Phone Gone With Your Codes On It? The Order That Gets You Back In
The device that proves who you are is gone, and every recovery route asks you to prove who you are. There is a way through it, and the order matters.
Collection
Digital
7 stories filed to the Digital desk — newest first.
A Drill on a Quiet Morning: Proving the Backup Works Before Anybody Needs It
Backup software reports whether it finished, not whether the result is usable. The only test that answers the second question is putting something back.
Required Elements and Empty Phrases: How to Read the Breach Letter You Just Received
These letters are drafted to satisfy a statutory list and to concede as little as possible beyond it. Reading them for what is absent is more useful than reading them for what is there.
Green Lights and Empty Restores: What a Failed Small Business Backup Looks Like
Nobody is quoted in this piece. The same questions went to several people who do small business recovery work, and the answers are reported rather than attributed.
The Enrollment Code and the Free Freeze: Reading a Breach Letter for What It Omits
The code in a breach notification buys an alert after something has happened. A freeze stops the thing from happening, and only one of the two is free forever.
Browser Vault, Paid Manager, Paper Notebook: Which One Suits Which Household
Three ways of keeping passwords are in wide use and all three are defensible. They fail in different directions, and the right one depends on who else lives in the house.
The Password Rules You Were Trained On Were Withdrawn by the People Who Wrote Them
Change it every ninety days, one capital, one digit, one symbol. Those instructions came from a specific place, and that place reversed them years ago.