Is AI ready for prime time?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, AI, SI, memoirs, experiments

Disclaimer and Pledge: It's a pity I need to say this. I don't use any kind of software to write for me, nor to expand on my writing. The words are all mine, 100%. I do use images I produce using art generation tools touted as "AI art" software, and I (almost) always attribute images produced in this way. If for any reason I use a piece of software-generated text, I'll make that clear. 

This mini-avatar of me was produced by Gemini using a picture from 2015. I look much the same now, just with a few more wrinkles. I wear the hat to keep the sun off my bald head. For those who read this blog regularly, I decided it's time to give you a hint what I look like.

The author of I am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to do (Almost) Everything, Joanna Stern, spent one year using as many "AI tools" as possible to carry on her life. Kudos to her wife Michelle and their young boys for putting up with it all. This picture shows BookBot, her imagining of an AI scheduler (she actually had two versions running in different software systems), introducing her calendar for the year. This is one of many, many illustrations by Jason Snyder that pepper the book.

Ms Stern begins with her own disclaimer, from which I'll quote, "Every sentence in this book started in my brain and traveled, via my MacBook keyboard, onto the page. AI never wrote anything from scratch, except in places that I've clearly marked."

This book is much more than a series of chapters. Timelines full of blurbs (and Jason's drawings), journal entries, lists of ratings of comparable products, a travelogue (the Way-Mo Fun vacation), interviews, and other side notes enliven the narrative.

I found her experiments, one per season, quite enlightening. The first and most successful was "Search and Information". She set aside Google and its kin in favor of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and a few others. She soon adapted to "getting the answer" instead of a long list of blue links. Being able to follow up was a big plus. One aspect she used a lot: pointing her phone's camera at something and asking, "How do I fix this?" or "What is THAT?" (On my Android phone, I use Google Lens similarly). She also tried a couple of versions of smart glasses that can either project information into your line of sight or mutter in your ear about whatever you are gazing at. Though she didn't say so, I'd hope such devices have settings about how much info overload you can tolerate.

The other three experiments involved 

• Music: listening only to AI generated music for a month. She lasted less than two weeks, and recommends that nobody else try such a thing.
• Books: reading only AI generated short stories and books for a while. She generated her own short stories, none of which were as imaginative as her prompts, except when the prompt was a measly 8-10 words. She writes that they were like recycled movie scripts. She found an author who publishes AI generated novels, which must be assembled bit by bit. She corresponded with the author, who said, "Overall, the more human ideas and input, the better. Just like the old programming adage: garbage in, garbage out." She really enjoyed his+its novel. Her own words about stories she prompted, rather than wrote: "Flatter, less alive." (Sturgeon's Law of human writing: 90% of it is garbage. When we feed that to a LLM, of course the proportion is going to approach 99%).
• Video: watching only "AI video slop". She acknowledges that AI generated video getting pretty good and improving fast, but "…it still leans heavily on human creativity, storytelling, and judgment" and she worries about "misinformation, copyright issues, and the use of massive amounts of energy just to make a thirty-second meme."

At the end of all the experiments she asks if we're headed for "a world where simulation starts to feel preferable to experience?" For some people, this is already true. Many science fiction stories dwell on this theme.

Along the way, she and her family used a robot vacuum cleaner, now more enhanced than ever; they "adopted" a robot dog on loan (her son hid the robodog when it was due to be returned); rode only robotaxis, usually Waymo, wherever possible; she tried turning over email responses to ChatGPT—that didn't last long!; she had mammograms with AI enhanced interpretation (but very human oversight) and had dental X-rays with AI enhancement, but found an unfortunate tendency for the dentists to abdicate and upsell; she got a robot massage (and thoroughly enjoyed the way it worked on her butt—no erotic overtones); and they tried a robo-chef, which produced bland but edible meals.

A funny story about riding a Waymo: a photographer was assigned to take pictures of her family in a driverless car. When the Waymo's cameras spotted the camera he stuck out the window of the car ahead, it spooked like a gun-shy horse, stopping abruptly and pulling over to the center divider on the highway. It wouldn't budge thereafter until a Waymo tech got on the radio and "persuaded" it to forget the incident.

There's lots more. Lots and lots. I'll leave it to you to read it. It is well worth it!

