Showing 1 - 5 of 5
Protect yourself when online
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/08/2022
» A friend of mine, let's call him Dave, wrote to me recently about identity theft. He told me that all of his identifying information like phone numbers, email addresses, old passwords and his usual security questions, were all available on the dark web. He also had a number of notifications of personal information breaches that resulted in fraudulent charges, the need to replace credit cards and attempts to set up fake bank accounts in his name. The latter is used if a hacker is planning to get into your other accounts so they can transfer funds to themselves under your name.
Connected to the grid for life
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/08/2016
» I had an unsettling experience recently where all of my Yahoo emails seemed to vanish and I mean everything. When I logged into my account it was completely bare. While it was all there a couple of hours later it made me realise just how dependent I was on my email account. Thinking a bit more I realised that I also depend on Skype and to a smaller extent Yahoo. Then I thought about the people who have a much larger online presence. For some who are always sending electronic messages it could be a terrifying experience to be suddenly cut off from all regular communication. This kind of effect is a very modern one and I suspect that it has not been investigated very thoroughly in the journals as yet but I suspect it will be a newly defined psychology condition sometime in the near future.
Connected to the grid for life
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/08/2016
» I had an unsettling experience recently where all of my Yahoo emails seemed to vanish and I mean everything. When I logged into my account it was completely bare. While it was all there a couple of hours later it made me realise just how dependent I was on my email account. Thinking a bit more I realised that I also depend on Skype and to a smaller extent Yahoo. Then I thought about the people who have a much larger online presence. For some who are always sending electronic messages it could be a terrifying experience to be suddenly cut off from all regular communication. This kind of effect is a very modern one and I suspect that it has not been investigated very thoroughly in the journals as yet but I suspect it will be a newly defined psychology condition sometime in the near future.
Let it all go with Pokémon
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/07/2016
» The Pokémon Go game is taking the smartphone world by storm. Like Ingress before it, it is a real world location based game so you physically have to get out of the house to play it. Unlike Ingress, it has a cartoon character so kids love it but mums and dads don't so much because they have to drive their kids around to out of the way places to get the next Pokémon. This is another game by Niantic, a group within Google and the ones who built Ingress. The game was also quite insecure on iOS phones but that was apparently fixed with a patch. There have been no issues reported by Android phone users.
Operating without support
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/10/2015
» For most customers, Windows Server 2003 ran out of even extended support back in July but there are still plenty of people using it, including the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) where half of their servers are still running on the old but very good at the time operating system. For some, running an old operating system has no downside. What software and functionality that is running on it has probably happily been doing so for a decade or more and also in all likelihood without any problems. If the device is not connected to a public network of any kind then the risk of security breaches is also very low so missing out on any security updates is likely to have no impact. There is also no need to upgrade hardware to support a later and more demanding operating system. For some users this is a win-win.