The process of writing this article was much more educational than I anticipated. I started out to write about a breach of Snapchat usernames and phone numbers, so I could warn readers about using this service. Then I found out about the photo leaks—and more. I also found a significant amount of naiveté demonstrated by…
image courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives In the United States, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 325 million cellular devices in use (15), comprising phones, tablets, notebooks, hotspots, and, most recently, vehicles. We are generating a lot of data on these devices, and these devices are generating a lot of data—about us. At…
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…
I was reading one of my techie newsletters recently and the writer mentioned something of which I had never before heard: CubeSats. I know that there are a lot of things in space of which I have never before heard, but I thought I had heard of the big, important things. As it turns out,…
Rule Number One: Don’t get infected. But if you do, follow Rule Number Two: Clean it off your system immediately. If you read my post on CryptoLocker, you’re aware that it’s not always just that easy. Without a good backup you run the risk of losing everything, and even with a good backup, you’re in…
The term “net neutrality” refers to two different aspects, and the debate revolves around both of them. One part refers to priority treatment of some types of traffic over other types. Pure net neutrality would state and require that all traffic be treated equally. The other part involves access to all of the Internet regardless…
…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…
View image | gettyimages.com I listen to a lot of podcasts on various subjects, and recently I heard the hosts of the Digital Underground Podcast from Kaspersky Labs talking about a new web browser called Aviator. Built on Chromium, but designed for privacy, I figured I’d give it a try. I like Chrome, and I…
View image | gettyimages.com Under normal conditions, the human body has an astonishing capacity to self-regulate and heal itself. Unless weakened through misuse, environmental damage, or anomalies at the cellular level, to name just a few exceptions, we are largely capable of overcoming most illness and damage. Sometimes we have to help, like splinting or casting a…
In April of 2015, the Hubble Space Telescope will turn 25 years old, and in that quarter century, it has given scope to the imaginations of space geeks everywhere. Recently I saw a really neat photo that got me curious about the device, so I figured it’d make a great first space post here. I’ll…
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