Newsletter Archives

• Amazon quietly halts arbitrations — consumers can now sue

  Posted on June 14th, 2021 at 02:43 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  With no announcement, Amazon.com has changed its terms of service, which previously compelled aggrieved consumers to submit their claims to mandatory arbitration. But last month, the retail giant eliminated arbitration as a requirement and now allows customers to join in class-action lawsuits.

  This may make a big difference for you — and for anyone who’s ever used any of Amazon’s products and services — because you may someday be eligible for large, court-ordered refunds.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.22.0 (2021-06-14).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender Amazon, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender

• Buying crypto? Watch out for these 100 problems

  Posted on June 7th, 2021 at 02:45 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  ISSUE 18.21 • 2021-06-07

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  People in the tech industry tend to find cryptocurrency very attractive as a concept. After all, crypto coins are totally digital — there are no paper bills or metallic coins to handle — and you can transfer these “digicoins” to anyone in the world, instantly (in theory).

  The reality is that digital money is prey to all kinds of hacks and cons. Many people have lost their life savings because they converted their hard currency into crypto and got hacked. Bad actors used one security flaw or another to transfer the victims’ funds to themselves.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.21.0 (2021-06-07).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 18.21.F (2021-06-07).

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Cryptocurrency, Public Defender

• Don’t click those pop-ups that say you’ve been infected!

  Posted on May 31st, 2021 at 01:03 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  It’s been said before, but it bears repeating — when you see a pop-up window on your desktop, laptop, or smartphone screen that says you’ve been infected with a virus and must act immediately, don’t click it!

  These frightening warnings are invariably “bad ads” that use advertising networks to insert these pop-ups into websites and phone networks. Their goal is to get you to click a link and download malware, whether it’s a fake “antivirus program,” a malicious “virtual private network,” or some other backdoor into your personal life.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.20.0 (2021-05-31).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, phishing, Public Defender, security

• Amazon is turning Echo and Ring into transmitters on June 8

  Posted on May 24th, 2021 at 01:02 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  You may not have been expecting this, but those nice little Echo speakers you bought to play music — as well as your Ring Cams, Video Doorbell Pros, Level door locks, etc. — will begin talking on June 8 to a gaggle of gadgets that may be up to a mile from your home or office.

  These always-on communications will not use Wi-Fi, although your speakers, security cameras, and so forth probably already connect with your Wi-Fi router. Instead, Amazon has built a new capability into devices that the corporation may have sold to you as long ago as 2018.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.19.0 (2021-05-24).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender Amazon, Amazon Echo, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, LoRa, Public Defender, Ring

• Should you give Microsoft all of your passwords?

  Posted on May 17th, 2021 at 01:01 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  A new feature of Microsoft’s Edge browser is causing our readers to ask, “Is this MS initiative going to place our account info at risk?” Should Web users allow their browsers to store usernames and passwords for sites they must sign in to?

  You’re not going to like the answer, but it’s: Yes and No.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.18.0 (2021-05-17).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Microsoft, passwords, Public Defender

• Buy the drives you need before ‘chia’ gets them all

  Posted on May 10th, 2021 at 01:06 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Prices of high-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) have almost doubled at the producer level just in the past few weeks — and shortages are already affecting us. The cause is a new kind of cryptocurrency that demands vast amounts of disk space around the world for its financial network to function.

  The new digital coins, which began trading only a week ago, bear the odd moniker of “chia.”

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.17.0 (2021-05-10).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Cryptocurrency, hard drives, Public Defender, SSDs

• Microsoft Casual: It ain’t all fun ’n’ games

  Posted on May 3rd, 2021 at 01:04 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  New shoot-’em-up and twitch videogames get all the attention, but lots of people still like good ol’ strategy games, such as Solitaire and Minesweeper.

  Microsoft removed its games from Windows 8, but they’re just lightly hidden in Windows 10. In addition, the whole Microsoft Casual Games package is downloadable — and boy, are people having problems.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.16.0 (2021-05-03).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Games, Microsoft, Public Defender

• New smartphone? Great! Now don’t charge it past 80%

  Posted on April 12th, 2021 at 01:06 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Sales of new smartphones are skyrocketing — Samsung’s new S21 line sold three times as many units in the US in March 2021 as last year’s S20 series did in the same period, according to SamMobile — but few people are learning from the manufacturers about these phones’ dirty little secret.

  That’s the fact that charging these devices’ lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries to a full 100% wears out a great deal of your battery’s capacity within a year or two. This has been written about before. But in this story, I’ll show you how to triple the usable life of your gadgets’ batteries — either on your own or using a simple app.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.13.0 (2021-04-12).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Batteries, Battery charging, Public Defender

• The best laptop docking stations and hubs for 2021

  Posted on April 5th, 2021 at 01:06 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  More and more of us have been spending part of our time working in a business office and part of our time in a home office (which may sometimes be called “the kitchen table”).

  Even if you work primarily at home, there are always times when you want to work on your laptop in a hotel room or maybe that beach house you like to retreat to on weekends.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.12.0 (2021-04-05).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Docks, hardware, Public Defender

• LinkedIn deliberately scrambles résumé PDFs, experts say

  Posted on March 22nd, 2021 at 01:08 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  ISSUE 18.11 • 2021-03-22

  The AskWoody Newsletters will not be published on March 29, 2021. We’ll see you again on April 5, 2021.

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  LinkedIn — the foremost social network for working professionals, with 760 million members in more than 200 countries — constantly changes the format of its PDF résumés to make it hard for companies to search for possible job applicants, according to human-resource consultants.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.11.0 (2021-03-22).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 18.11.F (2021-03-22).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, LinkedIn, Public Defender

• There are no USB cables any more

  Posted on March 8th, 2021 at 01:04 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  It used to be that you could run any old USB cable between just about any two USB ports, and the devices on each end would simply work. But that hasn’t been true for a long, long time.

  As more and more manufacturers wanted to bring different devices with different needs to market, the standard USB-A cable was lost in the shuffle. Instead, we got a gaggle of novel USB connectors named Mini-A, Mini-B, Micro-A, Micro-B, Apple’s similar-but-different Lightning, and more.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.9.0 (2021-03-08).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender, Thunderbolt, USB, USB standards

• Here’s looking at you, kid: the child-cam scam

  Posted on March 1st, 2021 at 01:06 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

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  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  Here’s looking at you, kid: the child-cam scam

  By Brian Livingston

  It’s terrible when no one is paying attention to you. But it’s much worse when someone is paying attention to you whom you don’t WANT to be paying attention to you.

  Around the world, millions of nursery schools, daycare centers, and private homes have installed “child cams.” These are intended to allow parents to see what their kids and caregivers are doing at daycare, how their infants are sleeping in a crib room, and so on. Many of the systems allow the video to be viewed from a distance across the Internet.

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.8.0 (2021-03-01).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender, Security AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Internet of Things, privacy, Public Defender
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