>If you ever mailed a Cologuard sample back in a prepaid box, the company that processed it has been broken into, and the stolen data is already public.

>Exact Sciences makes Cologuard, the at-home colon cancer screening test. Abbott bought the company in March. Have I Been Pwned added the Exact Sciences breach on Friday, August 7. The published file holds 10.9 million unique email addresses, along with names, dates of birth, genders, phone numbers, home addresses and health information belonging to customers, patients and healthcare providers.

>Abbott has confirmed the incident. Its August 5 update says "some of the impacted files contain personal information and/or personal health information," and that it is still reviewing the data before making any required notifications. Abbott has since filed an initial breach report in at least one state, listing a single affected resident there and a notice date of August 5. The wider round of letters has not gone out yet.

>Abbott has been specific about how this started. It was a vishing attack, not a ransomware event. Vishing is phishing done by voice. Somebody calls an employee, sounds like the help desk or a coworker, and talks them into handing over a login. With that login, the data was copied and carried out.

>What was actually taken

>Abbott has not itemized the data yet, so this splits into two lists.

>Confirmed and sitting in the published file, according to Have I Been Pwned, are:

>Names

>Dates of birth

>Genders

>Email addresses

>Phone numbers

>Physical addresses

>Personal health data

Not all apps are created equal. I'm curious if others share their location within their family? Do you have privacy concerns at all?

From the article:

>I do not share my location with anyone. That sounds more principled than it is.

>Nobody ever asked me. My family is not close enough for it to come up, so I have never had to sit across from someone I love and say no. I got to skip the hard part.

>A reader put it to me a different way. She does not share with anyone either, not even her husband, and not because she has anything to hide. Her words were that it feels like a door that does not need to be opened.

>So I went looking for what I would have been agreeing to. This article isn't going to tell you if you should or shouldn't share your location. That is your call and I wouldn't second-guess it. Every family, and every relationship, is different. Most of the people I know do it and they give good reasons. What I wanted to know is who else is peeking at your location.

>Location tracking isn't just monitoring

>We should begin with the positive side, because the motivations behind sharing your location are genuinely valid.

>There are conveniences. For example, your spouse knows you will be home in fifteen minutes and begins preparing dinner, or you are stuck in a meeting and cannot answer, and no one is left guessing. Your child recently earned their driver's license, and seeing their status indicator confirms they arrived safely at practice. Location tracking used in this way is a form of unspoken communication.

>A reader described it better than I could. Opening the app to see where her husband is takes less out of her day than texting him and waiting on a reply, and it works when he is driving and cannot answer at all.

>The arguments for personal safety are equally compelling. Keeping tabs on an elderly parent facing early memory lapses, locating a phone misplaced at a restaurant, or checking on a teenager driving home through a rainstorm are all genuine arguments for the use of this technology.

>Typically when we want a new service, we tap the agreement button right when we urgently require it. Then we use it continuously, and never take the time to review the terms we accepted. It is a universal habit that applies to everyone, including myself.

>3-way consent

>Two people agreed to this. Three people are in it.

>You and your daughter. You and your husband. That is the arrangement you think you set up, and it is the one you agreed on. But her phone does not hand its location to your phone. It hands it to a company, and that company passes it along to you. It also keeps a copy, decides how long to keep it, and decides who else gets to see it.

>Who gets to see it depends enormously on which company is providing the service. These products are not interchangeable, and the difference between them is wider than most people assume.

You may have visited a doctor's or therapist's office recently and been asked if you consent to an AI note taker. Many are not sure if they should allow AI to listen in on their personal conversations with a provider. Despite the hesitation, this technology is in place today.

That tool being used is an ambient AI scribe. It listens to the whole conversation, turns it into a transcript, and drafts your visit note into your chart for the doctor to review and sign. This allows the doctor to focus on you instead of a screen. Abridge, Microsoft's DAX Copilot, and Nabla are the ones you are most likely to be sitting in front of, and they are already common. At UC San Francisco, 70% of physicians were using an AI scribe in daily practice as of 2026.

Anyone who has attended a workplace meeting featuring an automated notetaker has already encountered this kind of technology. Most of us have seen those tiny bots popping into our online meetings. However, the doctor's exam room is a completely different environment, and the reality might surprise you.

"Storage Almost Full." You've probably seen the notification. You tapped "Not Now," and a week later it came back, and then you tapped it again. Most of us have seen it. We do the dismiss dance until we finally find the time.

The box in question.

The standard advice is to delete some photos. It is good advice. But on the wrong phone, that advice destroys the only copies you have. Whether deleting a photo is harmless or permanent depends on a setting that can be easy to miss. So before you delete anything, answer one question: does this photo exist anywhere except in your phone?

Find out where your photos actually live

There are three possibilities.

• Your photos are safely in the cloud.
• They live only on your phone.
• Your backup was on, but it stopped without telling you.

The third case is most dangerous, and it is common. Without any warning, an account that has reached its limit will simply stop automatic backups.

Here is how to check yours.

On an iPhone:

1. Open "Settings" and tap your name at the top.
2. Tap "iCloud," then tap "Photos."
3. Look at "Sync this device."

If it is on, your photos are in iCloud, and you can see upload progress in the Photos app (tap "Collections," then the profile button). If it is off, the photos exist on this phone and nowhere else. Unless you copied them to a computer yourself, they are the only copy.

