Tech Essentials

Your Emails Don’t Need to Wear Masks with Registered Email™ Message In places where there are indoor mask mandates like where I live in California there is the phenomenon now of loud talking. What used to be the punchline of a Seinfeld episode is now very much the reality for millions of people here in […]

Get Some Rest (for Your Files) for the Rest of Your Summer As we head into one of the summer’s final weekends, I’m doing the usual exercise of wondering where all the time went. This certainly was not a restful summer for the world what with Delta variants, ransomware attacks, record-setting wildfires and now hurricanes […]

Don’t Be Like 7sdf8dxz0sjh-3. Get RMail. Did you hear the one about the guy who couldn’t remember his “unhackable” Gmail password, so he changed his name to 7sdf8dxz0sjh-3? Now that you’ve stopped laughing uncontrollably, we can talk about something slightly more sobering: A new ransomware attack will occur every 11 seconds this year according to […]

Optimize 2021 Greater Than Tokyo 2020? The star-crossed 2020 Summer Olympics (held in 2021) will probably go down either as one of the most or least memorable Olympics in history. What will it be remembered for: the durability of the athletes and the organizers throughout a global pandemic? The willingness of some star athletes to […]

RMail — DDT for Ransomware Attackers Ransomware is again in the news—this time in terms of what state and local governments are actively doing to prevent it. At least three US states—New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania—are considering legislation that would ban state and local government agencies from paying ransom if they’re attacked by cyber […]

Hey You, Get Off (or On) My Cloud 15 or so years ago, ‘the cloud’ was considered the next big thing in business and personal technology. No longer did each machine you used Needed? have files or applications stored on it locally. When you worked on a document in the office, you now didn’t need […]

Ransomware Attacks Won’t Die–Just Multiply Ransomware has become such a hot topic with a seemingly new case every day that we thought we would pick up where we left off last week…

We Predicted the Death of Ransomware in 2017. Oh, Time Machines. We first wrote about Ransomware attacks in Tech Essentials in 2017 – back when a Bitcoin was valued at $1800 (oh, the good old days). The crux of the article was that many victims were paying their ransom to the cyber perpetrators, but they […]

Independence from Big Brother, Big Tech and Big Putin This time of year, Americans are obviously thinking about independence. And this year, independence will take on even greater importance because the lockdowns are over, and we are free again to travel to see our friends and family for the holiday.

No Mitsakes Were Made in This Week’s Artical “To Err Is To Be Human”—a great quotation coined, I believe, by Rodney Dangerfield, or maybe Alexander Pope. My mistake. To be human is great—you get to enjoy earthly pleasures like food and music in ways that machines will never be able to do (at least for […]