by Katherine Villyard | Aug 27, 2018 | written for nontechnical friends
Password managers. You want one. Let’s do this in Q&A format, shall we? Q: WTF is a password manager and why do I want one? A: Have you ever forgotten a password? Do you use the same password on every site? Is your password...
by Katherine Villyard | Aug 13, 2018 | written for nontechnical friends
Okay, with all the securing all the things posts, it occurs to me that I haven’t actually explained this. (I did, however, explain this in depth for an interview at Large Internet Company, so it’s probably higher-level than I thought.) One of my first jobs...
by Katherine Villyard | Jul 30, 2018 | written for nontechnical friends
Here’s a short demo of sniffing. They [TM] can possibly do this to you at that nice free public wifi spot you’re using. They need to be on your network. This is geographically limited, by which I mean that if you’re in Kansas and visiting a server in...
by Katherine Villyard | Jul 16, 2018 | written for nontechnical friends
I’ve been trying to get people to encrypt their email, and send me encrypted email, since 1995 or so. Here’s why: email is cleartext. What does “cleartext” mean? Well, if your ISP is having you send your email out through port 25, you can do...
by Katherine Villyard | Jul 2, 2018 | written for nontechnical friends
If you’re a Windows user, you probably want to do your daily web surfing as a non-administrative user. This is because any process you launch (on any operating system) runs with your account’s permissions. That means that if your browser runs into an...