I'll finish on this note. All this is, at best, ANI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence. "Agentic AI" is, in the author's view, far from ready and cannot be left unsupervised. The author's definition:

Artificial Intelligence is the creation of intelligent machines that can think, see, learn, and act like humans—and maybe even exceed human abilities.

The supposed emotional content many people claim to get from LLM's (including AI boy/girl friends or even spouses) is actually a consequence of the software being trained using human-generated text, which always has emotional content, and of the software ecosystem in which a LLM sits (every bit human coded). Their relational interactions are thus a mirror of the psychology of the person being interacted with. Actual sentience is the difference between simulating feelings and actually having them. Also, the so-called guardrails (easily sidestepped) that try to keep sex and violence out of the picture are written in human code. No AI tool yet devised can reliably detect "unacceptable content."

When I was teaching computer programming at a university, the department head once said, "Computers excel at detecting differences. Human minds excel at detecting similarities." I built a career on this principle, writing software that helped humans with the stuff we cannot do well, and leaving it to the human user to do what we can do better than any machine. I'll leave further thoughts to future rants.

The first Mars generation

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, astronomers, biographies, mars, social phenomena

In 1877, Mars and Earth had a "great opposition". The two planets were close together, just about 56 million km (35 million miles). The orbit of Mars is somewhat elliptical, so at "less favorable" oppositions, dates when Mars is directly outward from the Sun and high in our night sky at midnight, the distance can be as great as 102 million km (63 million miles). Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli took advantage of the great opposition to observe Mars nightly, for weeks. In addition to blotches and pale areas, he saw a few seemingly linear features, which he called canali, the Italian word meaning "channels".

The word canali does not refer to artificial waterways; other meanings are "troughs" and "gullies". Unfortunately for the next generation or two of the American and European public, when Schiaparelli's  work was translated into English, the translator chose to use the word "canals".

About seventeen years later, Percival Lowell, nearing the age of forty, having observed Mars in telescopes located in Boston and elsewhere, built his observatory near Flagstaff, on "Mars Hill". With the 24-inch diameter telescope he installed there, he watched Mars obsessively during every period of opposition. The drier, steadier air in Flagstaff enabled him to see the planet more clearly. Over time, he discerned numerous linear features, writing of them as "canals". He inferred that they were produced by intelligent Martians.

Lowell's articles, books, lectures, drawings and later photographs of Mars stirred a kind of Mars Mania for a generation, as described by David Baron in The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.

Percival Lowell was rich, driven, obsessive, and probably bipolar. He had earlier had a varied career, including being a kind of envoy for Korea and Japan. Once the observatory was completed, and he had released his book Mars, the planet and his theories about the Martians and their engineering abilities dominated his life and enthralled the public.

His public lectures and writings kept Mars Mania going for the rest of his life, in spite of opposition from roughly half of the scientific establishment. One particularly telling blow came from an experiment conducted by Walter Maunder, which became known as the "Small Boy Theory". Maunder began with maps of Mars produced by Schiaparelli and Lowell. He removed all the canals and replaced them by scattered dots or bits of riverine shapes. For each of several tests, such a doctored map was hung high on the wall at one end of a large classroom, and schoolboys were seated throughout the room. They were asked to copy the map as well as they could, without moving from their seats. Those closest to the front made the best facsimiles, of course. The farther back a boy sat, the more likely he was to add straight lines where dots and fragments seemed to run together in his vision.

Lowell never wavered from his view of a canal-riddled Mars. This image from page 62 shows one of his maps showing the "canals" and "oases" (dots) he drew. Just below it is an image I captured from Google Mars, taking in the approximately same view of the planet. The straight edges of some dark areas are artifacts of different camera views stitched together.

The scattered dots in the lower image are craters. I remember in 1965 when the Mariner 4 spacecraft sent us images of Mars that resembled a moonscape: loads of craters, and no canals. This was just a century after the Flagstaff Observatory was established.

Have you looked at clouds to see "cloud animals" and other fantasies? Various amorphous shapes can look like faces. There is a blotch in the abstract pattern in my shower that looks a little like a panther's head, only when I have my glasses off. This is called pareidolia. A roughly lined-up string of spots can look like a straight line when seen from a certain distance.

