Look, I’m just going to put this out as a blanket statement – you should never give ANY of your personal information out unless it’s absolutely necessary. This goes triple to big corporations. Think about it – if a stranger walked up to you on the street and asked for your home address, place of work, and phone number – would you hand that over without thinking? Not a chance. So, why is it you so freely do so with proven evil corporate giants?

Every “points card”, “loyalty card”, and so-forth is to track you. When the cashier asks for your email address for your receipt, or they want your postal code, tell them you decline. If they insist they need it (they don’t), ask them for their own personal phone number and home address. But giving in is only hurting you and stripping you of more of your privacy – possibly one of the only things you have left that’s actually yours. Think I’m paranoid, or question why it matters? Read on.

Fitting, seeing as he’s a real piece of shit. You may know him from such blockbuster films as “Above the law” or “Under Siege”. He’s even tried his hand at action/comedies like “The Glimmer Man”, but the real comedy is in how horribly scripted all this stuff is. He’s quite literally type-cast himself, where he more or less plays the same character in every movie; an ex-CIA/special-forces/Black-Ops agent with a secretive past, where he goes on to beat the living piss out of every bad-guy he comes across with his insane martial arts skills, then at the end of the movie makes out with the girl, and usually has some heartfelt message to share with the audience.

As a kid I remember the rumours always being “he can actually do all this stuff in real life!” and of course that makes him instantly cool. The thing is, Seagal is little more than a fraud. Which, in and of itself would be fine – he’d be just like so many other Hollywood celebrities. However the thing is he truly thinks he’s somehow this great authority on serious real life matters, and it’s that insane ego that’s put him in a whole new rank of horrible person. That, and a whole lot of sexual assault, among other things.

Nearly everyone has heard of Tinder. It was the “original” dating app that gamified trying to find love, or get laid. If you’re not familiar with it – likely because you haven’t been dating anytime over the past 10 years – then it’s really a simple concept. You match with people you like, you chat, date, and ideally things go well. However, there’s a whole world of nastiness behind it, and some of it’s users will gladly attest to these things, with others being completely oblivious.

I began writing this article as last week I got a shock I never saw coming. My account in Tinder got banned. I wish I could tell you why, but I’m absolutely clueless – with one exception that I’ll get into later in this post. With so many other apps out there, why would I care – especially with Tinder in hot competition as the worst dating app out there. Well, they kind of own everything and have the dating market cornered. Oh, and they’re evil.

Have you realized there’s a serious lack of emails in your inbox from Nigerian princes claiming you’ve magically inherited $7,285,51, but all you need to do is pay the processing fees to get the money? That’s no shock as everyone knows of those scams by now, even Grandma. If scammers are going to pull one over on you, they’re going to have to change up their tactics. And, they have.

The essence of a good scam is rooted in a couple of things. You want the victim to feel a sense of entitlement, you want them to feel a sense of reward, and you want to promise them

The latest scam revolves around a little social engineering to get you to reveal your 2FA keys. It’s actually pretty brilliant, and sadly I can see a lot of people falling prey as it’s so simplistic. Any good scam is at it’s core, and this one is incredibly well designed. Here’s how it goes down.

The inevitable happened to me today. I had something fail, and it’s wasn’t just a “little” something, either. My Synology DS1515+ NAS just won’t power on. This is the device that houses basically all of my data. I’ve got it configured in a RAID setup (I’ll talk about this more later), but the actual device just is dead. There was a power outage earlier today in a good portion of the city and I powered off my units before the battery backups were drained. When the power was restored, everything came back up but my NAS. The thing is, I’m sitting here very calm and not feeling panic in the least because I know I’m going to be OK.

But this wasn’t always the case. About 7 years ago I lost a TON of data. Basically everything. All my photos, music, movies, documents. It was a mess and I was devastated. I’d built a NAS on Ubuntu and had 5 drives in a RAID configuration – only 3 drives died and I had no idea until it was too late. I still have that server and there’s a reasonable chance I can recover a good portion of my data, but it’ll be $2500 and frankly I’ve been OK with that data loss. But, I learned a very valuable lesson and I’ll never let it happen again.