An artist friend reached out: her work showed up in an AI-generated gallery online—without permission, without credit, and definitely without payment. This isn’t rare. This is the internet now. And it raises the biggest question in digital ownership since the days of Napster: who owns what? AI models need training data. But at what point does “training” become theft? If my code, my art, or my voice becomes part of a system I can’t opt

After helping a local client last week whose VPN went down during a storm, I realized most folks still think “remote work setup” means a laptop and Zoom. That’s not enough. Here’s what I use (and recommend): Tailscale for secure mesh VPN (no more port forwarding headaches) Syncthing for peer-to-peer file sync A local NAS for backups and quick access A kill switch on outbound cloud traffic (because I like to know) None of this

With all the hype around AI agents and bleeding-edge automation, I spent my Saturday morning… installing htop, nmap, and rsync on a fresh Debian box. Why? Because they still work. And they don’t phone home. There’s a quiet power in using software that does one thing well—and respects your privacy while doing it. I’ll take a stable CLI tool over a flashy web dashboard that breaks under load any day. If you’re a small team

A small project management firm got hit with ransomware last week. Standard stuff—files encrypted, ransom demanded. But instead of communicating with customers, they went silent. No emails. No social posts. Not even a banner on their site. Just… vanished. This is every IT team’s nightmare. But it’s made worse by the instinct to hide. When something goes wrong, say so. Fast. Even if you don’t have all the answers. People will forgive downtime. They won’t

A regional dental group filed suit this week against their SaaS vendor after being locked out of years of patient records due to a billing dispute. They missed one invoice. The vendor flipped the switch. Patients couldn’t get prescriptions. Staff couldn’t access notes. Fam, this isn’t just a billing issue—it’s a cautionary tale. Small businesses are too often at the mercy of platforms they don’t control. If your data lives in someone else’s house, don’t