But what further affected Lowell as he aged was a bad case of confirmation bias. It's something we are all prone to: when we like an idea, we remember facts that support our view and discount those that don't.

At one point, Lowell spent some time looking at Venus. He produced the map in the upper part of this pair (from page 76). He was told that the "map" seemed to just reflect the blood vessels in his retina; he apparently agreed, and retracted the map. 

I've viewed Venus a number of times with various size telescopes. To a normal human eye, it is featureless, a blank white disk. However, if Lowell had lived a century later, and had a cataract operation, he might have seen features on the surface that are visible in ultraviolet light, particularly if he used a dark blue filter such as Cobalt glass. The lower image simulates such a view; I just "blued up" an ultraviolet photo of Venus. The natural lenses in our eyes are yellow, to filter out deep blue and UV light, which are hard to focus and tend to blur the vision. Cataract operation patients can see more UV than the rest of us.

Well, that would only be true before 1980. Since then, the plastic lenses that are inserted to replace the natural lens also filter out UV light. Oh, well, my hopes of getting my cataracts out and gaining UV vision are dashed!

Percival Lowell married at age 53. Eight years later, somewhat a fallen hero but still well remembered by the public that had been enthralled by his lectures, he passed away at age 61. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 Lowell was still sufficiently famous that the planet was given the symbol ♇ using Lowell's initials.

I have just skimmed over Lowell's life. I sympathize with his "neurasthenia", which was probably depression in the "low" phase of bipolar syndrome. I've been there. David Baron did an amazing amount of research to put this book together. The apparatus—source notes, bibliography, list of illustrations, and index—take up a quarter of the volume, almost 80 pages. Many other people who surrounded Lowell and the Mars phenomenon, including Nikola Tesla, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Camille Flammarion, play their parts in this narrative. The fabric of these lives is a fascinating tapestry of the American and European societies of the thirty years surrounding the year 1900, when so much happened.

Why did I title this piece "The first Mars generation?" A new Mars generation has arisen, enthralled by the vision of Elon Musk, who wants to establish a colony on Mars with a million inhabitants. He hopes the first humans to reach mars will do so in the early or mid 2030's. Maybe it will work...

Finishing with a fizzle

 kw: story reviews, fiction, poems, short stories, collections

It didn't take long to finish the last eleven pieces in 2026 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by Bill Henderson and other editors. Eight were poems, all perhaps eloquent and evocative, but most were pointless, except perhaps to insiders.

Poets, if your writing is only for yourself, your audience is limited to some (not all) of your closest friends or associates, and a smattering of others who happen to think like you do. Don't think you are quite so universal. We have only so many archetypes to go around. 

There was a time that a poem was a piece of craftsmanship. A few still are. Poetry arose before prose and even before writing, for good reason. It's easier to memorize…that is, if it has rhyme and rhythm. So-called "free verse" is too free. If someone has something worthwhile to say, even if they break the sentences and phrases in odd places so it looks like "verse", the content is the content. Too many "free verses" are free of content, or at least, of content that means anything to someone except yourself.

OK, huffiness over, I did like two of the poems:

• "Refuge" by Sheema Kalbasi. The skeletal images make the tragic almost bearable.
• "After the Fireworks" by Jessica R. Gordon. At times it is good to linger. The accompanying image is the fruit of running the prompt, "Remember to slow down and enjoy your surroundings" through Leonardo AI's Flow State, culling a few from several hundred images offered, and selecting one. FYI, most of the images Flow offered were abstract.

The one story I liked was "Lessons of the Line" by Dana Levin. It's about poetry, by someone who actually works at it, who practically coerced an established poet to mentor her.

This volume of Pushcart Prize has been better than some of the earlier ones. I'll keep looking for its successor volumes.

