When signing up for nearly any online service, you don’t have to give your real name, address, birthday, or anything. (Banking and URL registry not included.) Never give real answers to those “lost password challenge questions”. The odds of those answers being stored encrypted is low. If that company is...
We cannot protect ourselves from these ad corporations because they have eyes and ears hidden everywhere. They can see us and we can’t see them. They know who we are but we don’t know how they know. And we don’t know who “they” are.
Your debit card number is given out frequently if you regularly shop online. Every time you type it into a website you are trusting that they will handle your information properly and yet you have no way to know that they are doing so. Sooner or later, everyone seems to...
You know you hate ads. Why do you allow them into your life? They rob your screen space, bandwidth, and mental energy. You have the right to block them, and you should do so. How many hours per month do you think you could have back if you didn’t have...
When working with Microsoft support in an online chat, they have this lame excuse for me to divulge my phone number to them. It’s not new. It’s not just them. I have heard this before from many support reps. “Just in case we get disconnected give me your phone...
I’m glad I actually read the release notes this time. Simple QR is a good QR code reader on Android. There are no network permissions needed so I sort of trust it to work without wrecking my privacy. The recent update made a switch so that when you scan a...
It’s always irritated me when I talk about retaining my privacy by avoiding spyware, online ads, phone tracking, etc., and people respond by saying they don’t care because they have nothing to hide. I always saw that as a really shortsighted and ignorant way of viewing it but I couldn’t...
For many years I have played around with a home lab server. I tinkered around with self-hosting my own cloud storage, blog, password management, etc., but I have always abandoned the idea for fear that I might end up losing everything. Absent from my solutions has always been a good…...
What is it? Here’s a little pet-project I put together just for fun. It’s called CIPH-R.com (pronounced like “cipher”) It is for when you want to say a certain thing online but you know the word will get flagged and get your comment deleted. The solution is to create a ciph-r...
