Everything you know about passwords is wrong. But then, you probably knew that. I’ve been harping on the various exercises in futility that is password setting for some time. Most recently, I talked about password patterns — how we all use them, and how they make life easy for would-be [Keep reading]
If you use retail store gift cards, you should know: They’re not safe. Criminals are remotely draining their value, and unlike credit cards, consumers have no fraud liability protections. If your retail gift card is hacked, you are screwed — you have no rights to get the money back. [Keep reading]
The Dow is up about 20 percent since Donald Trump’s election. Wages are up 2.5 percent on an annualized basis. That’s what you need to know about the U.S. economy right now. Sure, today’s jobs report has lots of people cheering. Most of them are cheering, however, because the news [Keep reading]
Getting a mortgage while holding student loan debt can be tricky — and not just for the obvious reason (a big loan payment can be a budget killer). When making mortgage decisions, lenders sometimes don’t know how to treat all the various repayment plans that student borrowers can utilize. Recently, [Keep reading]
Computer users have something new to worry about in the cat-and-mouse game with hackers. You probably use “password patterns” to create easy-to-remember-but-hard-to-guess passwords. Well, the criminals are on to you. Their ability to detect such patterns may have figured prominently in the high-profile attack on a security professional earlier this [Keep reading]
Choice. It makes a free market work. Yet how many times recently have you tried to do everyday things like book a flight, purchase cable TV, get Internet service, even buy eyeglasses…and discovered you don’t really have much of a choice. Instead, you face a giant corporate monopoly. Sure, perhaps [Keep reading]
It was easy to impersonate White House officials like Jared Kuschner and Reince Preibus or even Eric Trump. It fooled plenty of people who should have known better, like Anthony Scaramucci, former Utah governor and presidential candidate Jon Hunstman, Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert — and Trump, too. This [Keep reading]
Bob’s note: It’s rough out there for consumers. Large corporations spend billions of dollars learning how to “hack” marketplaces, and people, getting them to overpay for things or tricking them into buying items that aren’t what they seem. Screaming “that’s not fair!” rarely gets you anywhere, however. That’s why today [Keep reading]
MISSOULA, SOME SUMMER EVENING — There are plenty of good reasons to visit Montana. The mountains. The sky. The air. You know all this. Usually when it comes to vacationing with pets it’s easier to simply use a Campervan Finder to find a campervan or motorhome, as so many hotels [Keep reading]
The next time you speak to a debt collector, you might find yourself negotiating with a computer. And you might actually prefer that. Consumers buy toothpaste and bread without talking to a person. They get boarding passes for flights with a few swipes of a credit card or mobile phone. [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan