Joel Folgner - Fresh From Cache (Page 5)

A woman holding up her phone to record a selfie video of her own face outdoors

News

Google wants a video of your face. Skip it for now.

Google's new selfie sign-in is optional, stored on Google's servers, and easier to turn on than to undo. Five minutes on your recovery settings does more for you.

5-Minute Tech Tip card: Can you make the robocalls stop?

Learn

Make your phone stop ringing for robocalls

Your phone can send robocalls straight to voicemail, or make them say who they are first. Here is the five-minute setup on iPhone, Android, and Samsung.

A pole-mounted automatic license plate reader with a small solar panel, against a blue sky

Learn

What a Flock camera actually does

It photographs every car that passes, including yours. The argument your city council is having is about who gets to search the record.

News

Also this week: rival app stores, Siri's public beta, and rising phone prices

Four tech stories from this week that matter to everyday people, each in a sentence or two, with a link to whoever reported it well.

Rows of empty red seats in a dark movie theater, lit by a single projector beam

News

The Odyssey hit theaters Friday. The scams were ready by Monday.

Scam sites and a fake movie file appeared within hours of release. Two rules protect you, and neither needs technical skill.

A phone screen showing a folder named AI filled with chatbot apps, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot.

Blog

AI tips for people who don't want to get left behind

The habits that make AI genuinely useful, written for regular people, not AI people. What to set up, what to watch out for, and why it works.

Two identical young women stand face to face, foreheads nearly touching, staring at each other

Learn

How to get a deepfake of you taken down

The full platform-by-platform companion to our deepfake explainer: where the real removal paths are, what each report form actually covers, and what to save before you file anything.

newsletter

The sketchy hospital letter that turned out to be real, a deepfake you can't report, and the Windows bug eating your drive

Also in this issue: what data brokers actually sell, the password habit worth one evening, and a five-minute trick for copying text out of a photo.

A robot vacuum sitting on a hardwood floor, photographed in black and white

Learn

Shark fixed the vacuum flaw. Here's what yours knows about you.

A researcher pulled a live camera feed, a floor plan, and a Wi-Fi password off a Shark robot vacuum he didn't own. Shark hasn't fixed it. Here's what every robot vacuum collects, and what you can do about it.

A hand holding a Samsung Galaxy phone, seen from the back.

News

Samsung killed its texting app, but your texts are fine.

Samsung Messages stopped working July 6 on newer Galaxy phones. Nothing is broken, your old texts are not gone, and the switch takes about ten minutes.

A child and an adult flipping through a printed photo album together.

Learn

I lost ten years of photos. Now I print a photo book every January.

Half an hour in January, and a printed book of your whole year shows up at your door. I started because I lost a decade of pictures.

A woman sits cross-legged on a couch, reading through paper statements with a laptop open on her lap.

News

That sketchy letter from your hospital might be real

Rochester patients got a real breach notice with the wrong hospital name on it. Many threw it away.