Finding a job is never easy. But finding a flexible, shift-based, or part-time job that actually fits your life, pays fair wages, and offers competitive benefits? That can feel downright impossible, especially when you use employment tools and staffing resources designed with only the employer’s needs in mind.
Want to make it easier to find a job that meets your needs? Then you need to check out Bluecrew, a modern staffing solution that helps workers find the flexible employment opportunities they deserve.
With record inflation causing food, gas, and housing prices to soar, just about everybody could use a little extra money. An estimated 70 percent of American workers are looking for additional employment to make ends meet. So why did 10.5 million jobs go unfilled in November? Why are so many companies saying they still can’t find employees?
Some people will tell you it’s because today’s workers are lazy or they’ve become too accustomed to government handouts. But that’s not the case. People want to work. They just need jobs that fit their lives. And the reality is hiring, and employment practices have not evolved to meet new economic realities.Modern Solution For A Modern Workforce
That’s where Bluecrew comes in. This company was founded on the idea that the traditional approach to hourly staffing is broken. So they set out to create a new platform that streamlines the entire process in a way that works better for everybody.
A traditional job search requires a bunch of phone calls, emails, and paperwork. But half the time, you go through the entire application process only to find out that the employer can’t offer you the shift you need or the job just isn’t right for you for one reason or another. But with Bluecrew it’s so much easier.
Bluecrew is an online staffing agency and workforce management platform that lets you search for part-time, full-time, temporary, or ongoing job assignments that fit your location, skills, and schedule. Because you will be an employee of Bluecrew, you only have to fill out one application to access dozens of job opportunities. And all of them are sent right to your phone through the Bluecrew app, along with the wage, location, job description, and company reviews.
With Bluecrew, you can decide if a job is right for you, and there are never any penalties for declining a position. Best of all, you get peace of mind knowing that Bluecrew guarantees essential protections like timely payment, overtime, paid sick leave, and workers comp.
"Awake surgery" allows brain surgeons to see the functioning parts of the brain to avoid during surgery.
This article originally appeared on 10.17.22
Do you ever step back and marvel at the miraculous things human beings have figured out how to do?
Less than 200 years ago, no human being had ever played a saxophone, there was no such thing as anesthesia and if you had even a simple brain tumor, you were just out of luck.
Now, a team of doctors in Italy has successfully performed a highly complex, nine-hour brain surgery on a man while he was awake and while he played the saxophone. Not only that, but the patient reported feeling "tranquility" during the surgery and only spent a few days in the hospital after the surgery before being discharged.
According to CBS News, a 35-year-old male patient had a brain tumor removed at Paideia International Hospital in Rome, Italy, on October 10. The surgery was led by Dr. Christian Brogna, a neurosurgeon who specializes in complex cancer surgeries and "awake surgery," in which patients are not put under general anesthesia. According to the Mayo Clinic, certain brain surgeries actually require a patient to be awake and responsive during the procedure to lessen the risk of the surgery damaging areas of the brain that could affect vision, movement or speech.
Dr. Brogna told CBS News that this particular surgery was located in "a very, very complex area of the brain" and also pointed out that the patient is left-handed. "This makes things more complicated because the neural pathways of the brain are much more complicated," he said. Recent research shows that left-handed people differ in brain asymmetry from right-handed people and that the right and left hemispheres of the brain tend to be more connected in people who are left-handed.
The team of 10 who successfully completed the surgery was made up of neurosurgeons, anesthesiologists, neuropsychologists, neurophysiologists and engineers from around the world. Though other awake craniotomies that included a patient playing a musical instrument have been done before, the level of complexity and cutting-edge technologies used in this surgery made it a notable accomplishment.
Why the saxophone? The man had told the surgeons that retaining his musical abilities was of the utmost importance to him.
"Awake surgery makes it possible to map with extreme precision during surgery the neuronal networks that underlie the various brain functions such as playing, speaking, moving, remembering, counting," Brogna said in the hospital's news release. Playing music during the surgery gave the surgeons a visual of where those functions were in the patient's brain and helped them ensure they were keeping them intact.
Several times during the surgery, the patient played the theme song from "Love Story" by Francis Lai and the Italian national anthem on his saxophone. (You can watch him playing in the video below shared by Voice of America.)
"To play an instrument means that you can understand music, which is a high cognitive function," Brogna told CBS News. "It means you can interact with the instrument, you can coordinate both hands, you can exercise memory, you can count — because music is mathematics — you can test vision because the patient has to see the instrument, and you can test the way the patient interacts with the rest of the team," he said.
