HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN
That Airport Charging Station Could Be Hacking You. Here’s How to Stay Safe
Ignorance is bliss until it bites you in the ass.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
Photo: Getty Images
It’s hard to know these days whether the greatest risk to our personal and financial security is laziness or ignorance. I’d say it’s a tossup but, while ignorance is theoretically curable (perhaps not for team MAGA), laziness is a lifelong curse. Worse yet, if you’re too lazy to learn, you’ll never be free of your own ignorance. So many of us, even apart from politics, choose the blissful comfort of ignorance over the inconvenience of painful truths. We go through life with our fingers crossed just hoping and praying that bad things won’t happen to us. But hope is not a strategy, and we have to stop kidding ourselves and admit that knowledge, for better or worse, makes life messier.
One of the problems we’re facing with the rampant spread of all kinds of new technologies is that—in far too many cases—we don’t even understand that our mundane, habitual behaviors now represent dangers that we could have hardly imagined a few years ago. Real knowledge gives us the ability—if not necessarily the will or desire—to recognize and acknowledge the extent of our ignorance. The recent announcement by Anthropic that its latest AI model is too powerful to trust to mere mortals is just the latest warning that the world is likely to shrug off as more tech hysteria. The time has come to overcome our studious obliviousness and at least listen to the folks who know better.
We decided long ago that we were willing to sacrifice a great deal of our privacy for immediate access and convenience in virtually every aspect of our social and shopping activities. Virtually everyone suffers from the stupidity of employing the same simplistic password or phrase multiple times for access in various applications and accounts that we use regularly. And today we hear jokes all the time about people using the word “password” for their passwords. On average, each household has about 100 critical passwords for their many accounts and services and experts estimate that more than half of those are the same word or phrase. Google and Microsoft systems regularly alert users to the fact that they have multiple identical and common passwords or that their codes have been included in data breaches or other dark web listings. But, because we’re all too busy or too lazy, we almost never take the time to update and change them.
Now we’re seeing several new threats which don’t rely so much on new or exotic technologies as they do on our habits, typical actions and behaviors, and the fact that we have reached the point where we take far too many conveniences for granted and never even consider that they might pose security risks. We’ve seen this problem for years now with crooks inserting skimming devices in ATMs and other card readers in order to steal credit card numbers. But now our increasing reliance on ubiquitous connectivity and shared infrastructure is presenting a whole new level of exposure and risk.
We don’t give one second’s worth of thought to plugging in any of our devices to any available power outlet. We’re just grateful they’re there. But when public USB ports and power stations began to be deployed in airports and elsewhere, the focus was 100 percent on location, access and convenience and not a bit on security. As a result, a new threat—juice jacking—which is based on our incautious use of public USB ports to charge our devices can lead to compromised equipment, data theft, and the insertion of malware in moments. When we’re in a hurry, distracted, and grateful to find a source before we hop on a plane, no one’s thinking about data loss, identity theft, or worse. But in doing so we’re all sharing a common port and an anonymous connection.
As Eric Plam, the CRO of SIMO says: “The safest move today is simple—don’t share infrastructure with strangers.” SIMO makes portable and powerful devices which supply both power and secure dedicated Wi-Fi connectivity for mobile workers and especially for travelers. And to be clear, these kinds of risks aren’t limited to power concerns. SIMO’s devices also address another new connectivity problem which is the growing development and deployment in public spaces of imposter Wi-Fi networks.
Plam calls these “evil twins.” They look very much like a legitimate network that we’re all familiar with and to which we readily connect without taking a moment to verify anything. In fact, we’re pleased that we see a rapid connection and, where necessary, that our password is accepted (along with anyone else’s). Once the connection is made, your messaging, transmissions and other traffic can be intercepted, your credentials captured, and you can even be sent to other fake or spoofed sites. There’s no magic here or complex technology, it’s just a case of crooks riding on our typical conduct and routine actions.
Avoiding these threats isn’t hard once you’re aware of them, but habits are ridiculously difficult to break or change. Moving from using public facilities and infrastructure to reliance and use of a secured and trusted private connection is clearly the way to go and, frankly, cheap compared to the likely costs of losing your data or your identity. SIMO suggests a few other basic steps for travelers to take:
(1) Avoid public Wi-Fi for sensitive activity
(2) Verify network names before connecting
(3) Disable auto-connect on the road
(4) Use wall outlets rather than USB ports
(5) Carry a power pack whenever you’re away from home or office
(6) Use a Solis Go secure Wi-Fi + Power Bank
(7) Always enable two factor authentication for all sites, services and apps
(8) Use a security key such as a Yubikey especially for work-related computing
Ignorance is the absence of knowledge. Stupidity is the rejection of knowledge. Now you know. Forearmed is forewarned.
