If You Are Not Paying, You Are the Product. It is an old line by now, but it has not stopped being true. A weather app, a flashlight app, a game that costs nothing to download — someone still has to pay the engineers, the servers, and the app store's cut. When the price tag [...]
That Free Extension Might Be Reading Every Page You Open. A coupon finder. A grammar checker. A screenshot tool. Small browser extensions solve small, specific problems, and most people install a handful without much thought — a quick click on a browser's extension store, and it is running in the background from that point forward. [...]
Your Password Was Never Enough. A password is a single point of failure. It can be guessed, phished, leaked in a breach you had nothing to do with, or reused across enough sites that just one weak link takes down all of them. None of that is a character flaw — it is simply what [...]
The Safest Place to Store Your Data Has No Wi-Fi. There is a piece of hardware that costs less than a dinner out, fits in your pocket, requires no subscription, cannot be hacked remotely, and gives you complete ownership of everything stored on it. It has no cloud sync. No company has access to it. [...]
Your Passwords Are Only As Safe As the Company Holding Them. Cloud storage is convenient. Cloud password managers are convenient. Automatic backups to the cloud are convenient. Convenience, however, is not the same as secure — and the gap between those two things has cost millions of people dearly. When you store your passwords, your [...]
Your Laptop Is Replaceable. Your Files Are Not. Think Accordingly. Here is a way of thinking about your computer that most people have never considered: your device and your data are two entirely separate things, and treating them as if they belong together is one of the most common and costly mistakes in personal digital [...]
One Unhappy Employee Stands Between You and a Data Breach. When people think about data breaches, they imagine sophisticated hackers working from anonymous locations, exploiting complex technical vulnerabilities with advanced tools. That image is not wrong. But it accounts for only part of the picture. A significant and growing proportion of data breaches do not [...]
The Hook Is Already in the Water. Have You Seen It? Right now, as you read this, approximately 3.4 billion phishing emails are being sent. Every day. That is not a typo. Every 39 seconds, another wave of fraudulent messages goes out — to inboxes, to phones, to social media accounts — each one designed [...]
Have We Become So Lazy That We Need a Fridge Telling Us What To Buy? Walk through any appliance showroom and you will find refrigerators with touchscreens and cameras inside. Washing machines that order their own detergent. Ovens you can preheat from your phone. Air fryers with companion apps. Coffee makers that connect to Wi-Fi. [...]
Before You Click That Link — Read This. Every day, on every device, you are presented with links. In emails, in text messages, in social media posts, in search results, in documents, in chat applications. Clicking links is so fundamental to how the internet works that most people do it reflexively — without hesitation, without [...]