Such surgeries require intense preplanning and familiarity with the patient's normal functioning, and the team met with the patient six or seven times in the 10 days leading up to the surgery.
"When we operate on the brain, we are operating on the sense of self, so we need to make sure that we do not damage the patient as a person — their personality, the way they feel emotions, the way they get through life," Brogna told CBS News. "The patient will tell you what is important in his life and it is your job to protect his wishes."
As amazing as surgery like this is, Brogna reminds us that there's still so much we don't know about the way the brain works. Prodecures like this one help doctors learn in addition to helping patients.
"Each operation in awake surgery not only allows to obtain the maximum result in terms of removal of the pathology, but it is a real discovery," Brogna said in the hospital's news release. "Each time it offers us a window into the functioning of this fascinating, but still in many ways mysterious organ, which is the brain."
There is no shortage of dire news about the state of modern recycling. Most recently, this NPR article shared the jaw-dropping statistic that about 5% of all plastics produced get recycled, meaning the rest of it ends up in landfills. While the underlying concerns here are sound, I worry that the public narrative around recycling has gotten so pessimistic that it will make people give up on it entirely instead of seeing the opportunities to improve it. What if instead of focusing on what isn’t working, we looked at these news stories as an invitation to do better?
This question isn’t rhetorical for me; it’s been the motivation behind how I’ve spent the past five years of my life. It started when my son Owen asked me how we could recycle our dead batteries where we live in Seattle. After making a few phone calls and realizing how complicated it was, we made it a weekend project to pick up our neighbor’s batteries along with other hard-to-recycle items.This novel approach of having your hard-to-recycle stuff “carpool” with your neighbors quickly caught on in Seattle. Our rapidly growing community was looking at their junk drawers with new eyes, felt inspired to be part of something bigger, and kept asking what else we could pick up.
This enthusiasm turned my family’s passion project into Ridwell, a company whose mission it is to make it easy to deal with hard-to-recycle materials like plastics, light bulbs, batteries, & more. We pick up where curbside recyclers leave off, providing our members in six states with a way to recycle and reuse materials right from their doorsteps. In 2022 alone, our community kept more than one million pounds of hard-to-recycle plastic film out of landfills. To date, we’ve kept more than ten million pounds of hard-to-recycle materials from going to waste. All of this impact started with a simple, optimistic reframe. Instead of dwelling on what our curbside service couldn’t take, we instead asked ourselves how we could help.
Ryan Metzger, Founder and CEO of Ridwell
Via Ridwell
It’s been a lot of work to be sure, but what’s kept me motivated on this journey has been learning about all of the exceptional efforts happening elsewhere to make recycling work better for everyone. Our elected officials are creating new policies that powerfully shift market incentives, like Maine’s law that makes companies pay for their own recycling or California’s law that creates more demand for recycled plastic. Engineers are developing new ways to recycle tricky plastics, while citizens across the country are raising awareness about the need for government and corporations to do more.
The longer I’ve worked in the recycling space, the more I’ve found allies and collaborators who are finding surprising uses for materials that used to be dismissed as trash. Trex has pioneered a method of turning soft plastics like grocery bags into high-performance decking for homes. Companies like ByFusion and Arqlite are turning multilayer plastic packaging once considered unrecyclable into building materials and hydroponics gravel. The types of innovations we’ll need to solve our recycling crisis are all around us; we just need to keep connecting these pockets of innovation into a more holistic system of reuse and recycling.
So while the news cycle around recycling can often feel overwhelming, I always encourage people to use these grim statistics as motivation to lean into the challenge and look for solutions. For some people, that’s calling their legislators, and for others, it’s coming up with new packaging that has a smaller environmental footprint. For those of us at Ridwell, it’s about how we can help make it easy for households to keep hard-to-recycle materials out of the landfill. As the past decade has shown us, the overwhelming “Pacman-shaped” chunk of the pie chart often shows us where the most impactful innovations must come from and where the next wave of businesses must focus. Yes, we are at an inflection point when it comes to addressing the problems posed by excessive waste in this country. To be honest, I’ve never felt more optimistic that we have what it takes to address this problem, together.
Ryan Metzger is a guest contributor to Upworthy and founder and CEO of Ridwell
Students at Washington State University created a life-size Operation game.
Anyone who has ever played the game Operation likely feels a teensy bit of anxiety just thinking about it. The experience of painstakingly trying to extract the Charlie Horse with those tiny, wired tweezers with a steady hand, only to accidentally touch the metal side and get the lightning-like jolt of the buzzer is hard to shake. That's the stuff of core memories right there.