Some learn and grow

 kw: story reviews, fiction, poems, short stories, collections

I'm nearing the end of 2026 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by Bill Henderson and other editors, having read another 22 pieces. Here and there a story shows a protagonist who learns something and grows up a little. Far too many authors show no evidence that they know what learning and growing even are. First, the list of the pieces that I rated as at least so-so, with my tiny comments:

• "Transition Lenses" by Jessica Petrow-Cohen (poem). grief recovery; a semi-poem
• "Werner Herzog's Ecstasy" by Maura Stanton (poem). evocative, mysterious. [a mix of iambic and trochaic pentameter]
• "Typical Girls" by Amy Lee Lillard. AI takes over [neuralink plus?]
• "Freefall" by Marie Goyette. surviving foster care
• "Late Spring Epiphany After the Georgia O'Keeffe Exhibit" by Melissa McKinstry. expressive impressionism
• "From Hedge to Hedge" by Wendy Willis. democracy of species
• "A Black Mother's Child Considers His Lost Dream of Immortality" by Iain Haley Pollock. reality framed in classical imagery
• "Whistling Past the Graveyard" by Ted Kooser. cancer memoir [see below]
• "Nashville, 1999" by John Okrent. kindness in adversity
• "Cairn" by Clint Bentley. loser gets a little less lost
• "Plate Spinner" by Francine Witte. new hobby
• "Don't Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife" by Wendy Brenner. unexpected joy [see below]

First, about "Whistling Past the Graveyard": I'm a cancer survivor, thankful for every day bought from the grave by God's grace in the hands of a master surgeon. Ted Kooser had it even worse than I did, and came through it.

"Don't Bleed on the Artwork" goes a few directions, but the main thrust is growth. I wrote "unexpected joy" because the unexpected job in a picture framing shop, and what the author learned and gained from the owner, led to unexpected growth and maturity.

In a memoir I've written on and off for more than a decade, a large section is titled "The twists and turns of life."

Librarians take the lead

 kw: story reviews, fiction, poems, short stories, collections

I have read another 23 selections, and skipped one, in 2026 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by Bill Henderson and other editors. In a similar way to the review a few days ago, I will just show the short impression I wrote as I read each piece, but this time only for the 17 that were at least so-so. I have more to say about the single story (so far) that earned a "++" from me.

First, the list:

• "Yellow Tulips" by Nathan Curtis Roberts. disability, seen and hidden
• "Countdown" by Anthony Marra. conscripted at the border [between Russia and Georgia]
• "An Essay About Coyotes" by Ryan Van Meter. grief and healing
• "One of You Will Betray Me" by Kathy Chao. parents have to grow up too
• "Hover O'er Me With Your Wings" by Randy F. Nelson. turning points
• "Lords of the Wind" by Yxta Maya Murray. religious naturalism
• "Steeplechase by Angela Ball (poem). variety, even in steeples
• "How No Money Becomes Money" by Andrei Codrescu. vanity of destructive fashion
• "The Widow's Tale" by Richard Bausch. unwelcome séance
• "Is Wrack, Is Rak, Is Wreckage" by Allison Hutchcraft (poem). wrack on rock
• "The Department of Everything" by Stephen Akey. libriarianship! [see below]
• "Devotion" by Michael Mark (poem). purposeful vandalism
• "Thebes, Revisited" by Grace Schulman. town stage production
• "Sickled" by Jane Kalu. disease of body and soul
• "The Weight of Days" by Dorianne Laux (poem). stretched metaphors
• "Easement" by Kim Samek. scams take over
• "Ode to Darnel (Ode to the Crocus)" by Carey Salerno (poem). hospital memories

In "The Department of Everything", Stephen Akey fondly remembers when we could call the reference desk of a public library and get almost any kind of question answered…so long as it was a question of fact. A librarian might have offered advice on more ambiguous matters such as relationships, but at the risk of the supervising librarian's wrath. Also, even if a librarian already knew the answer, he or she needed to also provide the reference, which typically required going to get the physical book or index or journal for the citation. A reference desk librarian didn't need to know everything, just where to find everything. Now for factual information we just use Wikipedia, or Google, or more recently, we ask a chatbot. Note that these are in descending order by reliability.

Pushcart at Fifty - the first third

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, poems, short stories, collections

Looking back I see I have previously read five of the Pushcart Prize volumes. This is the sixth: 2026 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by Bill Henderson and other editors. My esteem for the series has risen and fallen. This time around it is mostly high…so far.

Prior volumes took up around 550 pages. This one is 570 pages, plus another 47 pages listing every item published since 1976. The last page of the last story is 521; the rest is the apparatuses. That's a typical proportion. There are 77 stories and poems.

