Your Attention, Please communications

12/15/2025

Warning: iPhone's iOS 26.1 contains security holes that are already being exploited by bad actors. These flaws could let a person take total control over a phone, including hijacking banking sessions and other bad stuff. Experts advise folks to immediately go to Settings, Updates, and update to iOS 26.2, which closes these security holes.

Apple has released iOS 26.2, fixing 26 iPhone flaws, two of which are already being used in real-life attacks. Here's what you need to know.

12/11/2025

Rachel Michaelsen, LCSW of PsyTE-online.com and Steve Freedkin of Your Attention, Please! communications will be offering an online course on Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health early in 2026, with continuing-education credits for mental-health practitioners. Watch for updates here or at

Online classes taught live, or pre-recorded for on-demand learning, on Telehealth / Telemental Health (meets BBS 3 CEU hour requirement), social work supervision, energy psychology, and other psychotherapy topics taught by Rachel Michaelsen, LCSW

10/29/2025

Numerous Microsoft online services, including its own Web site, are offline or working sporadically today (Wed., Oct. 29, 2025 US), due to failures in the company's Azure cloud computing services. Impacted platforms include Microsoft 365, Xbox, Outlook, Starbucks, Costco, Kroger, Blackbaud, and Minecraft, per Newsweek . Microsoft says service should be restored by 4:20 p.m. Pacific time. Ironically, one page that's offline is Microsoft's status page (status.microsoft.com) listing which of its services are down.

Coming on the heels of an Amazon Web Services outage on Oct. 20 that knocked out numerous major Internet services, the Microsoft failure underscores the dangers of centralizing so many Internet services into a few gigantic systems. Bigger isn't necessarily better.

(Illustration adapted from image by Peachaya Tanomsup via Vecteezy.com)

05/22/2025

We will be closed Saturday, May 24, through Monday, May 26 (over the Memorial Day weekend).

04/16/2025

Update 2:35pm Pacific time — From Zoom: All Zoom services have been restored. If you are still having connection issues please flush your DNS cache and reconnect.

For Windows open a command prompt and type "ipconfig /flushdns"

For Mac open a terminal window and type "sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder"

Earlier post:
ZOOM IS DOWN. Here’s what to do instead.
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April 16, 2025, 1:45pm Pacific time

The Zoom videoconferencing service is down. It appears something went wrong with the registration of their domain name zoom.us about three hours ago (about 10:30 a.m. Pacific). There are indications that the service is starting to come back online, but as of now, I’m not able to start a meeting.

If you need to hold a video meeting without waiting for the problem to resolve, you can switch to Google Meet. This free service is accessed through your Web browser; no special app is needed. To create a Google Meet session:

1. Visit: https://meet.google.com
2. Click the New meeting button
3. To start a meeting now, click Instant meeting, then share the meeting link that appears in a box (lower left on computers) with everyone who should join your session. Or
4. To start a meeting later, click Create a meeting for later and then copy the link shown and send it to all participants.

In steps 3 and 4 above, clicking the icon of two sheets of paper stacked will copy the meeting link, which you can then paste into an email message or other document.

FYI, I will be away and largely unreachable Thursday–Sunday, April 24–27, as well as Thursday–Sunday, May 15–18, 2025.

Regards,

Steve Freedkin
your attention, please! communications
https://your-attention-please.com
[email protected]
Voicemail (messages only): (510) 595-4626 [call any time]
fax (510) 900-1900 [anytime]
Mail: 5111 Telegraph Ave. #274, Oakland, CA 94609-1925
USA

We make and improve Web sites, run Zoom for meetings and events, improve SEO and social media, and provide other online/offline communications, including conceptualizing, writing, editing, artwork, audiovisual editing, and more, specializing in working wi

09/26/2024

Don't hand your phone to the police: Think you have nothing to hide? Read this article. Maybe you happened to be at a location where a crime happened a few minutes later and your phone tracks that you were there. Maybe you've violated some obscure law you didn't even know about. With digital driver licenses available now in California (I've just deleted mine), there are more inducements than ever to hand over your unlocked phone (which courts may deem your permission to let the authorities look at •everything• on it). This article is well worth a full read.

Even if you’ve got nothing to hide.

06/25/2024

We’ll be closed Thursday–Sunday June 27–30 and July 4–7, 2024.

02/27/2024

George Orwell would be proud: A Texas company has cars with license-plate readers driving California streets to track where your car has been and when. It sells that data to marketers and others. Our car — which we drive maybe once a week — has been tracked by the company (so far) FORTY-EIGHT TIMES since 2017. We know about this only because a class-action lawsuit has been filed against the company.

Check how many times your license plate has been tracked: https://drnprivacyclassaction.com/form/

If it's at least 15 times, you're a member of the lawsuit class. The suit asks a $2,500 for each of the 23 million cars and a permanent injunction against continuing to track license plates.

Article about the lawsuit: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/privacy-license-plate-scanning-lawsuit-18685303.php

Anyone with the money to buy the data can learn who our friends are, where we shop, where we bank, and when we visit government offices. Is that what we want?

Feel free to re-post.

Millions of Californian car owners will have their privacy on trial in San Diego in May, over Digital Recognition Network’s license plate scanning.

02/14/2024

Last night I was driving to a meeting using Google Maps. The map app announced aloud, “Your destination is on the left.”

What was actually on the left on this unlit, winding road was an unprotected, sheer drop down a steep hill.

Double-check directions given by navigation and “find-my-device” apps. As this article notes, they’re usually pretty good, but they •can• be inaccurate — with potentially dire consequences if you don’t take them with a grain of salt.

Two dangerous cases of mistaken identity using the Find My app showed that location-tracking technology can be useful — but it cannot be trusted.

12/15/2023

If your location history is turned on in Google Maps, that data is stored “in the Cloud,” meaning on Google’s computers. You might not care who knows where you’ve been … until you become a criminal suspect simply because you were near a crime scene. Google received 11,554 law-enforcement warrants to scoop up location data in 2020 alone, even tracking people attending protests.

Finally, Google has decided to store that history data on users’ phones, not where authorities can get at it in Google’s computers. This change will roll out on iPhone and Android devices over the coming months. I still advise keeping Location History (a/k/a Timeline) and search history turned off in your map applications, even after the change, so your phone isn’t turned into evidence against you (even if you’ve done nothing wrong).

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/15/24002693/google-maps-update-geofence-warrants-law-enforcement

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-09-28/google-user-data-is-police-s-top-shortcut-for-solving-crimes

Google’s latest update to Maps protects users’ locations from law enforcement.