But what if you had a humongous game board the size of a real human, with life-size bones and organs to extract? What if instead of tweezers, you had large tongs as tools to perform your operation? What if instead of Pavlovian-style fail buzzers, the game produced a much less traumatic womp womp womp sound when you mess up?
Students took on the project after Pullman Regional Hospital’s Center for Learning and Innovation approached WSU engineering professor Roland Chen about the idea. Chen took the concept to his senior-level design class and they created an initial plan, which was then passed on to the engineering club.
WSU senior Joel Villanueva, who served as a team leader on the project, tells Upworthy that approximately 15 students were involved in the game's creation over the two years it took to complete it. The project was quite complex as it involved translating the computer-aided design to a real table, creating multiple prototypes, figuring out the right level of challenge and making sure it was safe for kids to use.
In terms of gameplay, Villanueva says it's very similar to the original board game, but obviously much larger and with a few key differences. "We have tongs that aren't connected to wires, which was a safety concern, so we found a way to increase that safety factor," he says. "And it also has sound. So when it's triggered, a red light is emitted and an error sound is also emitted."
The life-size version of Operation uses tongs instead of tweezers.
Villanueva says they didn't want the fail signal to be too alarming, which makes sense since the game was made for kids at the local science center. So instead of the buzzing of the original game, touching the sides of the organ or bone opening results in a sad trombone sound—womp womp womp wommmp.
The game is officially referred to as the Surgery Skill Lab and is now a part of the EveryBODY exhibit at the Palouse Discovery Science Center (PDSC) in Pullman, Washington. It's ultimately a learning tool, and Villanueva says they put the bones and organs in their appropriate locations in the body to help kids learn about human anatomy.
"We worked with the BMES [Biomedical Engineering Society] student section who created some fact sheets about the project," adds Villanueva. "For example, 'The heart pumps this much blood at a given time'—small fun facts like that."
The bones were 3D printed, then coated with silicone (so the tongs can grip them), and the soft organs were molded out of silicone using 3D-printed molds.
Pictured left to right at the Palouse Discovery Science Center: Kevin Dalbosco Dal Forno, Silas Peters, Roland Chen, Connor Chase, Ryan Cole, Becky Highfill, and Joel Villanueva
Courtesy of Joel Villanueva
The game was unveiled at a Family Night event at the PDSC on January 19, so Villanueva and his team got to see how it was received.
"It was an eye-catcher," says Villanueva. "There were many kids playing with it and it seemed like they were having lots of fun with it."
Jess Jones, who is part of the education team at PDSC, tells Upworthy that there was also a real doctor at the exhibit during the opening to talk with kids about medicine. She says the game has been a hit with kids so far.
"They're loving it," she says. "The organs are 3D printed so they feel kind of realistic. The kids are loving the texture."
The life-size 3D-printed brain kids can remove in the Surgery Skill Lab.
The project is a win-win for both the university students and the local community. The students got to put their engineering skills into practice using various software and technologies and also gained valuable life skills such as time management, documentation, leadership and more. And the community gained a fun and educational exhibit both kids and nostalgic adults can enjoy.
Three cheers for innovation and collaboration that helps us all learn. (And good riddance, stress-inducing buzzer.)
This movie couple definitely could have used some healthy therapy.
This article originally appeared on 02.15.16
Ever fallen into one of those Internet dating quizzes? You know, the ones that promise to categorize you? Like "what your astrological sign says about your relationship style."
They can be fun, but we all know they're mostly fluff.
What if I told you someone did find a way to "categorize" your love style but with actual real science?
Three relationship scientists asked about 400 couples to track how they felt about their relationship and how committed they felt to marrying their partner. They followed each of the couples for nine months. Not, like, literally followed them — that would be creepy. Instead, they just asked them a few questions and asked them to keep track of how committed they were feeling over time.
At the end of the nine months, the scientists collected all the couple's responses and delved deep into the data. They found that couples did indeed tend to fall into one of four categories.
Prepare yourself for some soul searching because you might just be:
This is the couple Facebook made the "It's Complicated" relationship status for. Their levels of commitment tend to go up and down over time, especially after arguments. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. These folks use those conflicts to help them make decisions about the relationship, and in fact, they didn't appear to be any more destined for a breakup than any of the other groups.
