Tech Commentary and Consideration will bring you deeper insights on technology uses. I’ll cover ethics, privacy, and security that isn’t particularly new but warrants address.
Just about a year ago, the Infotech security space was all ablaze with noise about this thing called “BadBIOS.” This was a scary bug, for several reasons. First, it was new, which meant that before the security researchers could come up with the cure for it, it could do a lot of damage; but that’s…
There have been several incidents in recent memory in which a service provider has stopped providing a free service or stopped providing service altogether. Most recently, the developers of TrueCrypt, a disk encryption product, announced that they were stopping all development and support of their product. They went so far as to alert users that…
answer: ALWAYS. It is a rare circumstance when our United States Supreme Court agrees so completely as they did in the case of Riley v. California: all nine of the Justices agreed that law enforcement officers DO need a search warrant to examine the contents of your cell phone. This question is no longer about…
The internet is a cool place, is it not? We now have access to information on a scale not dreamed of by our parents; our grandparents didn’t even know a lot of this information even existed. You can find countless places to pursue any of your interests. Some of the material is provided by subscription,…
You can only truly turn off this “feature” in the desktop/laptop version; on the Mobile app for iPhone, the best you can hope for is to force it to only work when your phone is connected to wi–fi. update: ios 7.1 includes the ability to turn OFF video autoplay: go to Settings>Facebook>Settings>Video; set Auto-play to OFF, or to Wi-Fi…
We live very different lives than our ancestors did just a generation ago. Many more of us work in some sort of office environment than our parents’ generation. While being a digital device user may not carry as many physical hazards as factory or farm or other industrial work, it is not without any risk…
Microsoft ended support for Windows XP today. The camps are divided as to whether that was just another ploy to get you to spend more money on another operating system, or whether it was time for XP to go gently into that good night. Keep reading to the end for a bit of a surprise….
It never was really safe to just surf around and clickety-click on interesting-looking stuff, but it just keeps getting truer and truer (is that grammatically correct?) that you have got to pay attention to what you’re doing on the web. You’ve got to pay attention when you get an email with a link or an…
That’s the answer; the question is, what do the bad guys want? Ultimately, the bottom line, at the end of the day, the spam, the botnets, the phishing emails, the hoax sites, it’s all about getting money, either directly or indirectly, from someone otherwise unwilling to give it up that easily. Let’s start with spam,…
There’s a great line from the movie Sneakers, when Robert Redford is in the limo with the Russian guy, and the Russian guy says, “You won’t know who to trust.” If you’re going to do any business online, you’ve got to trust someone, and knowing who the trusted trusters for trusting are is a great place…