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 [...]

Some decades ago, when I was in high school, I somehow managed to get my hands on a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook. For a teenager in a society before the Internet, this was a fascinating read, though tame by today’s standards.
I never really considered that this book might raise eyebrows until some years later [...]

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 is [...]

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 spam [...]

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 that [...]