In the past few days I've read 19 items: eleven stories or memoirs and eight poems, and I skipped only one item. I do not take many notes as I read, but I do note down a very short "impression summary" to remind me. Perhaps it is instructive to record those (ignoring the one I skipped):

• "Rich Strike" by Christie Hodgen. mentoring and growth
• "When the Prince of Heaven Sleeps" by Roger Reeve. the softness of strong men
• "Ode to a Smith-Corona Galaxie Typewriter" by Angela Narciso Torres (poem). nostalgia
• "Tinder" by Sarah Green (sort-of poem). bemusing quotes by men
• "Golgori" by Peter Hong. outgrowing a deity
• "The Beautiful Salmon" by Joanna Kavenna. gaining perspective (young student among titans)
• "The End of Childhood" by Wayne Miller (poem). memoir or fantasy?
• "All I Love" by Chen Chen (poem). tree+poem = troem...cute
• "Desperate Times, Desperate Crimes" by Lou Mathews. optimism, against all odds
• "The Harvest" by Uche Okonkwo. collapse of one's dreams*
• "Like Mowing the Grass" by Bruce Beasley (poem). mowing metaphors
• "This is You" by Tommy Moore. the carry-stuff guy for a porn studio
• "One Writer Against Oblivion" by Mark Brazaitis. the title says it
• "Wilding" by Shara McCallum. metaphor of escape from childhood
• "Almost Born" by Keya Mitra. pilgrimage w/medical mistakes*
• "The Uber Men" by Nadir Jabur. experience doesn't always confer wisdom
• "It is Said" by Suzanne Cleary (poem). interesting, ambiguous
• "Siri as Mother" by Hala Alyan (poem). stream of [machine] consciousness, extra-long lines
• "On Arrival" by Sarah C. Harwell. finally beginning to grow*

*Three stories deserve a little extra comment. "The Harvest" is about a preacher whose congregation dwindles to himself and his wife. Having suffered a similar fate, before learning why God put me through it, I once said, "All my dreams have died," to which God replied only, "Your dreams, not mine." "Almost Born" has a woman learning, after about 20 miscarriages and finding a doctor who would take her seriously and do the right tests, that an early injury is the cause of her misfortune, not the oft-heard, "That's just the way you are," too late. I have a dossier of medical mistakes and I can more than sympathize. I am alive because I once forged a referral to a specialist! In "On Arrival" I find an amazing statement about the experience of many at a job: "…eight hours of emptiness in order to continue the activity of loving."

I find that I marked eleven items with a "+", including a couple of the poems. The rest were so-so or below. I have yet to find a piece that makes me say, "I am really glad I read that." Hope springs…

Happy 250th, America!

 kw: independence day 2026, 250th birthday

Very briefly, I am so glad to be a citizen of the greatest country on Earth!

The original image is full size (2K), unsigned, in case anyone wants to download it and print it. My gift to you all.

To catch a spy, think like one

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, hacking, spies, hackers, cybercrime, deepfakes, home security

A truly successful cybercriminal must have excellent social skills. The popular idea of a "hacker" as a guy in a basement wearing a hoodie and somehow breaking into computer accounts is fiction. The easiest way to get the user credentials needed to get into a computer system is to purchase them on the dark web. The second easiest way is to make a phone call and persuade someone to tell you; that is often easier than you might imagine. But social skills are essential.

As former spy hunter Eric O'Neill tells us in Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime: Cybersecurity Tactics to Outsmart Hackers and Disarm Scammers, the third best way to steal credentials (typically, user name and password) is to exploit weaknesses in an operating system, taking advantage of them before security software is updated to "patch" the weak place. He tells us of one or two such weaknesses, mostly because they don't work well any more. But until a few years ago, forcing a buffer overflow was a common tactic until security programs were re-coded to limit the number of characters entered as a user ID or password.

But here's where things got more scary. HNDL means "harvest now, decrypt later". Getting into a system is one thing; being able to do something useful (to you) with the data files it contains is another. I don't know how many household computers enable encryption of their hard drives; probably very few. But wise business leaders have their IT team encrypt all data. Then someone who breaks in cannot read anything. Crooks have learned to simply copy everything and store it, awaiting the development of more powerful decryption technology, including quantum decryption, that may be able to tackle it in the future. Storage is getting incredibly cheap: hard drives as large as 36 TB are available, and depending on disk capacity, the cost is in the range of $30 to $60 per TB.

