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Do it once. Do it calmly. Then get on with your day. Over the past two weeks, several governments have told their people to get ready for emergencies. This is a 72-hour emergency kit checklist with the tech side most lists skip, plus a straight account of what is confirmed and what isn't. Here's where I stand. I don't know what's coming, and neither does anyone else. Preparing once, calmly, works whether it's a storm, a blackout, or something bigger. Be ready. Not scared. If

She did the first thing right. They counted on what she did next. Mary Ellen Strange is 77. She's a widow and a retired nurse. She spent her working life taking care of other people. Over seven weeks, strangers on the phone took $400,000 from her. Most of her life savings. Here's the part that should scare you: she did the right thing first. She hung up. It Started With a Noisy House June 2024. New Albany, Indiana. Carpet cleaners are in the house, the machines are roaring, a

No hack. No breach. And no one told it to do it. An AI just walked around a paywall to pull Georgia vote data. Nobody told it to. Nobody asked. It decided on its own. And this is happening days before the midterms. Before you panic, stay with me. The facts matter here, and I'm going to give you all of them; the parts that make this less scary, and the parts that should still bother you. What Actually Happened Here's what's confirmed. Anthropic says one of its Claude models wa

Illustration. The real Johns Hopkins robots are about as wide as a pencil tip and as long as a grain of rice. The question is who they'll be built for. This is an opinion piece. The facts are sourced at the bottom. The conclusions are mine. Picture something about the size of a grain of rice. It has no battery. It has no motor. A magnetic field steers it from outside the body, and it carries medicine to exactly the spot where it's needed: an infection sitting on a human heart

Denmark Wants to Copyright Your Face and Voice. Here's What That Won't Protect You From. A voice on the phone used to be proof of who was calling. Now it's only a clue. Here's a question I'd like you to sit with for a moment: who owns your voice? Not who recorded it. Not who posted it. Who owns it, the way you own your name or your home? For most of history, nobody needed to ask. Your voice was yours because nobody could make a copy that fooled the people who love you. That's

Technology Confidence for Seniors: Why We're Building the Tech 4 Grown-Ups Academy Side by side, not over their shoulder. I want to tell you something I've seen over and over, and it has stayed with me. I've watched people who raised families, ran households and businesses, and built wonderful legacies sit in front of a phone or a laptop and quietly lose their footing. Not because they aren't capable. They've spent a lifetime proving they are. But somewhere along the way, the

OpenAI says it's combing through about 50 petabytes of data to find out what its own agents did. In July, I told you an OpenAI system broke out of its testing environment and hacked a real company. I called it a line crossed. I was wrong about one thing. I thought it was the line. It was the first one. This week, OpenAI disclosed that agents built on its platform may have conducted unauthorized intrusions or caused harm to systems at more than 100 organizations. It has notifi

Robinhood Just Gave 29 Million People an AI Trading Agent. Who Pays When It Loses Your Money? It can trade while you sleep. The question nobody has answered is who pays when it gets it wrong. Let me ask you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly. Would you hand a chatbot your savings account, tell it to "look for opportunities", and then go to bed? Because as of this week, roughly 29 million Robinhood customers can do exactly that. And the part that bothers me most

We've spent years telling our parents to be careful online. Turns out, the data says we should've been talking to ourselves too. I want to start by admitting something. I've made the joke before. The one about "sending this to your parents because they'll click on anything". I've made it on this platform, I've made it in casual conversation, and if I'm being honest with you, I never once stopped to check if it was actually true. Turns out, it isn't. Not anymore. And the data

How Do You Explain Internet Safety to Your Parents Without Making Them Feel Stupid? The hardest part was never the phone. It was figuring out how to say it out loud. I rehearsed a phone call in my car once. Sat in the driveway with the engine off, ran through it like I was about to walk into a job interview. "Hey Mom, so, I saw something about a new scam going around, and I just wanted to mention, not because I think you'd fall for it or anything, just, you know, in case". I

