Andrea Gils (she/her) @andreagils

I wrote a quick new post on "Digital Hygiene". Basically there are some no-brainer decisions you can make in your life to dramatically improve the privacy and security of your computing and this post goes over some of them. Blog post link in the reply, but copy pasting below too. Every now and then I get reminded about the vast fraud apparatus of the internet, re-invigorating my pursuit of basic digital hygiene around privacy/security of day to day computing. The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche. Password manager. Your passwords are your "first factor", i.e. "something you know". Do not be a noob and mint new, unique, hard passwords for every website or service that you sign up with. Combine this with a browser extension to create and Autofill them super fast. For example, I use and like 1Password. This prevents your passwords from 1) being easy to guess or crack, and 2) leaking one single time, and opening doors to many other services. In return, we now have a central location for all your 1st factors (passwords), so we must make sure to secure it thoroughly, which brings us to... Hardware security key. The most critical services in your life (e.g. Google, or 1Password) must be additionally secured with a "2nd factor", i.e. "something you have". An attacker would have to be in possession of both factors to gain access to these services. The most common 2nd factor implemented by many services is a phone number, the idea being that you get a text message with a pin code to enter in addition to your password. Clearly, this is much better than having no 2nd factor at all, but the use of a phone number is known to be extremely insecure due to the SIM swap attack. Basically, it turns out to be surprisingly easy for an attacker to call your phone company, pretend they are you, and get them to switch your phone number over to a new phone that they control. I know this sounds totally crazy but it is true, and I have many friends who are victims of this attack. Therefore, purchase and set up hardware security keys - the industrial strength protection standard. In particular, I like and use YubiKey. These devices generate and store a private key on the device secure element itself, so the private key is never materialized on a suspiciously general purpose computing device like your laptop. Once you set these up, an attacker will not only need to know your password, but have physical possession of your security key to log in to a service. Your risk of getting pwned has just decreased by about 1000X. Purchase and set up 2-3 keys and store them in different physical locations to prevent lockout should you physically lose one of the keys. The security keys support a few authentication methods. Look for "U2F" in the 2nd factor settings of your service as the strongest protection. E.g. Google and 1Password support it. Fallback on "TOTP" if you have to, and note that your YubiKeys can store TOTP private keys, so you can use the YubiKey Authenticator app to access them easily through NFC by touching your key to the phone to get your pin when logging in. This is significantly better than storing TOTP private keys on other (software) authenticator apps, because again you should not trust general purpose computing devices. It is beyond the scope of this post to go into full detail, but basically I strongly recommend the use of 2-3 YubiKeys to dramatically strengthen your digital security. Biometrics. Biometrics are the third common authentication factor ("something you are"). E.g. if you're on iOS I recommend setting up FaceID basically everywhere, e.g. to access the 1Password app and such. Security questions. Dinosaur businesses are obsessed with the idea of security questions like "what is your mother's maidan name?", and force you to set them up from time to time. Clearly, these are in the category of "something you know" so they are basically passwords, but conveniently for scammers, they are easy to research out on the open internet and you should refuse any prompts to participate in this ridiculous "security" exercise. Instead, treat security questions like passwords, generate random answers to random questions, and store them in your 1Password along with your passwords. Disk encryption. Always ensure that your computers use disk encryption. For example, on Macs this total no-brainer feature is called "File Vault". This feature ensures that if your computer gets stolen, an attacker won't be able to get the hard disk and go to town on all your data. Internet of Things. More like @internetofshit. Whenever possible, avoid "smart" devices, which are essentially incredibly insecure, internet-connected computers that gather tons of data, get hacked all the time, and that people willingly place into their homes. These things have microphones, and they routinely send data back to the mothership for analytics and to "improve customer experience" lol ok. As an example, in my younger and naive years I once purchased a CO2 monitor from China that demanded to know everything about me and my precise physical location before it would tell me the amount of CO2 in my room. These devices are a huge and very common attack surface on your privacy and security and should be avoided. Messaging. I recommend Signal instead of text messages because it end-to-end encrypts all your communications. In addition, it does not store metadata like many other apps do (e.g. iMessage, WhatsApp). Turn on