Faraday Bags
A bag that genuinely works turns your phone into a brick until you take it out. That is the whole feature, and it is also the whole complaint. Which bags and key fob boxes earn their price, and when the trade is worth making.
Topic
Security
A collection of 42 issues
Two-Factor Authentication Devices for 2023
A 2023 snapshot of the hardware key market, when the decision came down to price, durability, and whether you could read the firmware. The specific models have aged; the reasoning for picking one has not.
Is Your App Safe? A Simple Guide to Assessing Vulnerabilities
A friend forwards a headline about an app getting hacked and you have no idea whether it touches you. Four terms and a short set of questions that turn a scary-sounding score into a decision about your own phone.
Android "10" List
Ten things to change on a stock Android phone before you carry it anywhere. None of them take long, and the defaults were chosen for someone else's benefit — starting with everything under Location.
Introducing the Passphrase Card: Your Personalized Password Security Solution
A wallet card that carries no passwords, only a block of random words. What you memorize is a coordinate; what you carry is useless to whoever picks it up.
Travel Routers
Hotel Wi-Fi is a network you share with a few hundred strangers and, occasionally, one fake access point. A travel router turns that from a problem with every device you own into a problem with one.
Android Lockdown Mode
Two seconds on the power button drops the phone to PIN-only: no face, no fingerprint, no notification text on the lock screen. Worth finding the button before the moment you need it.
Phishing, Vishing, and Spam
Urgency is the tell. Your bank will happily let you hang up and call the number on the back of the card. A vishing caller cannot afford to let you do that, so they will not.
Virtual Private Network (VPN)
A VPN does not make you anonymous. It moves the question of who gets to watch your traffic away from the coffee shop and your carrier, and onto one company you have decided to trust. Choose that company carefully.
Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (Encrypted Cloud Storage)
Switching it on takes a couple of minutes. The part that matters is the 28 characters Apple shows you once: lose them and nobody, Apple included, can open your iCloud data again.