I'll review the characteristics of external drives and include a couple of specific recommendations.

It's important to check and possibly download your email from time to time so that you won't lose email, or even the entire account.

Encrypted email cannot be sniffed, but chances are you aren't using encrypted email. I'll explain what I mean and what you might want to do.

Password vaults are a common recommendation by security professionals to improve your online security. Why do so many resist?

Your school can see email being sent and received across its systems, and there's no way to know whether or not they're actually looking.

A MAC address can easily be traced for as far as it travels -- which isn't far enough to be useful.

Hard disks can last a long time, but it's important to realize that they could still fail at any moment.

Another day, another breach. What should you do if you're involved?

Erasing your hard drive before you give it away is important. Exactly how thorough an erase you need depends on your data and level of paranoia.

A high-level overview of how websites and services should store passwords security, so next time there's a breach you'll know what to look for.