Also, as a bonus, they tend to follow those turbulent downs with passionate ups. "These couples operate in a tension between conflict that pushes them apart and passionate attraction that pulls them back together," said study author Brian Ogolsky.
If your idea of a perfect date night is a long walk followed by eight hours of binge-watching "House of Cards" together, you might fall into this category.
Partner-focused couples tend to spend a lot of time together and share hobbies or leisure activities, and it's that shared time that tends to propel them forward. They tended to be more careful and thoughtful about their relationship decisions — more likely to build from the inside out — and tended to be the most satisfied overall.
On the other hand, if your perfect evening with your partner involves grabbing all your friends and hitting the bars or breaking out Settlers of Catan for the hundredth time, this might be the category that best describes you. Social couples usually share a friend group and use that time spent with friends to inform and build their relationship as a couple.
"Having mutual friends makes people in these couples feel closer and more committed," said Ogolsky. They also tended to be pretty stable and have higher levels of love based on feelings of friendship toward each other, which can be a good indicator for long-term happiness.
Unfortunately, not every couple's path is easy. Things may start out good, but tend not to stay that way for dramatic couples. This type of couple tends to make decisions based on negative experiences or stuff from outside the relationship.
"These couples have a lot of ups and downs, and their commitment swings wildly," said Ogolsky. "You begin to see little things eroding, and you start to see the relationship in a negative light, and soon you give up," said Ogolsky.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, dramatic couples tended to break up the most, twice as much as other couples.
So what's best? Well, here's where this article differs from a lot of those Internet quizzes. Because the answer is that there isn't a "best" kind of relationship.
Different couples work and grow differently. These are different pathways and it'd be a mistake to assume there's a "correct" way to love someone. Or even that you're forever locked into a certain style of relationships. "These are not predefined, for-life patterns," said Ogolsky.
And even in a single relationship, these patterns aren't predictors of destiny — a dramatic couple may, in fact, outlast a social one, and a partner-driven couple may be as passionate as anyone you could ever meet.
And the researchers willingly admit in their paper that their study doesn't cover all relationships. Many very happy couples have no desire to marry, for instance. And, it should be noted, that it wasn't too long ago that the U.S. didn't even allow all couples to get married!
Wait, you're not going to tell me how to find the perfect, golden, eternally-happy relationship?! Why even study this then?
Because, in our hearts, humans are social creatures, Ogolsky explained. Love, friendship, passion, and commitment are part of the human experience. Understanding relationships can be as important to understanding ourselves as studying chemistry or biology. They can even affect your health!
As for what you can learn from all this, the important takeaway is that what you use to make decisions — whether from conflict, from the inside, from the outside, or from friendship — can influence your level of commitment. It might be useful for couples to think not just about their choices but how they make their choices.
NASA satellites continually monitor the Earth, snapping photos and sending information to researchers on the ground.
Most of the time, things seem to be more or less the same as they were the day before, but the Earth is actually constantly changing. Sometimes it changes through discrete events, like landslides and floods. Other times, long-term trends, such as climate change, slowly reshape the land in ways that are difficult to see.
By zooming way out, we can get a new perspective of the events that have changed the Earth. These 10 before-and-after photos show the disasters, trends, and changes that have affected our planet, as seen from space.
1. In May 2016, NASA's satellites picked up the devastating 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire.
Before:
Satellite image from before the wildfire.
All images from NASA.
After:
Satellite image after the devastating fire.
All images from NASA.
In May 2016, a wildfire broke out near Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada. It destroyed more than 2,400 homes and businesses and burned through roughly 1,500,000 acres of land before it was under control. (Some of the pictures use false-color imaging to distinguish between land types, by the way).
2. The satellites also captured how landscapes eventually recover from fires, like in Yellowstone.
Before:
Satellite image after fire in Yellowstone.
All images from NASA.
After:
Nature returns to normal with time.
All images from NASA.
In 1988, wildfires burned through over a third of Yellowstone National Park. 28 years later, images show that much of the forest and plains have returned.
3. They saw drought shrink Utah's Great Salt Lake over the last 30 years ...
Before:
Image of the Utah’s Great Salt Lake before the drought.
All images from NASA.
After:
Water supplies have shrunk with a possible link to climate change.
All images from NASA.
Persistent drought has shrunk water supplies throughout much of the West. Scientists now think this may be linked to climate change.
4. And they showed the Mississippi pouring over its banks in March 2016.
Before:
Satellite image of the Mississippi Delta and river.
All images from NASA.
After:
Rivers overflow their banks with spring run offs.
