Is it time to ditch free email?

Tech Talk #174–Mar 5, 2022 Billions of people have email addresses ending in Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, or many others. These email addresses are easy to get and easy to remember. Moreover, those email providers do a reasonably respectable job securing your email, offering industry-standard security like two-factor authentication and encrypting the connection between your computer and their server. So, why would you want to switch to something else? Privacy. You know those big

By Greg Cunningham | | In Tech Talk | Read MoreLeave a comment

Something (s) old and something new

Tech Talk #173–Feb 19, 2022 Something old #1–Fake tech support scams I know we’ve talked about this before, but the fake tech support scammers are still out there. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, the FBI, or anyone else will not call you about your computer. So you know that when-not if-someone calls you, it’s a fake tech support scammer trying to take your money. You also know that while you’re on the internet, any screen or web

By Greg Cunningham | | In Tech Talk | Read MoreLeave a comment

Death and passwords

Tech Talk #172–Feb 5, 2022 Along with wills, revocable living trusts, financial power of attorney, and the rest of the paperwork don’t forget your digital life when planning your estate. Your email accounts, social media accounts, PayPal, Venmo, or other digital payment accounts, any websites you own, as well as digital currencies, are all considered digital assets and need to be part of your estate. What? Do you think you’re too young to worry about

By Greg Cunningham | | In Tech Talk | Read MoreLeave a comment

What’s an NFT?

Tech Talk #171–January 22, 2022 You may have heard of people and companies selling NFTs. For example, Marvel, William Shatner, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Grimes, and many more. But of what? Seemingly nonsensical things like clips from videos, JPG art, tweets, baseball cards, and even pet rocks. Seriously. You probably have some questions. Let’s start with the NFT part. NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Now you’re probably wondering what the heck non-fungible means? If we

By Greg Cunningham | | In Tech Talk | Read MoreLeave a comment

The worst passwords of 2021 and how not to be on the list

Tech Talk #170–January 8, 2022 After years of security breaches at the companies we trust with our data and zero-day security exploits against the back-end systems those companies use, you might expect that we’ve gotten better at picking passwords for our financial, shopping, email, and gaming sites, right? Wrong. Researchers go through the stolen user databases and compile lists of the most common passwords every year. One of the best lists this year comes from

By Greg Cunningham | | In Tech Talk | Read MoreLeave a comment