Welcome!

I'm so glad you are here.

Although the Internet is an amazing resource for information, shopping, and socializing, it has become filled with scams, theft, and malware designed for a single purpose: to empty your wallets, investment accounts, and company coffers of hard earned cash.

The Surveillance Economy thrives on personal data you give up each time you visit a web site. Google and Facebook are giants gathering, packaging and selling your personal data every day. Online advertisers are bidding to buy data about you so they can earn money by serving you advertisements at virtually every site you visit online. Your personally identifiable information (PII) is under constant attack and stolen almost daily from companies with weak security practices you trusted to keep PII safe. Your passwords have been stolen and are likely being used to break in to sites that store your money and private data right now.

Anyone claiming to fix it all and make it completely safe for you is another scam artist ready to take your money and run.

My reason for being here is to educate you about how data breaches affect you and how you can become a "hard target" to keep scammers, malware, and data harvesters at bay. You'll learn how to make it harder for them to get your data so you can retain as much privacy as you can in today's online minefield. You'll understand how newsworthy data breaches affect you and what actions you can take to minimize your losses. Scammers, criminals, and unscrupulous data brokers look for easy targets. Become an online porcupine of deterrence.

Here's my deal: I'll give you news reports and understanding of the effects so you can take corrective actions to protect yourself, your family, and your company. You'll receive information about tools and techniques scammers are using to steal for money and data and what you can do to reduce your risk of becoming their next victim. We don't live in a vacuum; regulators and lawmakers must hear from you to make changes so I'll provide issues you can use to inform your elected representatives to update statutes and regulations for online protections.

Why subscribe?

Benefits of subscribing:

• Data breach news reports, how the breach effect you, and how to reduce your risk from exposed data.

• Commentary on how Artificial Intelligence is reshaping our daily online activities

• Notes and commentary on topical issues that affect your online activities

• Pictures and short vignettes of my cat Tigre the Tiger Tabby

If you become a paid subscriber, you'll also be able to:

• Comment and join a community of everyday people sharing experiences with each other and how they are making themselves online porcupines.

• Periodic "Ask the Ace" Q&A sessions for you to get your questions answered about online risk reduction

• Checklists and tools to harden your web browser that reduce and obscure personal data so you can retain more of your privacy online

• Processes for interacting with your email and social media activities to reduce your risk of triggering malware that can steal your data, money, and encrypt or destroy your devices

• Alerts about new online threats and corrective actions to implement to reduce your risk of attack and loss

Where do I use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in my writing process?

This section was inspired by

• Why Every Substack Creator Should Disclose Their AI Usage Policy

• Substack Live video: What’s your Substack’s AI policy? And why you need one

Here are opportunities for using AI in the writing process and how I have decided to live with it:

Brainstorming for ideas to write about - None. I come up with my own ideas and subjects to write about. There is so much happening in the world right now that I find no shortage of topics screaming for my attention.

Research: Yes. I use AI built into the search functions in the Brave, Edge, and Chrome browsers and related search engine sites. It is almost impossible to not use AI due to the up front, in your face deployment by their respective developers. I personally review the search results for veracity and any links provided as sources.

As a subscriber to Claude.ai, Microsoft CoPilot, and others in the future, I pose them questions requesting they search the web for a specific item or topic relevant to my research and specifically request links be included with the results (sometimes links are not provided). I use more than one AI during the research stage to see the differences in output when provided the same input. Once again, I personally review the source links for veracity and usefulness for my topic. Sometimes AI is just stupid!

Drafting: None. I create my own drafts. I occasionally request that AI provide an outline when a topic might benefit from a structured discussion. However, I use the outline as a suggestion and quite frequently deviate drastically from the generated outline.

Macro Editing and Revision: None. I learned from

Fact Checking: I personally fact check AI results received due to my inherent distrust of the technology, its propensity for hallucination, and on what data the AI was trained.

Micro Editing | Copy Editing | Proofreading: I subscribe to Microsoft Office and its tools. Microsoft is placing more AI into its proofing tools (spell check, grammar check, Editor) so AI will be used to fix my spelling errors at minimum. I frequently ignore grammar "fixes" because I have intentionally chosen to dispense with a particular rule due my own "artistic license" (insert raspberry here 😝).

As for proofreading, my lovely partner

Image Creation: I will occasionally use a generated AI image, such as those made available within the SubStack Post Editor with the "Insert Image" function. The majority of image uses are my own photographs or stock images licensed from an online stock image provider. For each stock image I acquire, I retain its related use license regardless of usage in publication.

Reader Data Protection: I do not use AI in any processing of reader data on or off the SubStack platform. In fact, I do not process any reader data. The only reader data processed is that which is native to the SubStack publisher platform commonly available to those of us who write regularly.

AI Training on my Writing: I have used the tools available to me as a SubStack writer to block AI training. That does not mean all AI will be blocked. It means my intentions are published to the ubiquitous AI content scrapers and it is up to those scrapers to honor my blockage settings. There is no way for me or anyone else to block an AI content scraper that willfully ignores blockage settings (DeepSeek, we see your routine violation of our wishes).

Audio & Video: Yes. AI has excellent capabilities for voice recognition and is quite useful for transcribing audio and video programs, inserting time stamps in the transcriptions, and summarizing descriptions. My main use for this is as a consumer of audio or video programs for future commentary. In the event I undertake publication of my own audio and video programs, I will certainly use AI transcription services as the labor-savers they are intended to be.

That covers how I use AI in my writing process. You are welcome to contact me for clarification or extended discussions on this topic.

Who am I?

I started my IT career over 30 years ago building high performance UNIX computer aided design (CAD) networks for semiconductor engineers in Silicon Valley, CA.

I transitioned into Internet engineering and communications in the mid-1990's and am a veteran of the year 2000 scare. In early 2000, computer worms became a problem, and I transitioned into computer network security.

In 2005, credit card data breaches were all over the news and I landed a job at Visa in the department responsible for compliance with their Cardholder Data Security Program where I reviewed audit reports of companies that processed Visa credit cards. In 2007 I moved into full-time credit card data security, auditing complex ecommerce networks for the next 15 years.

I've audited networks for Fortune 100 companies in the U.S.A. and traveled extensively to Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America working in cybersecurity.

Professional Certifications

• ISACA Certified Information Security Manager (CISM)

• ISACA Certified Information System Auditor (CISA)

• ISC2 Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP)

• ISC2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)

• CompTIA Secure Cloud Professional (CSCP)

• CompTIA Cloud+

• CompTIA CTT+ Classroom Trainer (cert retired 2023)

• CompTIA Security+

• Microsoft AZ-900, Azure Fundamentals

• Microsoft AI-900, Azure AI Fundamentals

• Microsoft MCSE Server 2003, Security – (cert retired 2020)

• PCI Professional (PCIP #1006-949)

• Toastmasters International Dynamic Leadership Proficient

• Toastmasters International Competent Communicator

I'm an amateur photographer - my father gave me my first camera at age 12. You can see my photo work at my other Substack Paul's Visual Arts.

I am a Contributing Author and Photographer at TASTE | Pacific Northwest, Linda Naylor's food and travel Substack. Learn how to steam artichokes here.

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