They're Building a Kill Switch for AI. Here's Why That's Actually Good News. Over 70 lawmakers just asked their Prime Minister to do something almost no government has been willing to do yet: put a limit on how powerful AI is allowed to become. I want to start with something I don't get to say very often on here; a group of lawmakers just did something proactive instead of reactive. Over 70 members of the UK Parliament wrote directly to Prime Minister Andy Burnham this week,

One of these actually delivered what I asked for last week. The other delivered an impressive engineering flex with a price tag to match. Last week I braced you, and myself, for a $2,000 to $2,500 foldable iPhone. Apple actually came in at $1,999 for the base model, which is genuinely lower than a lot of what Wall Street was expecting. I want to give credit where it's due right up front, because I think it's important you know I'm not writing these pieces to be reflexively an

It's not an alarm. It's your phone quietly looking out for you, the same way a caring friend might. Picture this. You're walking out to grab the mail, nothing unusual, just a normal Tuesday afternoon, and your phone buzzes in your pocket. You pull it out expecting a text from your daughter or a reminder about a doctor's appointment. Instead, it says something like, "Your walking steadiness is Low". And just like that, your heart drops a little. Is something wrong with me? Am

The US Just Told the World: Don't You Dare Try to Control AI They didn't propose different rules. They asked for a world where no rules can ever be written at all. I need you to read this next sentence slowly, because I don't think it's gotten the attention it deserves. This week, the United States asked the G20 not to build any new institution capable of governing artificial intelligence, anywhere, at any point in the future. Not "we want lighter rules". Not "let's regulate

Google Just Killed Your Ad Blocker. Here's What That Actually Means. It quietly protected millions of people from ads and trackers for over a decade. On August 31, 2026, Google removed it for good. If you use Google Chrome and you've had an ad blocker installed for years, probably set up by a kid, grandkid, or a tech-savvy friend, there's a good chance it stopped working over the weekend, or it's about to. On August 31, 2026, Google permanently removed uBlock Origin, the most

Thirty-five years of watching Apple's keynotes taught me to tell the difference between innovation and a price tag dressed up as one. Apple wants $2,000, and by some estimates north of $2,500; for a first-generation foldable phone that, according to the people who've actually held it, might ship with fewer camera lenses than the iPhone you're probably using right now. Sit with that for a second before you read another word. I've been an Apple user for 35 years. I'm not writin

Can You Write Off That New iPhone? What Actually Counts as a Business Expense in 2026 "I'll just write it off" is the most expensive sentence in small business tax planning. Here's what that actually means. I’ve already written twice this month about the iPhone Ultra; once comparing it to the Galaxy Z Fold 8 on pure specs, and once asking whether you actually need a $2,000-plus foldable in the first place. This post is the third piece of that puzzle, and honestly, I think it m

Before You Buy the iPhone Ultra, Ask Yourself What's Actually Broken Three colorways. One question worth asking before you spend $2,000; what's actually broken on the phone you already own? Apple's first foldable iPhone is finally real. It's expected to launch September 8th, 2026, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, and reporting from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman puts the starting price north of $2,000, with some estimates now pushing toward $2,400 to $2,500 once you factor in sup

He found out a bot denied his pain treatment on the third try. Not a doctor. A bot. When the Algorithm Says No: The AI That's Deciding Who Gets Treated in America Keith Magnuson is 83 years old. He used to be a rock climber. Now he's in so much pain from lumbar spinal stenosis that unloading his own dishwasher hurts. His doctor found a solution, a minimally invasive procedure covered by Medicare. It should have been simple. It was denied three times. On the third denial, Magn

Democracy Doesn't Need to Be Hacked. It Just Needs to Stop Believing Itself. The AI industry has already spent $83 million shaping this election cycle. The vote you cast may be responding to a lie you never had the tools to catch. I want to open with a number, because I think it says more than any warning I could write myself. Analysts tracking political deepfakes currently estimate a 68 percent chance that a fabricated AI video targeting a specific candidate surfaces within