A tale of two eras

In this week’s newsletter, Amy reminisces on the tech toys of their childhood, inspired by a hilarious lesson about why your digital privacy shouldn't be left on an open channel.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.   To the surprise of absolutely no one who has seen my face, I’m one of the younger employees at Talos. As my industry veteran colleagues were buying the first iPods, navigating the switch from dial-up to broadband, saying goodbye to floppy disks, and making Myspace accounts, I was playing with my  Password Journal and Friend Chips .  It’s a funny contrast, but I still experienced the beginning of the “always-on” era.   Ah, those were the days.

 One of my most vivid tech memories is begging my dad to play games on his  Handspring Visor  — a classic personal digital assistant (PDA) launched in late 1999 by Handspring, a company formed by the original creators of the PalmPilot.  Handspring stopped producing the Visor line in 2002 and it eventually became obsolete, mostly because its desktop sync feature couldn't keep up with modern OS updates. Despite the tech debt, I spent hours playing Asteroid, Centipede, and Hardball (aka Breakout) on that thing.

My dad, meanwhile, mostly used the Memo function to store his passwords... which he still does today. (Yeah, I’m still working on getting him to see the wonders of 1Password. )  You might be wondering what made me reminisce on childhood toys. A few weeks back, my fiancée and I drove a few hours to visit my family.  Even if we get in at 9:00 p. m. , it’s tradition for us to stay up late eating pizza and talking about random stuff.

  We got on the topic of phones because my parents still have a landline, and I mentioned that walkie talkies were my first introduction to having my own personal device.  My dad dug some old ones out, set them on the table, and put them on scan while we chatted.    At some point, the conversation petered out just when the walkie talkie captured a channel.  Radio static, and then a kid’s voice broke our silence: “Your butt crack is out. ”  My dad got an impish grin and brought the talkie up to his mouth.

 My mom pleaded, “No. Honey, no.  Don’t. ” The rest of us were already wheezing and crying.   He pressed the talk button and, in his best crotchety old man voice, bellowed, “Hey, you kids. Get off my lawn! ”  Imagine being those poor kids.  It’s a funny story, but if you don’t want people like my dad intercepting your comms, maybe stick to encrypted channels.

  The one big thing  Talos' Yuri Kramarz  published a blog  highlighting how AI-driven vulnerability discovery has completely outpaced human patching capabilities.