Nothing on the web is ever private. If you thought you can control your privacy, you were wrong. Websites may give you security options to better hide your information from the world, but ultimately your privacy resides in the hands of the website itself. We've seen how websites let ad companies track our private usage. We've seen how Facebook mucked up their privacy controls. We even saw how websites like Gawker are prone to hackers stealing user information. And now, Etsy has made what was ...
Outside the realm of politics, where opposing sides are quite passionate and quite disagreeable, there are few areas in our society quite as divisive as Twitter. People who like Twitter love Twitter and are relentless in trying to co-opt the people they know into joining (this is both altruistic and an unsubtle attempt to boost followers).
Back in the eighties, I used to hate television commercials, but I eventually got used to them. Had to, in order to enjoy my favorite shows. Then, the increasing number of billboard ads annoyed me in the nineties. They followed me everywhere I went—no escape—persuading me to buy the newest whatever. It seemed like Big Brotherism—like They Live. But, I got used to it. When I finally entered the digital age and became a web addict, I was peeved at the constant sight of online ads everywhere I v...
Ever hear of Spokeo? No, it's not a city in Washington state. It's a website called Spokeo.com, and it marks the complete end of privacy on the internet. If your phone number and address has been posted in a phone book, it's on there. If you own a house, chances are there's a picture of it. If you have a Facebook profile, it's probably listed.
Have you ever noticed that whenever you setup your voicemail account after getting a new cell phone number, it asks you to create a security pin to access your voicemail from other phone lines?
Six months ago, 1.3 million registered users of Gawker Media had their passwords compromised when the site was hacked by Gnosis. The passwords were encrypted, but 188,279 of them were decoded and made publicly available for all to see. Just three weeks ago, Sony Pictures was hacked by LulzSec, with 1 million passwords taken and 40,000 made publicly available. Comparing the two data sets, Troy Hunt found 88 accounts on both sites that used the same email address, and of those accounts, 67% use...
Things have been a bit quiet on the Google+ Insider's Guide this week. With the launch of the new Facebook, Google+ is finding itself a bit on the defensive. However, recent data shows that by making Google+ available to the general public, their traffic has jumped 13-fold, according to Mashable. With the new growth also comes the introduction of cool new features, which further enhance sharing.
It's only been a few weeks, and already there are a lot of misconceptions and myths floating around Google+. Let's take a deep breath, and tackle some of the more prominent ones.
Julian Oliver created the Transparency Grenade in January 2012 for the Studio Weise7 exhibition at Labor 8. It's a transparent device with a "payload" built from an ARM Chip, an Arduino Nano, a mic, and a strong Wi-Fi antenna. It taps into wireless networks and logs emails, webpages, images, and voice to a publicly available online map showing its "detonation" location. Apparently, development for an Android version (sans the pretty plastic shell) is under way thanks to interested donors. See...
Google Reader is ostensibly just an RSS aggregator, a tool that lets you catch up on your favorite blogs. How could Google have anticipated that getting rid of its social features could have angered so many people who were actually using it as their default social network, and who enjoyed it precisely because it didn't function like Facebook or Google+?
One of the primary goals of a social network is for you to share what you find interesting with your followers and friends, but on Google+, sharing has so many layers that it can be confusing for most people to really take advantage of it properly. Some of the tools in place that enable you do deal with spam and manage your privacy aren't very clear, so this week's round up is all about how you can share what you want with who you want on Google+.
After the media outcry of Google Buzz's privacy issues, Google has set its goals on making the privacy parameters of Google+ simple to learn and as explicitly manageable as possible. No small feat.
Here’s some news for those who still somehow believe the political left in Washington cares about the People. After U.S. Senator Rand Paul introduced an amendment that would have ended armed FDA raids on raw milk farmers (http://www.naturalnews.com/035966_Rand_Paul_FDA_censorship.html) and legalized free speech about the curative properties of medicinal herbs, nutritional supplements and superfoods, are you curious how many Democrats voted in favor of this?
Yesterday senior State Department official Alec Ross publicly announced that the Obama administration opposed CISPA, but refused to entertain the notion of the bill being vetoed.
The battle to be the video editor for your iPhone continues with the debut today of Cinefy at CES. An app that promises to bring 'Hollywood-style' visual and audio effects to your phone, Cinefy comes loaded with over 50 effects to add to your movies as well as a library of copyright cleared songs.
Nintendo's Wii Remote came close, but never has a video game peripheral garnered such adoration from the hacker community than the Kinect.
Okay, look behind your shoulder. Now check behind the other. Anybody looking? No? Then read on... Here's the scenario: You're single. You're an avid Facebooker. You're tired of your sans hottie reputation, and you're yearning for some much needed street cred. Well, Facebook street cred.
Probably one of the coolest things I have seen on the net. That crazy guy at xkcd have made a visual map representation of the internet based on user activity. Click on the picture for a a better look because this map is huge!
Gain control over your files online with Windows Live SkyDrive 2011, just one of the many new features of the newly released Windows Live Essentials 2011. You get 25GB of free online storage and tons of new features. You can store tons of documents, access all your important files and share the plethora of pictures you've amassed, all within SkyDrive.
Apple makes Ellen Apologize Publicly No. Not about her dancing.