HEATHER
On April 12, the day of Hungary’s parliamentary elections, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) posted on social media that it was closely watching the election and stood firmly behind Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
As a major networking event and ideological trendsetter for the radical right in the United States, CPAC has been instrumental in celebrating Orbán’s Hungary as the center of the effort to destroy the liberal democracy of the United States and Europe in order to replace it with what Orbán called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” His system replaced the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stopped the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and rejected “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.”
Today Péter Magyar, the man who will replace Orban after winning the election in a blowout, revealed that Orbán was using government money to finance CPAC. Orbán has clearly been working for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and just days before the election, news broke that last October, Orbán told Putin, “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”
So it appears that CPAC was funded by a foreign government that was working closely with Vladimir Putin. In a speech today, Magyar told reporters that the outgoing foreign minister, who has been accused of working closely with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, was shredding confidential documents.
The influence of Orbán on the U.S. right wing marked a change in Republican politics.
Before Trump won the presidency in 2016, the modern-day Republican Party was well on its way to endorsing oligarchy. It had followed the usual U.S. historical pattern to that point. In the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, and then again in the modern era, wealthy people had come around to the idea that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran everything.
Although those people had been represented by the Democrats in the 1850s and the Republicans in the 1890s, 1920s, and 2000s, they had gotten there in the same way: first a popular movement had demanded that the government protect equality of opportunity and equal justice before the law for those who had previously not had either, and that popular pressure had significantly expanded rights.
Then, in reaction, wealthier Americans began to argue that the expansion of rights threatened to take away their liberty to run their enterprises as they wished. To tamp down the expansion of rights, they appealed to the racism of the poorer white male voters whose votes they needed to maintain control of the government, telling them that legislation to protect equal rights was a plan to turn the government over to Black or Brown Americans, or immigrants from southern Europe or Asia, who would use their voting power to redistribute wealth.
The idea that poor men of color voting meant socialism resonated with white voters, who turned against the government’s protecting equal rights and instead supported a government that favored men of property. As wealth moved upward, popular culture championed economic leaders as true heroes, and lawmakers suppressed voting in order to “redeem” American society from “socialists” who wanted to redistribute wealth. Capital moved upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.
When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as “makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression was well underway. Republican leaders wanted a small government that kept taxes low and left business to do what it wished, but they still valued the rule of law and the rules-based international order.
It’s impossible to run a successful business without a level legal playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 Great Crash made it clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were determined not by the market but by cronyism. And it’s impossible to do business without freedom of the seas and the stability of international rules.
But when Orbán took office for the second time in 2010, he courted the right wing with promises not to get the government out of their way, as right-wing politicians in the U.S. had done since the 1980s, but to use the government to impose their cultural values on the country at large. He established control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote Hungary’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns.
Increasingly, Orbán used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. By 2026, Hungary still had elections, but state control of the media and the apparatus of voting made it very difficult for Orbán’s opponents to take power.
That model proved irresistible for right-wing leaders in the U.S. who courted radical white evangelicals and who recognized that their ideology was unpopular enough that the only way to make it the law of the land was to impose it through the power of the state. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, who took office in 2019, followed Orbán’s model right down to the laws prohibiting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues and DeSantis’s attempt to strip Disney of its governance structure when it refused to adhere to the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Orbán’s idea that the power of the state must be used to overturn democracy in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation inspired the far-right figures that took charge of the Republican Party under Trump. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”
Calling for “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Roberts pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term that uses the power of the government to impose right-wing religious values on the U.S. In his foreword for a 2024 book by Roberts, then-senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made it clear he saw himself and Roberts as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.”
Since taking power, Trump and Vance have followed Orbán’s model both at home and internationally. Instead of working with our traditional allies, they have attacked Europe and aligned the U.S. with Hungary and Russia.
Establishment Republicans who wanted a smaller government liked Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but they did not like the threat of government intervention in their business decisions to force them to adhere to right-wing moral values. They are also not keen on Trump’s rejection of Europe and destruction of the rules-based international order under pressure from Putin. That order facilitates international trade.
In an op-ed in Fox News online today, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the old leader of the establishment Republicans, tried to sideline the MAGA Republicans when he wrote: “Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage—not its social policies—align with America’s strategic interests.” By that, he tried to recall the Republican Party to his faction rather than that of the MAGA Republicans by pointing out that Magyar’s government seems more likely to resist America’s adversaries and work with America’s allies than Orbán was.
But the model that Hungarian voters’ dramatic rejection of Orbán offers to the U.S. is a more sweeping rejection of the whole radical right than McConnell suggests. Rather than centering an elite as lawmakers, as right-wing ideology does, it centers the people. Those who know Hungarian politics say that Magyar’s party won because voters recognized that Orbán’s vow to purify Hungarian society turned out to be a cover for extraordinary corruption of party leaders and cronies, while the destruction of the economy hurt everyday people.
Magyar and his party reminded Hungarians of the good in their country and reawakened their national pride. They promised voters a democratic state with the rule of law under a government that worked for the people.
Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,” New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.
“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,” FDR said. “Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”
“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR concluded. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”
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