Do you have a shared computer somewhere in your life? A computer that anyone and everyone uses in order to hop online to do a quick web search or to print a document? I have been dealing with situations like this for years, working with computers in a small school and at a nonprofit volunteer [...]

It seemed like all we needed to do was mix in some numbers and funny characters and that would make our passwords extra super secret enough to protect our Lego ID from the dark force. This belief was based on the understanding that only those with supercomputers at their disposal would have the computational ability [...]

In case I haven’t made myself clear in other posts, I like PDF documents. I mean I Really Like PDF documents. And I want to be able to treat a PDF file exactly as I would a sheaf of printed pages. Then along comes someone who exploits yet another bug in someone’s PDF renderer. A [...]

I was recently searching for some material related to password generation and stumbled on a blog post from a few years ago that contains some very candid and eye-opening discussion on password security. How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords (onemansblog.com) The author starts off with a list of the top ten passwords, and how he [...]

A few weeks ago I pulled up a chair in front of an aging computer that is shared by many volunteers in order to log their work and do occasional web searches. After an hour or so of doing paperwork, I wanted to look something up on Google, so I selected the word and hit [...]

Several weeks ago I was sitting at the dining room table with a family friend going through a stack of documents and letters. Her husband had passed away suddenly some weeks before, and I was doing the best I could to help her untangle the paperwork and understand what was what. This unfortunate scene made [...]

It’s too comical to be true. A few months back, when I wrote an article warning about inadequate attempts at sanitizing PDF documents, I thought that any organization serious about censoring documents would not make such a basic error. Especially not a government agency, after the military had been caught by this pitfall. Apparently this [...]

A few months ago I wrote an article that touched upon the problems inherent in attempts to sanitize documents before sending them to the enemy—perhaps to remove competitor’s names or trade secrets. I was reading a post on a board I frequent where a person was describing exactly this kind of activity—removing sensitive information from [...]

I have always been a big fan of HowStuffWorks, with their detailed in-depth articles describing such disparate topics as manual transmissions and money laundering. Anyway, author Diane Dannenfeldt has written a lengthy article on How Paperless Offices Work, giving ample coverage to myriad aspects of the topic: Introduction to How Paperless Offices Work Benefits of [...]

A nastygram from my ISP let me know that I needed to take action to lock down my home network. In this article I discuss using a spare router in a somewhat unusual daisy chain configuration in order to banish the teenagers and all of their wifi devices to their own network.