All images from NASA.
Record-breaking rain inundated much of the Mississippi Delta in the spring of 2016, causing the mighty river to spill over its banks.
5. In West Virginia, surface mining reshaped mountaintops.
6. In Washington state, the Oso mudslide changed the Earth back in 2014.
Before:
Mudslides can create significant change to an environment.
All images from NASA.
After:
A landslide reshapes a community and kills 43 people in Washington state.
All images from NASA.
43 people were killed in the March 2014 landslide in western Washington.
7. In Louisiana, sediment carried by water created new land.
Before:
Water carries sediment which changes the topography.
All images from NASA.
After:
Sediment can create new land.
All images from NASA.
Rivers and streams often carry sediment with them. As they slow down and reach the coast, that sediment falls out of the water. Over time, this can create new land, as you can see above.
8. The images show Hurricane Isaac touching down in Louisiana.
Before:
Satellite image before the hurricane.
All images from NASA.
After:
Image of the flooding of Louisiana after the hurricane.
All images from NASA.
Hurricane Isaac hit the gulf coast in August 2012. 41 people lost their lives and more than $2 billion worth of damage occurred. Above you can see the flooding that still lingered afterward.
9. And warming temperatures shrink Alaska's Columbia Glacier.
Before:
Alaska’s Columbia Glacier as seen from satellite.
All images from NASA.
After:
Warmer global temperatures have shrunk many glaciers.
All images from NASA.
Over the last 28 years, warmer global temperatures have shrunk many glaciers, including Alaska's Columbia Glacier. From above, the shrinkage is crystal clear.
10. Meanwhile, our cities grew and expanded, like this image of San Antonio, Texas, shows.
Before:
The growing community of San Antonio, Texas.
All images from NASA.
After:
The city has started to take up more space than the natural environment.
All images from NASA.
San Antonio — home of the Alamo and the Spurs basketball team — had a population of just over 1 million people in 1991. Today, it's added another 400,000 people.
The world — and our country — is constantly changing, and we play a part in that.
Sometimes nature changes us, such as people having to respond to floodwaters, but we also know humans affect the Earth as well. And while it's true that the Earth has gone through natural cycles, we know it's now happening faster than ever before.
As the Earth will continue to change, it's important to remain aware of how we affect the Earth — and how the Earth affects us.
Thousands of emails bombarded the company in a short period of time. They all came from the same source, pretending to be someone or something they weren't in order to lure people into clicking on shady links and giving up their personal data.
"While investigating it, I stumbled upon the phisher's database which had [the] personal data of thousands of people," McGready says. "I was surprised how little effort was required on the fraudster's part to acquire such a trove of information."
This discovery sparked McGready's interest in information security and teaching others how to protect themselves from fraud. Since then, this journey has taken him from the U.K.'s National Trading Standards department to the documentary series "Secrets of the Scammers" to his own company and beyond.
Here are just a few lessons from McGready — and some other IT professionals — about securing your personal data:
"Having data readily available online means that things like phishing emails can be automatically tailored to targets without much effort," McGready says.
But what does "data" really mean in this case? Um. Er. Pretty much everything. Even if we don't realize it. Something as simple as your basic browsing habits and location history can actually reveal a lot about you. Even if your name's not attached to it, a savvy social hacker could still figure something out.
2. Be aware that your friends may expose info about you — even if you're not on social media.
"We tend to share every detail of our lives on social media because we feel obliged to by peer pressure — whether that be adding your birthday to your Facebook profile because the website keeps asking for it," McGready says. But it's worse when your friend tags you in that photo from high school with your school mascot in the background and — oops. There goes another security question.
Things don't always go as planned with technology.
3. Pay attention so you can mitigate the risks (though probably not completely avoid them).
McGready recommends keeping your social media profiles as private as possible and asking your friends and family to do the same. "Even those that intentionally aren't on social media may be easily findable by their friends or family that share the 'dinner table selfie.'"
4. It's better to be proactive than wait until you're compromised.
"We hear about data leaks almost every week, it seems," McGready says. "The general public are no longer asking 'if' their data is compromised, but rather 'when.'"
This might sound scary. But it's also a good reminder to stay sharp.
Do you know everyone that's using your computer?
Image via Pixabay.
5. Check the Facebook apps and third-party services that might have access to your account.
"It's worth checking what data you share with specific companies and only giving out the bare minimum in case of a data breach in the future," McGready explains.
