Rise and Shine: Your Dose Of Business Tech Inspiration

Moving mail and files to the cloud solved a lot of problems for a lot of people. It also handed control of that information to someone else, and that’s a risk that doesn’t get thought about enough.

Today Charly goes through:

✅ The risks you take on when someone else holds your mail

➡️ Why it’s different to the “early days”

⚡ What to think about before you decide what to do

Have you thought about what you&rs...

In 1986, 75 cents of stolen computing time led to the capture of a KGB cold war spy.

Cliff Stoll, an astronomer and programmer turned System Admin, found a "cuckoo's egg" in the computing nest. His investigation is a rollicking adventure that:

✅ Covers a game of cat and mouse that never quite caught the mouse

➡️ Has 3 letter agencies be indifferent to the attempted hacks of US Military Networks

⚡ Shows how a Honey Pot definitely attra...

If you are looking for a cost effect PDF reader and editor, PDFGear is an excellent candidate to consider. I've been on the search for a replacement for my Adobe subscription and this one can highly recommended - I can see why.

Today I walkthrough PDFGear showcasing:

✅ Where to download it and the platforms it covers

⚡ What the interface looks like on first open and how to clear your recent files

⭐ The context menu options, from merge ...

In Episode 741, I shared that businesses often implement solutions or buy products and services before they know the shape and size of the problem they're trying to solve. That's were things get expensive and the question that was left was: can getting it wrong be made less expensive?

Charly thinks it can and this episode addresses just that:

✅ Why you don't know what you don't know

➡️ The one question you need to keep asking as you r...

When investigating a security breach, it’s best not to rely on the date of a compromised file. That date may not be the “source of truth” you think it is and it may derail your investigation.

There’s a number of reasons for that and Charly covers that in today’s episode:

✅ Why you can’t rely on the date of the file

⚡ Why a suspicious looking file date still may not confirm anything

⭐ What actually pr...

If you have a Google account, Gmail account, or Google Workspace account, Google has switched on a new AI feature and opted you in automatically. It scans your emails and attachments, which may include financial data, tax information, bank statements and health information.

Today’s Walkthrough Wednesday is about how to turn off Google AI scanning in Gmail, on both desktop and mobile, so you can make an informed decision about ...

They reckon you can spot when AI wrote something, but is that really true? There's a checklist going around online that shows certain words, certain punctuation and certain phrases, that some maintain are indicators something was written by AI. Is that true though?

Watch todays episode and tell us what you think. Charly gets into it and dicusses things like:

➡️ How AI learned the words, punctuation and phrases

⚡ Some of the sources of...

Links to shared Claude chats appeared in search engine listings recently.

If you've ever shared a Claude conversation someone else may still be able to read it, even after removed the search engine listings. This episode discusses:

➡️ How the chat links were listed

✅ What "sharing your chat" really means

⚡ Why this isn't just limited to Anthropic

❗ Steps you can take to protect your information

This one affects anyone using AI tools for ...

Do you share chats and artifacts out of your Claude account? Did you know the list of shared chats and artifacts appeared in Search Engine listings?

If you’ve ever shared a chat or an artifact, you might want to:

✅ Revoke the share on your chats

➡️ Revoke the share on your artifacts

⚡ Audit uploaded files

⭐ Ensure your sharing with an informed decision.

Go and check your own account after this one, and do the same on any other AI t...

According to the Bluevine's 2026 SMB AI Trends report, AI adoption in Small Business jumped 50% in just six months while trust in the accuracy of the AI along with data security, decreased.

What does rising adoption and decreasing trust in AI really mean for Small Business Owners and what can they learn from it?

In this episode:

✅ We discuss those stats

➡️ The difference between data security and AI accuracy

⭐ The one task you can use t...

Microsoft is making changes on how you can authenticate your logins and recover your accounts. Part of that starts in September 2026, when the tech giant will strongly "encourage" its users to move to Passkey logins and eventually change the methods you can use to recover your account if you get logged out.

There are three deadlines between September 2026 and February 2027 all Microsoft users should be aware of.

Charly breaks it down...

You’ve heard that M365, Zoho and Google Workspace all offer shared mailboxes and you think they sound good, but you’re not sure.

✨ Are they the right tool for your small business?

✨ What do you need to think about when deciding?

✨ What’s the best way to use one?

These are all excellent questions, and this episode provides some answers including:

✅ What a shared mailbox is and why it’s genuinely useful

➡️ What stor...

You don't need a thousand affiliates. You need the right ten.

Charly sits down with Alex Standiford, founder of Siren Affiliates, to talk about what happens when you stop chasing every possible affiliate and start building real partnerships instead. Alex explains the shift that changed the way he grows his own business, and why it might be exactly what your marketing is missing.

In this episode, Charly and Alex discuss:

✅ Why more aff...

Ever tried to work out where to host the videos on your website and ended up drowning in jargon? Streaming, transcoding, adaptive bit rate, CDNs, it’s a lot to make sense of before you’ve even chosen a platform.

In this episode, Charly covers:

✅ What’s actually happening behind the scenes when a video streams from your website

➡️ The three types of video hosting: dedicated platforms, raw cloud or object storage, and...

Muse Image was released by Meta as a cool new AI image generator. The release gave implicit permissions to Meta for the use of your Instagram content, and it wasn’t good.

Charly unpacks what Muse Image lets people do, why she had concerns, and what changed in just one week since it launched.

In this episode, Charly covers:

✅ What implicit permissions Meta took and the privacy implications

⚡ The real risks to businesses that many...

Meta’s new Muse AI is rolling out in the US, and it’s a good trigger to run your regular Instagram privacy checkup. If you haven’t been through your sharing and reuse settings in a while, now’s the time.

In this episode, Charly covers:

➡️ The existing settings that control who can reuse your content

⚡ Why checking on your phone matters, not just your desktop

⭐ What to watch for as Muse rolls out further

❗ How oft...

You keep hearing that the right AI tool will improve your business / drive sales / make you money / use all your data, so you try one, then another, and the money keeps going out while nothing really changes.

This is exactly the problem a business owner brought to Charly. Today, she works through the question worth answering before you spend another cent chasing the right tool.

In this episode, Charly covers:

✅ Why one more app never ...

Kevin Mitnick, one of the world’s greatest hackers, rode the buses for free, made phone calls for free, and gained access to some of the world’s largest tech companies, without having a tech skill.

How did he do it? The answer might surprise you, and business owners will want to know why how he succeeded still affects them without too much trouble today.

It’s Firewall Friday, and Charly:

✅ Shares how Kevin Mitnick pu...

Someone left a question on one of my YouTube videos about Zoho Mail shared mailboxes, and it was a good one, so today I go and answer it properly. If a person replies from a shared mailbox, does that reply go out from the shared mailbox address or from their own address?

What a great question, lets find out.

Book a Free 30 minute Breakthrough Session: https://askcharlyleetham.com/book-me

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