September 2023

by Jeff McKamey

Social Security Breach!

So almost every single American’s SSN, addreses, previous addresses, and maybe your phone numbers have been leaked by the government!

If this were a company, they would have fined the company based on how many names were leaked, since it is the governemt, oh well!?

I think they should refund every fine to any company for leaking SSN numbers since every SSN is out there now.

Last page of this article:

https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-988-Notes.pdf

Website to see if you are part of the breach:

https://npd.pentester.com/

Canceling Subscriptions:

If you sign up for something online, some companies make you call, mail, or even certify mail to cancel.

There is a big loophole now; if you live in California, state law says if you can sign up easy peasy online, you have to allow people to get off online too.

So you just change your address to a generic California address, and then cancel….

https://a23.asmdc.org/press-releases/20211004-california-makes-it-easier-cancel-online-subscriptions

GetHuman

Can’t get a real person on the horn for a phone, cable or car repair?  This website tries to have the best number for each company to get a real person on the line:

https://gethuman.com/

Telling Chat GPT you want exact answers!

If you ask for an numeric answer to a problem, most AI’s will simply guess based on previous questions and answer like your question instead of doing the math.

You can tell chat GPT to NOT guess:

“If I ask any question that requires a precise answer (these usually, but not always, begin with “How many” or “How much”), do NOT guess the answer: Instead, write and run a Python script to determine the answer.”

And it will make a program to generate the answer, run the program, and give you the ‘real’ answer from then on.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/petermarreck_chatgpt-activity-7218263871831109632-SfHu?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android

Another AI picture generator

https://fal.ai/

Flighty adds early warning to flight delays:

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/06/flighty-update-flight-delays/

IOS 18.1 finally adds a photo clean up tool

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/31/top-stories-september-9-glowtime-iphone-event/

Google photos has had this for a while now:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-photos-backup-edit/id962194608

Box Phone Farms:

Box phone farms are why you can’t trust reviews and how popular something is.  You can buy a rack, and stage hundreds of phones (without the expensive batteries and screens) to go to websites for whatever you want.

https://phonefarm.some3c.com/

Video of someone demoing one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Sc1-qdtIDo

OnlyOffice:

Is yet another free office, only this one is on the cloud…

So this is if you want to have documents in the cloud, but you don’t trust Google or Microsoft, and want them on a computer you control:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice

https://www.onlyoffice.com/

If you want an office to run on your computer locally, Libreoffice is the best free one:

https://www.libreoffice.org/

Someone used airtags to see if their plastic is really being recycled

And sadly no, they are simply piling it up in a lot somewhere!

Apple AirTags Track ‘Recycled’ Plastic to Unprocessed Piles in an Open-Air Lot – Slashdot