For example: Does Bejeweled Blitz really need permission to access everything you've ever put on Facebook, to post on your behalf, and to spam your friends and family? It's not just annoying — it puts you at risk if that information leaks.
6. Take some time to get rid of those old accounts.
A clever hacker might still be able to figure out something through your iwasdefinitelyacool15yearold@aol.com email address. "Many of us, myself included, also have a large number of 'dormant accounts' on websites that we no longer use," McGready says. "I'd fully recommend logging into these accounts and changing all the profile information before deleting the account."
It's important to know what accounts are open in your name.
7. Don't feel bad if it happens to you. Even IT professionals fall for it!
Georgia Bullen, technology projects director for New America's Open Technology Institute, recounts how she was hacked:
"My password wasn't secure enough and so someone had built a program that was logging into not-secure-enough accounts and then spamming."
What she felt at the time is all too familiar for anyone who's been hacked: "Embarrassed, confused, and then really worried that someone else was going to click on something from me."
8. Be smart, pay attention, and know what you're getting into with any website or service you sign up for.
This bears repeating because a little awareness can make a big difference.
What type of security for your accounts do you have?
Passwords are the Achilles' heel of the modern world — but there's a trick.
"It's totally possible [for hackers] to take one password, see where you've re-used it, and then get access to those accounts as well. And that's where the bigger danger happens," explains Harlo Holmes from the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
That's why, in general, passwords should be different for every website or service used, and consist of three random words, interspersed with special characters; a DiceWare password like "correct horse battery staple" is a good place to start.
Password managers can help out by creating unique passwords for you. Which leads to...
Password managers can generate strong, random passwords for you. And they keep track of all of your different passwords so you don't need to memorize them yourself.
All you need to do is remember one super-secure master password in order to unlock every other possible password combination. That way, says Bullen, you can't even make the mistake of verbally giving your password away because you genuinely don't know it yourself! (Unless it's your master password, in which case, ya know, don't do that.)
Safety is good, but a back-up plan is even better. 2FA sends a code to a device on your person just to make sure that the person logging in is really you. Even if your password does get compromised, the hacker probably doesn't have access to your smartphone, too. (Probably.)
Mozilla's Amira Dhalla explains how it works:
12. Consider using a separate email address — with a separate strong password — for important accounts like banking.
That way, even if you do use the same password elsewhere, hackers will have a harder time getting in to your important accounts. (Make sure this secondary email account has two-factor authentication, too!)
13. Be sure to hover over links before you click them.
"Links may look legitimate, but upon hovering, they actually redirect to a completely different place," McGready says. (Don't believe me? See what happens when you click on www.upworthy.com/definitely-not-an-upworthy-page.)
14. Always double-check the URL in the address bar. (But even that's not always safe.)
Ever notice that green padlock in your browser bar? It's a good sign! ... except when it's not. As McGready explains, "While it's true that this means your data is encrypted between your computer and the website itself, it doesn't legitimize the website."
Using default passwords on the computer router can leave you vulnerable..
It may seem harmless to use the default password for your router, but that can actually leave you vulnerable to hackers (there are even websites that can be used to find out different routers' default settings). And someone accessing your router can access pretty much your entire home network. So it's worth taking that small extra step of setting up a strong user name and password.
16. Be wary: These days, the internet is in everything from lightbulbs to baby diapers. Which is super cool! And bad.
McGready sees "the internet of things," or IoT, as the biggest online threat on the horizon. Even if you have worried about Amazon spying on you, you probably didn't consider who else could be spying on you through a vulnerable Wi-Fi or Bluetooth system built into your smart home. "The issue comes when these wireless chips are integrated by default on all products, whether the customer wants them or not," McGready explains.
17. Exercise a little extra caution.
It all boils down to the fact that humans are too trusting.
We trust that our friends aren't going to expose our address over Twitter. We trust that some disgruntled Angry Birds employee won't hijack our linked Facebook page because we didn't pay attention to permissions. We trust the green padlock in the browser bar that keeps our credit cards secure, even if the website taking that information wants to use it for a shady purpose.
Simply put, we trust that the internet is mostly good and that people are, too.
It's hard to solve a problem you can't see — which is why McGready is so passionate about teaching online safety.
"Show the public exactly what is possible and what they should be watching out for," McGready says. "It's one thing to tell someone that a scammer can send a text which appears to be from a legitimate company or a known person; it's another thing entirely to send a text to that person's phone which comes from 'Mum.'"
There's no "one weird trick" to protect us from the dangers of technology. But we can do our due diligence — as long as we know where to start.
