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 […]

ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley Passwords. We’ve had them for a long time. They’ve served us well. But they are also subject to attacks — phishing and spoofing. Microsoft and many other vendors want us to move to passkeys. Unfortunately, the transition has not been easy or clear. Passwords are what we are used to. […]

BEN’S WORKSHOP By Ben Myers For nearly three decades, I have been recycling electronic components — mostly for the gold content they contain, but also for the rare earths and other elements inside. So, here is how electronics recycling works, how it fits into the ecology of the electronics biz, and what you might do […]

ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley The “edge,” by which I mean the network hardware standing between the Internet and the PCs and devices on your network, is a first line of defense against attackers. What’s on your edge? At any point during the day, attackers are out to get someone. You may not be the […]

As I mentioned on Wednesday, today I attended a seminar about creating a local AI solution for business. The main reason? Besides data privacy, small businesses may want to turn to local AI for lower cost. Right now, cloud AI is heavily funded by investors. When they pivot to IPOs and go public, those investors […]

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. […]

ISSUE 23.15 • 2026-04-13 FROM THE FORUMS By Will Fastie Last week, we published a Public Defender column by Brian Livingston titled Any USB drive or cable you plug in might be a silent killer. You might have seen the reaction in the column’s forum topic. The forum exploded. So did my inbox. Read the […]

AI By Michael A. Covington Malfunctioning AI can hurt people. Preventing harm isn’t easy. To detect automatically whether an AI system is giving people bad advice, for instance, you’d need an AI that is smarter than the original one; and if you had it, you’d have used it in the first place. You see the […]

ISSUE 23.13 • 2026-03-30 LEGAL BRIEF By Max Stul Oppenheimer, Esq. This prestigious award, the Knuttie, memorializes King Knut. Or Cnut or Knute or Cnute. Or Knud or Knutur or Canuto, Canutus, Knutr, or Nuutti. (He preceded spell-check.) Anyway, Knut of Denmark conquered England, Scotland, Norway, and parts of Sweden but is best remembered for […]

Whenever I hear or see headlines about a “supply chain vulnerability,” I think in terms of big enterprises and delivery of goods and services. You know — supplies. But in technology, the term “supply chain attack” means that an attacker has gotten into something trusted — such as a software vendor, service provider, hardware supplier […]