It's time to expose what I have in my backpack! What does it mean to have gear in your backpack that supports digital resilience while you are away from your home? Here are some notes on my goals for a digital resilience backpack, and what I have in mine. Read more...

If you are not already digitally resilient, then now is the time to take some action. The first few weeks of 2021 have seen a cascade of events that bring up a lot of issues relating to our use of technology. The President is permanently banned from Twitter and other platforms for incitement to violence. People who took part in the Capitol insurrection are tracked down by cellphone and social media data. The Parler social media platform that was a favorite of right-wing free speech is shut down after Apple and Google remove the app from their stores, and Amazon Web Services turns off hosting services. Before it goes down, a crowdsourced effort to download Parler content results in terabytes of previously public and non-public content being downloaded, presumably to go public in the near future. WhatsApp announced changes to the terms of service for its messaging app which seemed to result in a mass exodus to alternate apps Signal and Telegram. And finally the the Signal app went down for a whole day after its servers were overwhelmed by new members. Read more...

Many of you will have heard of the problems a couple of days ago that prevented people upgrading to Big Sur, and caused everyone's Macs to behave sluggishly, weirdly hanging when you tried to open apps. It turns out this was due to a background process called trustd that runs on your Mac, and whenever you open a 3rd party app it communicates with an Apple server at the address ocsp.apple.com (credit to Jeff Johnson for figuring this out and putting it out on Twitter). It turns out this is the tip of the iceberg. Apple is constantly making calls to its servers for all kinds of purposes - some known, some unknown - from your machine back to the mothership. Read more...

In the privacy and security forums that I follow, there has been discussion recently about compartmentalization. Compartmentalization is separating different parts of your digital life, for example using different computers for work and personal use. This enables you to prevent an issue in one part of your digital life such as a ransomware attack bleeding into another area, in the same way that compartmentalization of a ship's hull prevents the ship sinking if one part is breached and flooded. Read more...

It's hard to overstate the extent to which our lives have been changed by technology over the last few decades. The mass adoption of the Internet in the 1990's, social media and smartphones in the 2000's and now the advent of pervasive Internet-connected devices have all transformed how we work, live, and relate to others. We spend much of our day in front of one kind of screen or another, absorbing information and doing the transactions of everyday life digitally. Read more...

BusinessInsider just published an article entitled What it's like to get locked out of Google indefinitely that highlights the risks of entrusting your data to big tech companies like Google. Users report being banned by Google for supposedly violating its terms, immediately losing all access to their email, files, and other data. You don't have to risk this happening to you. Here, I'm going to describe how to extract your important stuff from Google to local storage. Read more...

Maslow's hierarchy describes a five-tier model of human needs, usually depicted as a pyramid with the most essential needs at the bottom and successive layers of need that can be met when the more basic needs are fulfilled. The most basic need is physiological (air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, reproduction), followed by security (employment, resources, health, property), love and belonging (friendship, intimacy, family, sense of connection), esteem (respect, self-esteem, status, recognition, strength, freedom), and finally self-actualization (desire to become the most that one can be). Read more...

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