The side bar has always been a bit messy.  Rather than having a long “Recent topics” list, I’ve collapsed it into a single link to the shorter “Latest Topics” section of the forum. It presents the same list, but with more detail and in a larger font that is easier to read. I also moved […]

EDITORIAL By Will Fastie There is a wealth of information at AskWoody. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to find. If you have a long memory, you know I have mentioned a “forthcoming” search capability. Budget constraints and other priorities have delayed implementation, and we’re not quite sure when conditions will ease. In this brief […]

ISSUE 23.36 • 2026-09-07 PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston Spirit Airlines, an ultra-low-cost carrier that served nearly 90 destinations in the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean, went bankrupt and ceased all flight operations on May 2, 2026. Google, the search giant, won a competitive bidding process and will pay $10 million to buy Spirit’s […]

ISSUE 23.35.1 • 2026-09-01 By Susan Bradley Defer the Passkeys mandate for 365. Today, Microsoft begins its official effort to move Microsoft 365 customers from traditional authentication to what it calls “phishing-resistant” methods. This means Windows Hello, passkeys, or similar multifactor authentication (MFA) methods that are more secure. For consumers using 365, this will probably […]

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 […]

AI By Matthew S. Smith This might be hard to believe, but we’re now at least four years into the era of AI large language models — and perhaps up to nine, depending on your definition. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in 2022, GPT-3 was released in 2020, and the paper that defined the transformer architecture […]