COMMENTARY By Will Fastie I don’t have a problem embracing change, except for grocery prices. In most cases, my complaints are usually centered on things made worse by changes or on things that should be changed but aren’t. I want stuff to advance, to become better and more helpful. My complaints seem to be rising. […]

FROM THE FORUMS I recently wrote the article Older software to the rescue, which included a note about my having replaced Adobe Acrobat DC with the ten-year-old program PDF Fusion. The forum topic associated with the article received a lot of traffic. Although I mentioned other old software in the article, forum participants homed in […]

When you move from one computer to another, the first thing you have to take stock of is the accessories that go with it.  Case in point: The new Apple silicon-based local AI machine arrived, and I realized that all my USB-C to USB-A adapters were either at home, or they went the wrong way […]

SOFTWARE By Will Fastie Adobe continues to be very annoying, to the extent that I reverted to older software to duck the problem. In the past three weeks, two of my “clients” (of the friends-and-family variety) came to me asking for help. In each case, the problem was Adobe software. Then I finally got fed […]

ISSUE 23.24 • 2026-06-15 WINDOWS 11 By Martin Brinkmann Without a single warning, Microsoft may quietly hijack your local files and hold them hostage in the cloud to upsell you a OneDrive subscription. With a few steps, you can break the link and reclaim your data. Do a quick experiment right now. Open File Explorer, […]

ISSUE 23.22 • 2026-06-01 PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston Waves of state-sponsored malware attacks are expected to overwhelm traditional antivirus software as early as July 2026. By then, hacker teams will surely gain access to powerful large language models (LLMs) such as Anthropic’s Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s GPT-5.4-Cyber. In April 2026, Anthropic and OpenAI announced […]

PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston The maker of the popular Claude large language model (LLM) — which became the number-one download from US app stores in February 2026 — recently announced a powerful service called Claude Mythos. The new LLM has reportedly discovered thousands of security holes in every major operating system and Web browser. […]