I have a friend who is averse to reading emails.  That makes it difficult for us to arrange to meet for coffee because I’m averse to telephones.  As spies we’d do dismally.  How would we come together long enough to arrange a dead drop, a place where we would leave and pick up

Facebook went down the other day and what a blessing it was.  I like keeping up with friends but I hate the commercials I have to scroll through to reach them.  If scrolling can be counted as an aerobic exercise, I’m fit. Promos aren’t the only reason I needed a break.  I’m t

I admit it.  Some mornings, I dedicate time to cursing my computer.  Overnight, some dark magic has rendered my passwords useless or an old blog has risen from the grave to republish itself on Facebook.  On those days, I call my guru.  Usually, he’s good at sorting out the probl

Manners or morals?  That’s the question Brits are struggling with as the argument about leaving the European Union comes to a boil.  With the March 29 deadline for departure looming, many in England seem to have lost their cool.  It’s damn the torpedoes, among upper crust and f

Over the holidays, a couple  introduced me to their son who was visiting from Boston.  As he was a young man, I asked what he did for a living.  He said he was a medical researcher and was working on a drug for multiple sclerosis.  A lump hardened in my throat as I remembered a br

The title of this blog says it all.   On Facebook, our data doesn’t belong to us.  Ditto our “authorial rights” according to information scientist, Amelia Acker at the University of Texas at Austin.  (“Preservations Acts,” by Nora Caplan-Bricker Harper’s Magazine, Dec.

Do you know your trustworthiness score?  Did you know Facebook has given you one?  To avoid accusations they are purveyors of fake news,  the company now uses an algorithm to determine a member’s credibility.  Twitter, reportedly, is moving in the same direction.  (“Facebooks

Recently, I got entangled with a company’s phone representative for whom English was a second language. Both her grammar and her accent made communication difficult.  Finally, she brought her supervisor on the line.  His, too, was hard to understand.   “Do you live in the Unit

I have a friend who thinks whatever appears on YouTube must be true.  Though a sensible woman in all other respects, she thrives on conspiracy theories, and YouTube abounds in them. There, she can find fake news on the cabal to poison our water systems; a threat to destroy organic fo

My father taught me the difference between truth and a lie when I was five.  The story begins with a teddy bear, a tiny, plastic ornament that hung at the end of my toothbrush. I loved to watch it in the bathroom mirror, bouncing up and down as I cleaned my teeth.  One day, the tedd