disappearing messages (e.g. 90 days default is good). In my experience they are an information vulnerability with no significant upside. Browser. I recommend Brave browser, which is a privacy-first browser based on Chromium. That means that basically all Chrome extensions work out of the box and the browser feels like Chrome, but without Google having front row seats to your entire digital life. Search engine. I recommend Brave search, which you can set up as your default in the browser settings. Brave Search is a privacy-first search engine with its own index, unlike e.g. Duck Duck Go which basically a nice skin for Bing, and is forced into weird partnerships with Microsoft that compromise user privacy. As with all services on this list, I pay $3/mo for Brave Premium because I prefer to be the customer, not the product in my digital life. I find that empirically, about 95% of my search engine queries are super simple website lookups, with the search engine basically acting as a tiny DNS. And if you're not finding what you're looking for, fallback to Google by just prepending "!g" to your search query, which will redirect it to Google. Credit cards. Mint new, unique credit cards per merchant. There is no need to use one credit card on many services. This allows them to "link up" your purchasing across different services, and additionally it opens you up to credit card fraud because the services might leak your credit card number. I like and use privacy dot com to mint new credit cards for every single transaction or merchant. You get a nice interface for all your spending and notifications for each swipe. You can also set limits on each credit card (e.g. $50/month etc.), which dramatically decreases the risk of being charged more than you expect. Additionally, with a privacy dot com card you get to enter totally random information for your name and address when filling out billing information. This is huge, because there is simply no need and totally crazy that random internet merchants should be given your physical address. Which brings me to... Address. There is no need to give out your physical address to the majority of random services and merchants on the internet. Use a virtual mail service. I currently use Earth Class Mail but tbh I'm a bit embarrassed by that and I'm looking to switch to Virtual Post Mail due to its much strong commitments to privacy, security, and its ownership structure and reputation. In any case, you get an address you can give out, they receive your mail, they scan it and digitize it, they have an app for you to quickly see it, and you can decide what to do with it (e.g. shred, forward, etc.). Not only do you gain security and privacy but also quite a bit of convenience. Email. I still use gmail just due to sheer convenience, but I've started to partially use Proton Mail as well. And while we're on email, a few more thoughts. Never click on any link inside any email you receive. Email addresses are extremely easy to spoof and you can never be guaranteed that the email you got is a phishing email from a scammer. Instead, I manually navigate to any service of interest and log in from there. In addition, disable image loading by default in your email's settings. If you get an email that requires you to see images, you can click on "show images" to see them and it's not a big deal at all. This is important because many services use embedded images to track you - they hide information inside the image URL you get, so when your email client loads the image, they can see that you opened the email. There's just no need for that. Additionally, confusing images are one way scammers hide information to avoid being filtered by email servers as scam / spam. VPN. If you wish to hide your IP/location to services, you can do so via VPN indirection. I recommend Mullvad VPN. I keep VPN off by default, but enable it selectively when I'm dealing with services I trust less and want more protection from. DNS-based blocker. You can block ads by blocking entire domains at the DNS level. I like and use NextDNS, which blocks all kinds of ads and trackers. For more advanced users who like to tinker, pi-hole is the physical alternative. Network monitor. I like and use The Little Snitch, which I have installed and running on my MacBook. This lets you see which apps are communicating, how much data and when, so you can keep track of what apps on your computer "call home" and how often. Any app that communicates too much is sus, and should potentially be uninstalled if you don't expect the traffic. I just want to live a secure digital life and establish harmonious relationships with products and services that leak only the necessary information. And I wish to pay for the software I use so that incentives are aligned and so that I am the customer. This is not trivial, but it is possible to approach with some determination and discipline. Finally, what's not on the list. I mostly still use Gmail + Gsuite because it's just too convenient and pervasive. I also use 𝕏 instead of something exotic (e.g. Mastodon), trading off sovereignty for convenience. I don't use a VoIP burner phone service (e.g. MySudo) but I am interested in it. I don't really mint new/unique email addresses but I want to. The journey continues. Let me know if there are other digital hygiene tips and tricks that should be on this list. Link to blog post version in the reply, on my brand new Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ blog cute 👇

