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- Madagascar Exam
- ReciproCard
- Libby
- Hoopla
- Overdrive
- Chuck E Cheese
- SED Drivetrust old?
- Sedutil.com Friendlier
- Adobe patches
- bbtl.ink/sed
- bbtl.ink/stats for more links
Breakmaster Cylinder composed and performs our theme music.
Carson City Linux User Group – Meeting third Saturdays at ComputerCorps in Carson City – carsoncitylinux.org
One on One Tech Help at the Carson City Library Wednesdays 3-4 pm Techbusters
Not Something I Asked For
This week on Battle Born Tech Encryption nobody turned on, a voice assistant nobody invited into the call, and a library wait nobody expected. Robert is seeking a library with more audiobooks and ebooks, not just good deals on online shopping like last week; Rosie has Siri turning her cell phone into a old-fashioned party line; and Brian calls about a locked M.2 SSD that isn’t the usual suspect Bitlocker but something called SED, a self-encrypting drive. Careful: Here be dragons ready to eat your data.
Is Joe telling us that Chuck E Cheese the camel nose in the tent for AI?
Anthony adds from last week: if you lose wifi password, you can find it in a phone that is still connected.
To truly blank out PDF, print it, take a knife and cut out the edited parts, scan it back in. No image reconstruction or layer removal will reveal what never was in the scan.
We are in the studio Saturdays 9 am to 11 am Pacific. Call direct to studio then or anytime at 775-241-3571 and set up a time to battle your tech!
“Kill, Marry, Upchuck relationships with AI Assistants”
“Found a scrap of paper with a weird string of letters and numbers”
“Dragons not doing what they are supposed to”
“AI can’t tell content from command”
“Are you a robot?”
“Not something I asked for.”
“Everything is in settings except what is in accessibility.”
“Change my name to Spam Likely”
“All the threads hold.”
“Be polite to AI in case they take over and they remember.”
“Lower Expectations should be my radio name”
“Not zero day it is zero minute”
“There is always Google or Kagi search or AI”
“Knowledge has no gate keeping.”
“Take advantage of your library.”
“Tech Talk is your favorite music.”
AI assisted to make us sound more human.
BATTLE PLANS
with help from Claude.ai
SED
Self-Encrypting Drive: A hard drive or SSD with hardware built in that automatically scrambles everything written to it, so the data is unreadable without the right key. Steal the drive and you get a locked box, not the files inside it.
OPAL
Opal Storage Specification (not actually an acronym, just the spec’s name): A shared rulebook, published by the Trusted Computing Group, that spells out exactly how self-encrypting drives from different manufacturers must lock, unlock, and manage their encryption. A drive labeled “Opal-compliant” follows this common standard instead of doing its own proprietary thing.
Voice Assistant
Software built into your phone, like Siri, Google Assistant, or Alexa, that listens for spoken commands and answers questions, sets reminders, or opens apps for you. You talk to it instead of tapping, and it talks back.
Live Version
A version of Linux that runs entirely from a USB drive or disc without installing anything on your computer’s hard drive. It lets you try Linux out, or fix a broken computer, without touching what’s already on the machine
Skynet
Not a real product; it’s the fictional, self-aware military computer system from the Terminator movies that decides humanity is a threat and turns on it. People use the name, half-joking, as shorthand for any AI system that seems to be getting more control than feels comfortable.
Live Voicemail
An iPhone feature that transcribes a voicemail onto your screen in real time while the caller is still leaving it. You can read what they’re saying as it comes in and decide whether to pick up before they even finish talking.
Call Screening
A phone feature that answers an unknown call for you, asks the caller to say who they are or why they’re calling, and shows you a transcript before you decide whether to answer. It’s a way to filter spam and robocalls without your phone ever really ringing at you.
AI Tokens
The small chunks, roughly pieces of words, that an AI model breaks text into to read and generate language. Companies typically measure and charge for AI use by counting tokens rather than whole words or characters, since that’s the actual unit the system works in.
Tuesdays 8 PM Pacific 95.1 FM Carson City, Nevada
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