He may be the oldest person to have invented an app for Apple devices, but 84-year-old George Weiss didn't originally intend on marketing his Dabble word game to the mobile crowd. He first came up Dabble back in 1958 when he was just 31. “A lot has changed since 1958, but people still love a good game,” said Weiss on his introduction into the iTunes App Store last month.
Understandably, the tragedy in Japan has substantially risen the level of worldwide radiation-related hysteria. So much so, as an alternative to stampeding health food stores for iodine tablets, crafty individuals and organizations are hacking together personal radiation detectors. Rather than relying on the government, the creation and modification of handheld Geiger counters provides a self-sufficient solution to today's questions regarding radiation. Profiled below, three admirable organiz...
After his fall from Asgard into space, the Asgardian Loki meets the Other, the leader of a warmongering alien race known as the Chitauri. In exchange for retrieving the Tesseract,2 a powerful energy source of unknown potential, the Other promises Loki a Chitauri army with which he can subjugate the Earth. Nick Fury, director of the espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D., arrives at a remote research facility during an evacuation. Physicist Dr. Erik Selvig is leading a research team experimenting on th...
BURKITE n pl. -S a burker 63 points (13 points without the bingo)
As Google+ is still in its Limited Field Trial phase, joining can feel quite lonely. You can't exactly get all your friends and family in during the brief periods when the invitation system opens up. You can, however, add several interesting people to your "Following" Circle to keep up with developments as they happen.
Do you know how you are perceived by your peers? In real life and online? In the physical world, you could be seen as intelligent, thoughtful and hard-working, but on the Web you could be looked at as irrational, selfish and slothful. There's just something about the Internet that takes away a person's judgement and replaces it with impulsiveness—especially when it comes to Facebook.
Video game makers have never had great name recognition amongst the American public. Shigeru Miyamoto, Cliff Bleszinski, and Will Wright are names most Americans can't be bothered to remember, whatever their contribution to games have been. Most people are familiar with their work, but fail to recognize them by name or appearance.
Yesterday, Electronic Arts had a nice sale on Steam for 40-60 percent off some of their Sims titles, which included The Sims 3 (along with its DLCs) and SimCity 4. I've never been a big Sims fan, especially with the slew of virtual people games in the last decade, so I didn't realize until now that Maxis had stopped making their SimCity games; They haven't released any city building Sim games since SimCity 4 eight years ago. There was SimCity Societies in 2007, but it was made by a different ...
Good news. Facebook has finally listened. After severe criticism for ignoring the world's privacy norms, Facebook will finally release simplistic, user-friendly privacy settings soon.
In a move that seemingly surprised everyone—including Samsung—Korean carriers have released the Galaxy S5 a full two weeks early to avoid being caught up in an about-to-be-imposed ban.
You've probably seen those deep-web images floating around on the Internet. Usually, it goes something like this: There is a towering iceberg and the deeper the underwater portion extends, the more “hidden” and “exotic” the content is described to be. Sometimes these images are accurate to a point, but most are just making things up.
Google announced a lot of great feature updates this week! Most of them are content-related, and help you more easily find out what's going on in the overall Google+ community.
This week seems to have gone by in a flash. Maybe it was the three day weekend, but I don't think it accounts for the flurry of activity I've been seeing on Google+. Updates, debates, and new initiatives are unfolding every day, and the best part is that most of them are coming from outside of Google. People love Google+ so much that they want to evangelize to others about it. What more could Google+ ask for?
Much of the press around the launch of Google+ has pitted it squarely against Facebook. This was highlighted painfully for Facebook with their (misguidedly dubbed) "awesome" announcements yesterday. Their launch of a new design, video calling, and group chat might have been exciting, had not Google announced its Hangout feature for Google+ a week earlier (and by the way, introduced their own 1-on-1 video calling inside of Gmail way back in 2008). Hangouts took video calling a step further and...
+Randall Munroe, the man behind the web's most popular web comic, XKCD, has always had a knack for getting to the heart of the larger social issues on the web. During the 1st 48 hours after Google+ started letting non-Googlers in, one of the most shared posts within its private walls was his latest comic about Google+:
Social network fatigue sets in when it starts to feel impossible to keep up with all that new content from your friends, followers, and acquaintances on a daily basis. You lose track of stuff you wanted to read more about, and you miss important news from your friends, but are bombarded with inconsequential details from people you don't actually care about. What's the solution? Filter your streams so that you only see the content you do care about, and get rid of the rest.
Welcome to the Google+ Insider's Guide to all things Google+. We're dedicated to keeping you updated with all the latest news, tips and tricks on Google+, and this official index will serve as a one-stop catalog of all our How-To articles, as well as all the news & updates we've covered over time.
Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a series of high-profile hacks and leaks. From the rooting of CombinedSystems, to a secret FBI conference call leak, all the way to the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on U.S. government sites—with a lot in-between. As governments move to close their long fingers around the free speech that exposes their secrets, this shadowy collective of loose-knit, but like-minded individuals are hell bent on preventing them. Or are they?
I want to write this article because in my childhood, I had experienced internet stalking which ultimately ended in physical stalking which then lead to several attempted abductions. I have now learned how to use the internet safely, who to communicate with and I've learned how stalkers work.
