The numbers carry this segment. Eleven hundred forty ransomware attacks on industrial companies in a single quarter, 740 of them against manufacturers. A recent Patch Tuesday carrying about 570 fixes. An Apple advisory telling anyone whose machine touches a coffee-shop network to update now.

Craig's point is narrower and more useful than the headline count. Windows Update patches Microsoft software, and not all of it. The average computer is running roughly 60 other programs it never looks at. Older versions of ordinary things — Adobe Reader is the one he names — are what attackers are actually walking through.

So Craig built the tool nobody was building. It reads every piece of software on a machine against a database of about three and a half million known-vulnerable versions and reports which ones have working exploits behind them. It runs for his business clients and for retirees.

That is the shape of the advice: count what is on the machine, check what is current, and find out what stopped receiving updates and when. Three numbers, and then a decision.

Also in this segment:

• Jim on Quebec City's tourism campaign, and Craig — a former Canadian — on why it genuinely does read as Europe
• The FCC's concerns about spyware in imported robot vacuums
• A teaser for next week: what, if anything, government can actually do about this

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