IMO, passwords are more secure than 2FA and in trusting some cloud server in almost every case, if you're willing to put up with a little bit of inconvenience. All my passwords are random, locally-generated 16 to 32 characters which are unique for every site. They're stored in a locally encrypted file (a Keepass variant) which never leaves my laptop and never needs to access the internet at all. Eliminating or greatly reducing the dependence on external security tools is just good practice.

As a comm tech in the days of 300-baud dial-up modems, I too learned how to "whistle down" a modem to see if it responded to the calling modem's handshake. At the time, an indispensable skill.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

No, I'm assuming that the madman antagonist has made a calculation of the form "It's worth X of our folks to kill P*X of theirs", where P is any value you think realistic.

...something about a fool and his money.

They certainly did when I was a draftee, and the recipient of a great many vaccinations using this technique. However, I think airi-injections are sub-cutaneous, whereas covid vaccines must be administered intramuscular.

as we are all learning to our regret.

Reminds me of one of my favorite science-fiction stories, in which light propogates very, very slowly through a special type of glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This (apparent) requirement may be specific to rental vehicles. I've pulled a specific fuse in the 2019 Chevy Bolt that I own, which completely disables cell service, OnStar and GPS functionality: car still behaves normally otherwise.

"cognitive dissonance"

"Fermat's Last Theorem" by Amir D. Aczel (1996) , describes Andrew Wiles' seven year search for the famous mathematical problem. I've always been enchanted by Wiles' own description of the process: "Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of—-and couldn't exist without—-the many months of stumbling around in the dark that precede them." It's always made me think of searching for a particularly obscure bug in someone else's badly written code :-)

As David Cope discovered after producing AI-generated scores which emulate classical composers so well that even musically educated listeners couldn't reliably distinguish between "real" and "generated": this article provides more detail.

If the interest rate you're paying on your mortgage is less than you can reasonably expect to realize by investing the money elsewhere (e.g., stocks and bonds), invest the cash rather than paying off the mortgage.

If it stinks, won't move, and doesn't work, it's your [husband | wife | neighbor].

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out. -- Oscar Wilde, "Lady Windermere's Fan"