Comments by "Patrick Berry" (@MundaneGray) on "Ask Leo!"
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On the subject of overheating, many people don't understand how this works in laptops. Your laptop's air intake vent is almost certainly on the bottom. The feet on the bottom provide only a fraction of an inch clearance between the bottom of the case and the surface it sits on, but as long as it's a hard, flat surface like a table, the ventilation works fine.
BUT . . . if you place the laptop on a soft surface like a bed, sofa cushion, or pillow, the intake vent is BLOCKED. This is an excellent way to overheat the machine. (My daughter killed her first laptop by doing this.) If you really want to use your laptop on a bed or sofa, get a lap desk (basically a pillow with a hard, flat top) and put that between your laptop and the soft surface. Lap desks are available for as little as $10 from places like Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon.
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I wish there were some way we could abolish the idea of perfect safety, because it's a pipe dream. But so many people believe in it and waste huge amounts of time chasing it. In cybersecurity, the first thing you need to do is to let go of the notion that you can create impregnable defenses that will eliminate the threat of something like ransomware. You can't. Only after you accept that will you be able to actually improve your security by taking measures that reduce and mitigate the risk.
In one of my previous jobs, I was part of a multi-year project to improve the cybersecurity of the U.S. Postal Service. Our focus was not safety, but resilience. Yes, you want to reduce the risks as much as possible, but when you've done that, it's time to start preparing for the day when your defenses fail to protect you. Because it WILL happen. So you want to have a robust recovery plan in place. Instead of panicking and taking all sorts of hasty actions that don't do any good, you implement your plan to repair the damage and get your systems back up and running quickly. That's what reslience means.
Most people think of cybersecurity threats as a unique category that you have to have special defenses against, but the truth is that you're talking about having a disaster recovery plan, and it doesn't matter whether your disaster is a natural one (a fire or an earthquake, for example) or a malware attack. A good disaster recovery plan will work well after either kind of disaster. That's why backups are important, for example. It doesn't matter whether your data was lost because your computer burned up in a fire or because your files were encrypted by ransomware. What matters is whether you backed them up. If you did, the disaster is just a temporary inconvenience. If you didn't, you're probably screwed.
And Leo is right about people being the weakest link. That's why the cybersecurity organization organization I worked for had a category of risks called "insider threat," and it didn't distinguish between malicious and inadvertent insider actions. If a disgruntled employee (or one who has been bribed) exfiltrates copies of your proprietary data and gives it to one of your competitors, that's an insider threat. But so is a foolish employee who clicks links in e-mails or opens attachments without stopping to think about who sent the e-mail and why. In either case, the problem is the same: it's very hard to prevent damage inflicted by members of your own organization without making it difficult for your people to do their jobs. And a careless action by a dumb member of your team can do as much damage as a deliberate attack by a malicious insider. Intentions don't matter.
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I have used the "recall" feature of Outlook in a corporate environment, but it's only practical in cases where you sent a message to one person, or maybe two at the most. As the number of recipients increases, the probability that some of them will read the message immediately approaches certainty. After that happens, recalling the message means that it vanishes from the in-box of those who haven't read it, but NOT from the in-box of those who have.
Now you've made the situation worse, because the people who don't receive the message will hear about it secondhand from those who do, and they'll wonder why you excluded them. If you were trying to cover up something, then (as Leo pointed out) you have only succeeded in calling attention to it. You may be asked to explain what the hell you are up to. At this point, you probably wish you had just let the e-mail go to everyone and dealt with the consequences of that. It would have been easier to pass that off as a simple mistake.
As numerous people have pointed out, it's far better to avoid sending an e-mail that you regret. But that's easier said than done.
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I should also mention that in Outlook, even in cases where you send a message to only one person, and you successfully recall it before they read it, they may still be aware that you sent it. If it arrives in the recipient's in-box, they can see the identity of the sender and the subject line without opening it. Windows may also pop up a notification with the same information. If they use the preview pane, they can even see the first few words of the message without opening it.
At this point, if the message vanishes from the recipient's inbox, there are two possible reactions. If the recipient doesn't know about the recall feature (most people don't), they're going to be very confused. If they DO know about it, they're going to realize that you yanked the message back (and you think they never saw it). Either way, they're probably going to ask you for an explanation, so you'd better have one ready.
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I encountered the opposite problem a few days ago: if your touchpad is disabled and you discover that you don't have a working mouse, how do you re-enable the touchpad using only the keyboard? Here's how I was able to do it on a Windows 11 laptop:
1. Press the Windows key. The Start menu is displayed.
2. Start typing "touchpad". The text you type appears in the search field.
3. After you have typed a few characters, "Touchpad settings" appears under Best Match. Press Enter to select it.
4. In the Touchpad Settings dialog, use the Tab key to select the Touchpad on/off switch.
5. Pressing Enter doesn't toggle the switch as you might expect. Instead, it expands or collapses some additional settings below that. Make sure they are expanded.
6. Use the Tab key to select the Reset button next to the words "Reset Touchpad settings and gestures to defaults".
7. Press Enter. The Touchpad settings are reset. The touchpad is now enabled.
If you're wondering how I got myself into this predicament, I normally keep the touchpad disabled because I don't like it and never use it. Last week, I traveled to visit my mother in another state, and I took my laptop and mouse along. After I got there, I found that I had left the transceiver dongle for the mouse behind. (It should have been plugged into the laptop directly, but I had stupidly plugged it into a hub that I didn't need for the trip.) After reactivating the touchpad, I was able to use the computer. But I still don't like the touchpad, so I ended up borrowing the mouse from my mother's Chromebook, which she rarely uses. If that hadn't been available, I probably would have gone to Walmart and bought an inexpensive mouse.
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This happens to me all the time. But Leo didn't identify the true cause: failure of websites to do basic email verification. The correct process is as follows: when someone enters an e-mail address to create a new account, the website sends an e-mail to that address, asking the owner of the address to verify that they are creating an account. The account is only created if the recipient of the verification e-mail responds to confirm the creation request. If the person trying to create the account entered the wrong email address, the verification email goes to the wrong person, who can simply delete it. No account is created. THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT.
But many websites don't bother with email verification, because they're lazy or incompetent. They let people enter any email address they want, whether it belongs to them or not, and make no effort to check it. I have no sympathy whatsoever for companies that behave this way. When I receive their misdirected emails, I use the "unsubscribe" link if one is provided. If not, I just mark the email as spam. From now on, their attempts to contact their customer will simply vanish. That's unfortunate, but it's their own fault.
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