Tonight on CEP!

• I dig up an old piece of fan mail from a guy who labels my book as "Unacceptable Misinformation" (yet hasn't read it)! He urges people to do updates, but is completely unaware of their downsides. I explain (yet again) how an update fixes one thing and breaks a few other things, slows your machine down massively, and can never, ever protect you against The New Threats, such as fear-based Support Scams.
• What IBM execs called their older employees, and what they love doing with anything old.
• How to use an old tablet as a portable monitor, as long as you understand the caveats.
• Tesla's cars randomly slam on the brakes at highway speeds... because they're made with software.
• Jeeps blowing false alarms and accusing their owners of being thieves... because they're made with software.
• How to rejuvenate your 10-15 year old computer and turn it into a speedy Chromebook.
• Apple AirTags - yet another technology unleashed on humanity with zero thought to consequences.
• How many people (including myself) love working at home, but what that has done to retail.
• What are NFTs and Cryptocurrency, and why they're luckily fizzling out.

Hope you had a great time! We're blazing through these articles. Feel free to email me with any feedback, and thanks for telling your friends about the show!

Today we go over some evil tech schemes from 2022 and give thanks that most of them fell apart, as all evil things eventually do.

• Yuval Noah Harari warns the next generation that evil organizations could use biometrics to monitor our minds - for years I've called this the Soviet's greatest dream.
• In very related news, Microsoft tried to turn kids into QR codes that require daily validation. They dangled fear in front of people in order to gain their trust - something I've termed Fear as a Service.
• Airyx is/was an attempt to create an operating system that looked and acted like MacOS, but without all the bloat and paranoia. (Sort of like ReactOS did for Windows!)
• The excellent Jeff Johnson explains how Apple is just living off its brand reputation, and Apple is no longer what it was. I concur and people need to know this. He also mentioned that Steve Jobs was NOT an engineer, and instead was an advocate for the USER, and they no longer have that.
• The IRS was duped into giving a company $86 MILLION for a facial verification technology. LUCKILY since they're in the public eye, people caught on to this and shot it down. Two questions remain: When can people shoot down other bad ideas in the tech industry from less visible organizations, and did the American Taxpayers get that $86M back?
• Almost every Big Tech company is an evil monopoly in its own subsector. GoFundMe was caught REDISTRIBUTING funds it raised rather than simply refunding them to users. Luckily this too was a high-visibility case, so they didn't get away with it.
• Finally, we read some fan-mail where one of my clients was almost duped into the Fake Rental WiFi Scandal. I swooped in just in time, but how many millions of others out there were hit by it?

Find these concepts and more in the preview edition of my forthcoming book, now available at thecomputerexorcist.com !

Tonight on CEP! It's a New Year's Special Edition TaS Episode!

• Rather than the usual Foghorn Leghorn, I told all the scammers today I was Eddie Munster. Hilarity ensues, for us.
• I made the first (Medicare) scammer sigh right off the bat.
• The next one, a paypal impostor, says i can call him James. So i call him anything but. He tried telling me that "hack-kers from Michigan" took my bitcoins using "micro viruses", and other wild fake tech terms to dazzle me. He said they tried to get into my "serwer" so i said "What? They got into my Star Wars?" My personal favorite is the part where I describe the Firefox icon on my screen. When he tells me to download his evil UltraViewer software, I take him on an ADD-fueled wild ride.
• The next two are car insurance/warranty scammers who asked what car I drove, so I told them i drove some classics.
• The next one is a cable company scammer calling herself Lydia, so i call her Medea. She offers me a fake discount, so I whip out the calculator and got her so confused, that she agreed to apply the discount twice.
• Saving the best for last, everybody's favorite scambaiter returns! Karl Mailchimp created another persona, a pierogi farmer named Ross Pierogi. The scammer alleges that someone stole his credit card, so he plays along with that on-the-fly, ad-libbing, creative genius we've come to expect. Wait til you get to the part where the guy tries to spell "help desk host" to him.

As always, please warn your friends about phone scams by sharing this episode! Visit becomeanexorcist.com to join the good fight.