: I’m running a new coin promotion – check it out here!] This has been a long time coming, but it’s finally here and I’m super excited to finally announce this! In November 2020, I started brainstorming on something really cool and unique that I could offer my patrons on Patreon. I wanted to
Let’s face it. Passwords suck. I hate passwords – at least if I have to create and remember them. This is why I use a password manager (and you should, too). There are some other interesting technologies that can replace passwords in some cases, but the combination of user name and password is still really
Threat Technology just added me to their list of the 20 Best Computer Security Podcasts of 2021! Pretty cool. I managed to get on The Privacy Issue’s list of 10 Essential Privacy Podcasts a while back, which was great, too. It’s really hard to get noticed these days – there are so many podcasts out
Today I’m going to introduce you to Apple’s radical, internet-destroying new privacy technology: informed consent. What is App Tracking Transparency? Apple is calling its new program App Tracking Transparency (ATT). And it’s basically just what it implies – it makes ad tracking transparent to the user. Because ads are what makes the digital world go