The author trains us using two useful mnemonics, one related to intruder techniques, the other to defenses. Firstly, DI²CED (I suppose it is "diced" as in "sliced and diced", a hacker's goal). The keywords are Deception, Impersonation, Infiltration, Confidence, Exploitation, and Destruction. These are like the layers in an onion, each depending on the prior ones. Perhaps that is why a common domain suffix in the dark web is ".onion".

Each chapter ends with a series of tips labeled "Think Like a Spy." This is because cybercriminals, just as confidence actors (con men) of the past, use spycraft techniques. We need to know how a spy thinks to have a chance to avoid the lures and traps that spies use on us. The book is filled with examples, including a near-miss the author experienced and an extended example showing what was needed for a nonprofit corporation he and others worked for/with to recover from a ransomware attack.

The defensive mnemonic is PAID: Prepare, Assess, Investigate, and Decide. Making Preparations beforehand, getting policies in place, is like buying fire extinguishers for your home. A fire may never break out, but if one does, the low price you paid for the extinguishers is a tiny fraction of the damage a fire will do if you have to abandon the house to the flames (note: this is my example, drawn from tidbits here and there in the book). If a smoke alarm goes off, or you see a frying pan catch fire, for example, Assessing the threat needs to take place in a few seconds. Having the extinguisher close at hand makes a big difference in how you Assess the threat. Even then, you may determine that the best action is to call 911 and get outside. For a large business that finds it is under attack, Assessing and then Investigating may need to go on for days or even weeks. In a beginning house fire, if you have extinguishers, Investigation consists of knowing where the nearest one is. Decision is then instant: put out the fire you see, then look for possible others (follow-up Investigation). For a business, Investigation may lead to the threat being seen as either greater or less than it first seemed. Plans that were Prepared beforehand lead to better Decisions.

In the case of the nonprofit, the organization was "rescued" by slow internet connections. The ransomware perpetrator claimed to have downloaded 3 TB of sensitive information. During Investigation, the security team, including the author, determined from system logs that the intrusion was limited in time, and at most 1 GB could have been exported. That's 1/3000th of what the criminal claimed—and that's a common tactic. Scare, scare, scare, and try to keep you from getting time to think. Still, a lot of work had to be done to patch up the security software and restore the systems from backups. Then the criminal could be told, "You got nothing. You get nothing. Go away." Most satisfying.

Other examples relate to personal security. Deepfaked voices and videos are becoming more common. I answered a phone call one day, to hear a cheerful voice say, "Hello, Grandpa." I hung up immediately. I don't yet have grandchildren old enough to use a phone. If a call like that occurs in 10-15 years, I'll need a different plan. Here, Preparing means to have a "family pass phrase" or even a "proof of life" exchange, such as the following:

Caller: "Grandpa, I need help."

Me: "Were you caught by the Jabberwock?"

Real grandchild: "No, it was the Bandersnatch."

But a fake grandkid? The caller will simply hang up, and if they don't you hang up on them. The caller is probably some middle-aged guy with an AI generated voice, cloned from the grandchild's social media posts (do I need to remind you that you shouldn't post family videos on Facebook or TikTok or X or ANYWHERE!!?)

Of course, if it really is your grandchild, the Assessment needs to include demanding the location, saying you will do nothing until you get there (you may need weapons; that is a different discussion).

The last ten pages of the book is a collection of lists of "ten tips" on various subjects covered in the text. This alone makes this a good reference book to keep on hand. I know I need to do so. From a first reading, all I can gather is some impressions, and a few tips and techniques like those above. I need to re-read some parts.

I was motivated to revise my scheme for creating passwords. Carrying it out will take a few days; I have a lot of accounts! I don't want to use a biometric passkey because I already know of two men who could probably fool a biometrics face-print; in both cases, the man and I have been mistaken for one another several times. How many others are there? I am not distinctive enough!

Get this book. Read it right through. Then go back more slowly over parts that pertain to your life. Keep it handy as a reference. It's well written, so reading it is pleasurable, if sometimes a bit scary.

Resources cribbed from the Tips section:

• Federal Trade Commission: https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
• Identity Theft concerns: https://www.identitytheft.gov/
• Author's newsletter: https://ericoneill.net/newsletter/ - free subscription