Topics on Ryan P. Meyer

Security

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Practices for protecting systems, data, and identities from threats. This covers everything from personal account hygiene (strong passwords, MFA, email aliases) to organizational concerns like [[Supply Chain Attacks]], [[Data Breaches]], and access control.

Good security is mostly about reducing your attack surface and making the cost of compromising you higher than the value of what an attacker would get. For individuals, that means: use a password manager, enable multi-factor authentication everywhere, keep software updated, and be skeptical of unexpected messages (especially ones that create urgency).

The landscape changes constantly, particularly with [[AI]]-powered threats that can generate convincing phishing at scale and clone voices from a few seconds of audio. Staying informed matters as much as staying locked down.

RSS

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Really Simple Syndication is a protocol for subscribing to web content without relying on algorithms, platforms, or email newsletters. You own your feed reader, you choose what goes in it, and nothing gets filtered or ranked by someone else’s engagement model.

RSS never died, it just stopped being the default. Most blogs, podcasts, and news sites still publish feeds. The infrastructure is there; the missing piece is usually awareness that it exists and a reader app to consume it. Tools like Current, Reeder, Readwise, NetNewsWire, and Feedbin make the experience feel modern again.

The real value of RSS is ownership of attention. You decide what enters your information stream, and you can leave at any time without losing your subscriptions (export your OPML and go). No account needed, no tracking, no ads injected into your timeline.

Privacy

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The right to control who has access to your personal information and how it gets used. In practice, this means choosing tools and behaviors that minimize unnecessary data exposure; from email aliases to encrypted messaging to understanding what the apps your use actually collect.

Privacy isn’t about having something to hide. It’s about maintaining agency over your own information in a world where the default is to collect everything, store it forever, and monetize it later. Every data point you hand over is a bet that the company holding it will never be breached, acquired, or compelled to share.

The practical toolkit: [[Email Masking|email masking services]], [[Encryption]], strong [[Password Management]], and a healthy skepticism about “free” services that fund themselves through surveillance.

Personal Knowledge Management

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Systems and habits for capturing, organizing, and retrieving the information you encounter. The goal is to make your past reading, thinking, and learning accessible to your future self.

Password Management

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You should use a dedicated tool to generate, store, and autofill strong unique passwords for every account. It’s possibly one of the single most impactful thing most people can do to improve their [[Security]] posture! It helps eliminates password reuse, the root cause of most credential-based breaches.

I support either Bitwarden or 1Password as great options for most people. Apple Passwords is okay, but vendor and ecosystem locked, and doesn’t have all the standard features; but it is better than nothing.

I would avoid using Google Chrome’s password manager (or any browsers).

I do not recommend LastPass at all.

Encryption

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cryptographic techniques for making data unreadable to anyone who doesn’t hold the key.

End-to-end encryption means only the sender and recipient can read the message; not the service provider, not the government, not an attacker who compromises the server.

Email Masking

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Techniques for protecting your real email address from exposure. Primarily done through alias/masking services that generate unique forwarding addresses per service. When a breach happens, or an email is sold, you know where it happened from since every site should have a unique email.

Digital Minimalism

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The philosophy of intentionally reducing digital consumption to reclaim time and attention. Not necessarily anti-technology, more a deliberate selection of which technologies earn a place in your life and which are removed because they are quietly extracting more than they give back.

Digital Garden

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A digital garden is a way to take thoughts and ideas and grow them at their own natural rates. As I write more and cover various topics, I will want to keep them update or develop my thoughts and understandings around them over time. Sometimes they grow, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I have to split them apart so one topic doesn’t become too overgrown.

It also provides a more centralized definition of a topic across the site. Rather than redefining constantly or having old definitions linger, it allows me to have steady control over how I articulate different subjects.

Data Breaches

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Unauthorized access to and exposure of sensitive information. As the saying goes: “The question isn’t whether a service you use will be breached; it’s when”.

AI Written Content

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

[AI] written content is a very interesting thing in terms of content to consume. I do think it is and can be helpful to use it to fine-tune your own writings, but it can be a slippery slope on how much is just generated and posted.

For example, using AI to write you TPS Report, probably fine; no one reads those anyway. On the flip-side, using it to write personal or engaging blog posts? Probably can be a bit soulless if you aren’t also heavily controlling the output.

I’ve often heard “If you can’t be bothered to write it, then I can’t be bothered to read it.”

Or, another example, “I used AI to take these 5 bullet points to make a five page report, that the recipient then used AI to turn back into 5 bullet points.”

AI

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Artificial intelligence can broadly refer to many technologies, from large language models and generative tools to actual science fiction A.I. like Skynet or that one Will Smith movie.

The current wave of AI (roughly 2022–present) is dominated by transformer-based large language models that can generate text, code, and images. The capabilities continue to grow at a rapid pace. So are the risks: hallucination, deepfake-enabled scams, labor displacement, and the erosion of the ability to distinguish human from machine.

Some interesting cases with AI, to me, involve [[Security]], [[Privacy]], and skill augmentation. How these tools change the threat landscape (AI-powered phishing, voice cloning, automated vulnerability discovery) and how we can use AI to defend against AI. The reshaping of what “trust” means when you can no longer assume a message, image, or voice is from a real person.

Supply Chain Attacks

hello@ryanpmeyer.eu (Ryan P. Meyer) — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A supply chain attack targets an organization indirectly by compromising one of its trusted vendors, libraries, or update channels. Instead of breaking into the front door, attackers quietly poison a dependency the target already trusts and waits to pull in.