As we add more security or privacy extensions, like Norton Safe Web or Malwarebytes Browser Guard, some sites stop working as well for certain tasks. You should always have a plain unadulterated browser, say Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, DuckDuckGo Private Browser, and then you can copy the non-working website address from the address bar into your plain browser to see it things function differently.
Look-a-like domains are still being used for malware and scams. Sometimes we don’t type a domain name correctly, sometimes search results use letters in the domain name that look similar to what we expect. This is where that old fashioned skill of bookmarking known and good sites can save, rather than just searching each time for a particular site by using that top one line URL and search box in your web browser.
If you are curious whether your router’s IP address has been used in scanning or scamming out to the Internet (a sign of some computer or device on your network being compromised) go to GreyNoise IP Check at <https://check.labs.greynoise.io/>
Gmail users may soon be able to change their email address to a new one, so long as it is available. There is no published schedule for when this will roll out to US users but when it is you will find it as an option at https://myaccount.google.com/google-account-email
Users of duckduckgo.com may not have noticed that there is an AI version of that search engine at https://duck.ai. They promise that your interactions with the free and slightly older versions of popular AI models are kept private and won’t be use for any AI model training. You can always pay them for access to more modern versions, what you are buyings is that privacy, otherwise go straight to ChatGPT.com or google.ai and help their models learn from your tasks.
With holiday returns/exchanges, don’t just google and use the first number you find, get to the company’s real site and find their support number there, if you can’t find it on the packaging for the item itself. This might be harder for lesser known products but be aware that there are scam numbers out there at the top of google search results and in fake ads on many social platforms. These fake customer service numbers cost Americans over $835 million in fake charges this year.
If you are using AI for helping in fixing things, you should try iFixIt’s AI that is trained on their vast collection of curated repair guides (over 72,000 products covered). Called FixBot, and free for now, you can try it at https://www.ifixit.com/go/fixbot. As with any AI not all answers will be perfect and correct, but answers from humans also suffer that way.
If and when faced with needing to change a bunch of passwords, first create a long list of random passwords that you can just pick from as you move through all the places you need to change. Passwords are easy to make, look around the room, pick three or four objects and colors as a string of words, put a number somewhere in the middle, and ditto for capitalizing a letter and inserting some kind of punctuation mark. Then you are ready to quickly change a bunch of passwords, keeping track of which ones are used where.