Well it was bound to happen. My Social Security number was found on the dark web. Not the first time my personal info has appeared there, but it is definitely unnerving. Every time you turn around there's another data breach. I'm so sick of some company, hospital or whatever mailing you that letter and the only advice they give you is to check your credit report, which is basically looking for damage after the fact.
I already have a credit freeze in play as well as a credit alert, which expires in September, so hopefully at that time I'll be able to renew the alert. I did also check my Experian credit report, something I haven't done in a while, and all appears well. I created a little schedule for myself to check all three of them on a rotating basis every 3 months.
I also have a security freeze with chexsystems.com, which prevents crooks from opening a new bank account in your name. You may wonder why anyone would want to do that, but they do this to launder dirty money and commit fraud without using their own identities. Examples would include collecting fraudulent unemployment benefits or an IRS refund, or they could overdraw the account, leaving you on the hook.
A credit freeze locks your credit report entirely, preventing new accounts from being opened, while a fraud alert tells lenders to take extra steps to verify your identity. You should do both, in my opinion, but if you only wanted to do one, I would do the credit freeze, which is more restrictive. It may be a little redundant to have both, but there's no accounting for human error.
I finally got around to replacing my wireless mouse and keyboard. The old one was so old the letters had worn off some of the keys, but the main reason I replaced them is because the mouse was not letting me scroll well. I tried a few hacks I found online, but none worked, so I suspect it was simply a worn out little wheel inside the mouse. The new one works great.
To wrap up loose ends (again) on the VOC readings on my air quality monitor, I did hear back a few times from a Qingping customer service rep, but they were not very helpful. By looking at readings on the app, I can see the lows and high on each day, and most every day did have a low in the green/normal zone but also had readings in the yellow,/slightly elevated level and on 5 days of the past month, there were readings in the red. I have no idea why it was red for just 5 days scattered throughout the month, unless those were days when I didn't go out anywhere due to weather and maybe for that reason no influx of fresh air from opening the doors? I've had the monitor in 4 different rooms and the readings have been all pretty much the same.
Now granted, and as the Qingping rep told me, the monitor readings are just kind of a snapshot of a general range and are not meant to be a precise reading because there are fluctuations and so on. And aside from the 4 days with readings in the red zone, the yellow zone readings were not way, way high above normal, just slightly. So if normal is 1.0 or less, my yellow zone readings were 1.1 to 2.8.
I've decided to use the monitor app more proactively; I set things up to receive notifications on my phone when the VOC readings are 2.5 mg/m3 or more. Kind of an arbitrary choice but I could open a window for just a few minutes. Certainly it would make sense to do that if it reached the red zone again.
I will be interested to see, once I turn the heat off by early May, whether the readings improve as a whole, cus the only thing each of these 4 rooms have in common is being heated with warm air generated by an oil-burning furnace in the basement. So turning the furnace off, combined with more comings and goings once the weather warms up, could do the trick. The only other thing I could do to improve readings is to periodically open windows in the winter, but doesn't that sound stupid when we all work so hard to eliminate drafts and not throw energy dollars away? I don't know what else to do.
I got a nice little check from Reynolds Wrap the other day. I had a roll of tinfoil where a large portion of the center of the tinfoil looked scraped or abraded, on the whole roll, and I called them to see if it was still safe to use it. They said no, don't use it but they sent me a $25 check as compensation, which surprised me, cus usually they'll send a coupon to buy more of their product. I did provide them with the bar code and photos.
So where I live, one of the 2 electricty suppliers owns a regional water authority, which they needed regulatory permission to sell. Our attorney general railed against the sale because the water authority would then become a "non profit," which means they would free themselves from regulatory oversight, allowing them to double their rates. Unfortunately, the sale was approved, so now we can all look forward to rising water prices.
This is also a revaluation year in my town, which will also lead to rising property taxes, and in April we'll get to vote on the town budget, which will also very likely lead to about a 3% rise in property taxes.
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March 21st, 2026 at 01:42 pm 1774100542
March 21st, 2026 at 08:09 pm 1774123758
I’ve been on the dark web before, partly out of my own curiosity, but that actually lead to a bit of informal consultation work for law enforcement, that may or may not have contributed to the arrest of a convicted pedophile.
Still though, I’m not an expert with it, just more of a tourist. All I can say is that when I was there, it felt more like the Wild Wild West (WWW… get it?) of pre-dot-com bubble days, where websites are rough and simplistic, and you had to find your own way around, and everything was more word of mouth since no google search, or really any search, is available… but that was the whole point.
The place was littered with either teenagers who found a format to gleefully type off all the swear words under the sun, to seemingly-efficient marketplaces that distributed illegal narcotics, or the golden goose was getting access into the inner circles of people who shared and distributed child porn. Oh and here’s a really weird one, but I found a whole bunch of Chinese student’s math problems on there as well. My GUESS is that it was just their seemingly harmless practical exercise in learning how to establish themselves on the dark web…. They are much more sophisticated now, but I guess some forgot to erase their previous homework haha.
What’s really crazy about the child porn thing is that, much of it is now just operating out in the open, in plain sight, even on the clear web (another wording for the regular internet) through the use of AI. I’m sure actual child porn, and related scams of it, still exists, but AI has really disrupted things, and I can only imagine things getting much worse from here on out.
But what about us regular people who is trying to prevent identity theft? Well, if it will help you sleep better at night, it’s really no different for us from before, where we should always take reasonable precautions like the ones you listed above. On the dark web, people are basically either paying for, or just sharing these giant lists of these data, and unless you are a specific target of someone’s ire, it’s mostly just a matter of luck as some scammer may end up trying to take a loan out on your name, but that’s… really it.
March 21st, 2026 at 09:04 pm 1774127059
March 21st, 2026 at 11:16 pm 1774134993
Computer Systems are so complex now, using so many types of hardware and software that it really isn’t possible to prevent every attack.
I suspect everyone’s Social Security number has been breached by now.
I use three different banks and three credit cards so that if something happens to one, I can still manage while the problem gets resolved.
And I monitor every account a couple times a month to make sure nothing odd happens.
March 22nd, 2026 at 01:15 pm 1774185308
Also, google "house burping" (lüften). I started doing it periodically this winter. You might "throw a few energy dollars away," but you might find the benefits in terms of better air quality. It's a German cultural norm and the windows in homes are structured to make it easier.