The Security Rabbit Hole Has No Bottom (Premium)

You can add the term "go down a rabbit hole" to the list of those I use regularly and correctly while not having a full meaning of its origin. So I looked it up, and in this case, my understanding that it originated with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was correct. In the opening lines of the first chapter of that book, the title character follows a White Rabbit into his "rabbit-hole," as Carroll wrote it, falls for a fantastical amount of time down a very deep well, and lands in what Dictionary.com describes as "the strange, surreal, and nonsensical world of Wonderland."

"A rabbit hole is a metaphor for something that transports someone into a wonderfully (or troublingly) surreal state or situation," that site explains. "On the internet, a rabbit hole frequently refers to an extremely engrossing and time-consuming topic."

Perfect.

My experience researching and experimenting with online account security over the past month and a half has felt very much like that, a time-consuming topic that often feels surreal. Like many of you, I've long understood the basics of account security. And like many of you, I hope, I was delighted to confirm that I correctly configured my most important online accounts—those related to identity, e-commerce, banking, and the like—in secure fashions.

But like many of you, I'm positive, I also discovered many of my online accounts were out-of-date, with old and now incorrect verification methods, phone numbers, addresses, and other personal information. And in examining my accounts, I spent a bit of time getting them up-to-date. Which they will remain until one day when they are not.

And that's just one of the issues with security, a complicated and frustrating topic that requires expertise and experience that I, frankly, did not have. Thanks to my efforts since mid-December, however, I'm getting there. And while I still worry about offering any of you misguided advice that, when implemented, might prove dangerous, I'm putting in the hours and getting a bit more confident.

These things take a while. I've been writing books about Windows for almost 30 years and ever since Microsoft shifted from local account to online account sign-ins with Windows 8, I've felt a growing need to more fully explain what we now call the Microsoft account (MSA), in particular. I took baby steps along the way with introductory chapters of various kinds in different books, but I've long felt this topic deserved a small book of its own, something free or extremely inexpensive that I could point readers at as needed.

This need came to a head in December. I had collected a list of new features in Windows 11 version 23H2 and ordered them roughly in order of importance so that I could update the Windows 11 Field Guide to address the many changes in this release. And then I started writing the updates. As I noted in an early January update about the book, the result so far has been over 100 pages o...