This week Mike opened with news: Arizona Computer Guru is taking residential clients again, for the first time in about seven years. Then a story that is going to sound familiar to a lot of people: a nonprofit whose donation page had been stuck in test mode, on a WordPress site with around 40 plugins, run by a web company that would not give the owner the access she needed to fix it herself.
Topics we covered:
- When a vendor holds your website hostage - if someone else owns your domain or hosting and you cannot log in, you do not really own your site.
- Ads that infect without a click - a newly found ad campaign that installs spyware on targeted devices just by loading. Another reason to run an ad blocker.
- A record Patch Tuesday - Microsoft shipped 1,411 fixes in a month, and Howard explained the hot patching Microsoft is starting to offer.
- Courts breach texts - which texts about the Arizona courts breach are real, and which are scams.
- Calls - why Google Play Services storage keeps growing and shrinking, free alternatives to paid office and PDF software, and what to do when an external drive full of irreplaceable photos starts clicking.
What do you think?
- Have you ever felt locked in by a web, IT or software vendor? How did you get out, or are you still stuck?
- Where do your irreplaceable photos live right now, and how many copies are there?
- Do you run an ad blocker on every device, including your phone?
Listen to the full episode: S11E32 - Locked-In Vendors, Clicking Drives and Free Office Tools
If you want help with any of this at home now that we take residential clients again, our backup and recovery service is a good place to start.
