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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

Anyone who has kids in their home worries about how easy it is to access the seamier side of the Internet, even if by accident. Indeed, it is thrust upon us in our email in-boxes daily in the form of misspelled spam with links that only a fool would click. Another issue altogether is the [...]

Do you ever send documents to other people that might have … sensitive information embedded in them? Not everyone who works with documents in the home will run into this problem, but sooner or later you are probably going to find yourself in a situation where you would like to email someone a useful document [...]