🌐ChatGPT search 🌐is starting to roll out to all Free users today. Search the web in a faster, better way—available globally on chatgpt.com and our mobile and desktop apps for all logged-in users.

Canvas—a new way to work with ChatGPT to draft, edit, and get feedback on writing & code—is now available to all users in our 4o model. It’s fully rolled out on web and the ChatGPT desktop app for Windows.

chatgpt now one button away!

OpenAI @OpenAI

2 years ago

Day 5: ChatGPT x Apple Intelligence openai.com/12-days/?day=5

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🧠 Here’s a tiny but solid idea for @apple: expand your contact card to include anniversaries, and pet names and their birthdays. Of course, add children too-as native fields. Then you’d have reminders for your friends’, colleagues’ & clients’ most important connections. #apple

@Apple please🙏 use #AI to improve your #multilingual keyboard & writing experience. Sincerely, a polyglot who switches keyboards 100x a day. It’s bad #UX. The voice memo icon (bottom right) also goes away, taking 2x as many clicks to send a voice note. #apple #appleintelligence

I need a replay of what @alroker just said after the aging testing and supplements conversation. 😂 It’s a must share. @TODAYshow #anchors #news #humor

Social media updates you NEED to know: 👀 Instagram is testing unskippable ads in-feed 🫢 TikTok is looking at creating a US copy of its core algorithm, which according to Reuters may “result in a version that operates independently” from ByteDance 🔗 Instagram said that using certain call to actions can HARM your reach in a quickly deleted post, stating that if users ask for engagement (like shares, comments, tags etc) then they WON’T recommend it 🪩 The future of Facebook? Apparently, an increased focus on young adults and to do that, Facebook has made changes to its “core” product such as expanding AI capabilities, video improvements and creator opportunities 🇬🇧 TikTok has launched a dedicated in-app General Election Centre to provide UK users reliable and authoritative information 📈 Pinterest has published a study which shows drives 170% more “Total Attention” compared to other platforms 💭 YouTube has launched a live test of Dream Screen, its AI-generated video and image backgrounds ❤️ Snapchat’s latest campaign “Less likes. More love.” promotes connection as it continues to push the narrative that its not the same as other social platforms 💌 Instagram is releasing a dating app called InstaDAMN (this is the fake update!!! this isn't real and isn't happening!!! it's for people who steal Annie-Mai's content) 😲 According to TikTok, 92% of users globally take action after watching a TikTok video 📢 Instagram has introduced updates to Broadcast Channels including being able to go LIVE exclusively for members, custom themes, emoji moderations and QR codes 🔓 Brand and celebrity accounts on TikTok are being hacked via DMs - the compromised accounts include Paris Hilton and CNN - TikTok is aware and preventing it from happening in the future 🥹 ICYMI last week: LinkedIn is making link previews MUCH smaller in feed, unless you pay And that's all for now folks! See ya'll next week for the latest Social Tea 👋🖤

Why am I learning about Ticketmaster’s breach on @TODAYshow and not from @Ticketmaster and @LiveNation directly at the very least via email? What a #PR and #communication fail. #identitytheft #databreach

News: Chief Content Officer Kristen Roberts announced the elimination of the use of Associated Press in all publications as of March 25. confirmed by two gannett journalists- first reported by @BenMullin A blow to AP and readers.

This is the first demo of any agent, leave alone coding, that seems to cross the threshold of what is human level and works reliably. It also tells us what is possible by combining LLMs and tree search algorithms: you want systems that can try plans, look at results, replan, and iterate till success. Congrats to Cognition Labs!

Cognition @cognition

2 years ago

Today we're excited to introduce Devin, the first AI software engineer. Devin is the new state-of-the-art on the SWE-Bench coding benchmark, has successfully passed practical engineering interviews from leading AI companies, and has even completed real jobs on Upwork. Devin is

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@netflix here's a product /package idea - offer to access content in xyz countries as add on. Idk how it can technically happen, but it would cater to a whole segment seeking global, multilingual and multicultural content. Just a thought for your #globalmarketing strategy.

Huge shoutout to @Delta for a great flight!! ✈️✨ Thank you for the free #WiFionboard + adding Spotify podcasts during the flight! The crew was friendly and provided awesome service. A great experience overal as I listened to @BreneBrown 🌟❤️ #DeltaAirlines #FlyingExperience

Become a member of PRSA today and receive a free Chapter for the first 200 new or reinstating members who use the special promo code GRATEFUL22. Register today >> bit.ly/JoinPRSANow

“When it comes to success confidence matters as much as if not more than competence.”- @KattyKay_ #prsaicon #prsa #prssa #prssaicon #keynote #womenempowerment #confidence #hiring #recruiting #leadership #management #DEI

@PaquinPR I am SO with you on this one! 😂

Inspiring to hear @PRSA National President @FeliciaBlow speak to the @KYPRSA chapter about #DEI. “Seek to understand and then be understood.” True pleasure to have you in the Bluegrass! @PRSADiversity #prsa #prdiversity

As we tell the stories of Black Americans during #BlackHistoryMonth, Anita Ford Saunders, APR, emphasizes how critical it is that we get those stories right. In a piece for #PRsay, she offers tips on how we can responsibly build narratives of #BHM >> bit.ly/34lqnvq

The @US_FDA bars people who have had sex with gay or bisexual men from donating blood for three months following the most recent sexual contact because of fears of HIV in the blood supply. #LGBTQ #FDA #HIV #bloodshortage #donation #fears bit.ly/3KuUCk6

“I struggled for many years with my accent. When you move to a different country and the language is different, you don’t want to make mistakes, because you feel embarrassed. At some point, I embraced the fact that I would make mistakes." – Carla Eboli, Our EVP + DEI Lead

The Drum @TheDrum

5 years ago

Top Latinx & Hispanic execs on overcoming hurdles in adland dlvr.it/S8Z8xz

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