Dose of Paranoia - December 23, 2025
It gets worse before it gets worse...
Happy Holidays, paranoid peeps… this has been a great year to be an angry guy focused on and writing about information security, scams, and how the world is basically going to hell in a handbasket and I wish all of my readers a warm, happy, prosperous Holiday and 2026. Except if you are (still) a Trump supporter. In that case, may you step on Legos barefoot in every room of your house for all eternity.
Scam/Infosec Stuff
2025 Scam of the Year - Sometimes the breadth and extent of the scam is just breathtaking and understanding it fully just requires too much bandwidth for people who (unlike me) are willing to spend hours “doing the research.” So if you want to cut to the chase, please uninstall the Honey savings coupon browser extension if you have installed it. And cancel your PayPal account - they own Honey and if we lived in a country where corporate scammers still faced actual consequences, they would be fined into nonexistence. If you want to go down the rabbit hole and see how this “free” service seemingly dedicated to “saving you money” actually is totally screwing just about every stakeholder in their ecosystem, spend some time with this video. If you are looking for a more summarized version, The Verge has been keeping track of things. But if you have time (and want to understand just how bad the Internet has gotten) watch the video.
Customer service scams - When travel trouble strikes, many stressed travelers turn to the web to rebook their air and hotel arrangements - and increasingly, when you search for the customer service phone number of an airline, hotel, or other business online, you may be directed to a scam call center which will cost you thousands of dollars to (not) “fix” your issue. These dirtbags use Google ads, social media and other online information sources to misdirect people looking for help into their clutches. This is why you should NEVER Google customer service numbers - get them directly from the back of your credit card, or the hotel or airline confirmation or app. And be very wary of social media accounts purporting to be “customer service” for major brands. Dealing with travel issues in the moment is very stressful and the bad guys know this and take advantage of the situation.
Le Grinch strikes - France’s postal service was knocked offline just 3 days before Christmas by a major cyber attack, delaying both payments and holiday deliveries. While there has been no attribution of the attack, it certainly smells like part of ongoing Russian hybrid warfare efforts in Europe. As the current US administration continues to degrade our cybersecurity (and other) defenses, we may be seeing this type of event on this side of the Atlantic… although the Russians may simply let the Trump administration do their work for them.
Tech Stuff
Alexa, Land the Plane - OK, not quite, but this is pretty darn cool - a pilot was able to push a single button in his small plane and said plane was able to land itself safely, doing all of the flying and communication with air traffic control. While the system was originally designed for situations where the pilot in incapacitated, in this case, the pilot used it out of an abundance of caution when the plane had pressurization problems.
Down with the Glassholes - Apparently, there are still people around who think that wearing recording glasses in public does not qualify them from being shunned from polite society (at the very least) or cast into an active volcano (my preference). I hope that we see more companies take the step that MSC Cruises has and ban these losers from their premises.
Get those old laptops out - I’m not sure I would have the patience or eco-consciousness to pull this off, but you have to hand it to the guy who repurposed 1000 laptop batteries and some solar panels to run his home.
Fun Stuff
Them durn kids and their 6-7 6-7 - a guide to the top ten kids’ slang terms of 2025…
According to one study, I am the fucking strongest person alive.
This annual list of “52 Things I Learned This Year” is always interesting reading.
Books of the Week
You probably should put off reading these till after the holiday season is over as they are both pretty much guaranteed to ruin your holiday spirit…
Careless People was written by Facebook’s (former) head of government relations, who adorably joined the company thinking that it had the potential to change the world for the better. She tells the story of how Mark Zuckerberg (and Facebook) went from wanting nothing to do with governments and politics to becoming an evil powerbroker which we can thank for the Trump and other horrible authoritarian administrations around the world. Along the way, we get to hear just how horrible Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and the rest of the Facebook leadership truly are. After reading this, they have all moved up a few notches on my “murder list for when I finish building the time machine.” Facebook is truly one of the worst things to come out of the Internet era.
On the fiction side of things, Joe Steele imagines a world where Joseph Stalin’s parents fled Russia for the US and Joe became a congressman and later President of the US during the Great Depression. Until recently, this would have been considered a dystopian alternate history. The interesting thing in this book is that while Joe and his cronies are a bit more murder-y than our current administration (at least when it comes to American citizens), things seem to be markedly less corrupt than in our timeline. At least these fictional horrible people had an actual political agenda… the bar has been lowered to sub-sub-sub-subterranean levels in this timeline.