One wrinkle: if "Sync this device" is off but iCloud Backup is on, your photo library may be inside the phone's backup. That copy is real, but you cannot browse it. It can only be recovered by restoring the entire phone.

On an Android phone:

1. Open the Google Photos app.
2. Tap your profile picture or initial in the top right corner.

The screen tells you plainly, "Backup complete," or "Backing up" with a count of items left. It might also say "Backup stopped." You can also check an individual photo. A backed-up photo carries a "Backed up" label in its details; a photo without that label lives only on the phone.

If the screen says anything other than "Backup complete," stop here. Don't delete anything until you know which photos made it to the cloud and which did not.

Article includes the full guide.

>If you priced a laptop or tablet this summer, you noticed. In June, Apple raised the price of nearly every Mac and iPad it sells. The cheapest iPad went from $349 to $449 overnight. The MacBook Air went from $1,099 to $1,299. The hardware stayed the same, but the prices didn't.

>It isn't just Apple. The PlayStation 5 costs $100 more than it did in March. Xbox prices went up $100 to $150 this past Saturday. Nintendo is raising the Switch 2 to $499.99 on September 1. Dell, HP, and other laptop makers have raised prices too. Every major device maker is moving in the same direction. Most of them name the same cause.

>You've probably read that AI data centers use a massive amount of electricity and water. They also use an enormous amount of memory. That is the bill that just reached the store shelves.

>Three companies make nearly all of the world's memory chips: Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron. The AI data centers going up across the country (including here in Oregon) need enormous amounts of memory, and they pay top dollar for it. So those three companies pointed their factories at AI. Memory sits inside every device you own: your phone, your laptop, your tablet, your game console. When the factories serve AI first, the chips for everything else get scarce. Scarce means expensive.

>The companies buying those chips are not being subtle about it. On July 30, on his final earnings call as Apple's CEO, Tim Cook called it "a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing." Microsoft was blunter in its Xbox announcement: "console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027."

>The hard-drive half of this story already played out this spring.

The school laptop comes home in a padded sleeve with a district asset tag on the lid. It goes in the backpack next to the pencil case, gets left on the kitchen table, and ends up open in a bedroom at ten at night. Most parents signed for it during the first week of school and never thought about it again.

There is a simple way to think about that machine. Your child has been issued a work computer.

If you work in an office, you already know the unwritten rules. You assume the company can see your screen. You do not look up your medical symptoms or bank account on a work device. You just figure those rules out somewhere along the way, and keep your personal life on your personal devices.

Your child just got handed a work computer, and nobody told them how it works. You should still take the laptop. For a lot of families, it is the only computer in the house. But you need to know how the software actually operates before they open the lid. Here is what the school district can see, how to explain the rules to your child, and the handful of questions you need to ask. The camera is not part of it, and I will get to that.

What the district can actually see

"Monitoring" is one word describing three separate products, and school districts buy them separately.

A content filter blocks categories of websites. Your district almost certainly runs one. This one is simple and straightforward. I think most of us are used to working with a content filter at this point.

Classroom management is what the teacher uses during class. A teacher can see a live thumbnail of whatever tab is open, close that tab, or lock the browser. GoGuardian Teacher, one of the common ones, spells all of that out in its own help pages.

Safety scanning is the one that worries parents. It reads searches, browsing, documents, email, and chat inside the school's Google or Microsoft account, and it alerts on anything that reads like self-harm, violence, drugs, or bullying. Gaggle, one of the bigger vendors, sifts through everything attached to a district's Google Workspace. When something trips an alert, the software saves a screenshot of whatever set it off.

Full article

Manufacturers are not required to tell you when your router is no longer able to get critical updates. It's more important than ever to keep these security updates coming. This article can help you find yours and also point you towards what to do if you need to replace your router and can't right away.

Also in this article: What is an AI agent?

>The phone rings on a 95 degree afternoon. The screen shows your power company's name. The voice says your account is past due, a technician is already on the way, and the only way to stop the disconnection is to pay within 30 minutes with a prepaid card from the drugstore.

>Hang up. Every detail in that call is a lie, and during dangerous heat, the shutoff it threatens can be against the law.

>This scam runs all year, but it surges when the weather turns dangerous. Utilities and the FTC have warned for years that impostor calls climb during heat waves and cold snaps. That's when losing power stops being an inconvenience and starts feeling like a threat to your life.

>Early this month the weather gave scammers the perfect opportunity. A heat dome settled over the eastern half of the country. More than 160 million people went under heat alerts. The Department of Energy declared a grid emergency across the 13 states served by PJM, the grid operator for the mid-Atlantic. Air conditioners ran around the clock, and everyone was focused on their electric bill.

>Wisconsin's utility commission put out a reminder at the end of June along with a warning. Threatening a same-day disconnection is the signature of this scam. A real utility will always provide a written timeline instead.

This page is a triage for what to do in the first hour after you've been scammed.

>You did nothing shameful. You met a professional criminal who does this all day and who has practiced the exact script that worked on you. A bad afternoon becomes a drained account in the hours people spend feeling embarrassed before they pick up the phone. So the goal here is speed. Do these in order.