If you have a home broadband connection, odds are you have a dynamic IP address — one that changes every so often. This is fine until you feel the need to connect to your home computer from somewhere outside your house. Without a constant, static, never-changing IP address, you don’t have a reliable way to […]
There are chances that someone is secretly spying on your Google search tracks for various reasons. For example, the employer may monitor your Google search habits to know if you are looking for jobs elsewhere while the local ISP may be collecting your Google queries with the purpose of selling that data to large analytics […]
AOL, the fourth most popular search engine, recently released search queries of 650,000 AOL subscribers on the Internet. Though AOL now says that it was a mistake and quickly removed the search data from their website, mirror copies of AOL search terms continue to be available across the web.
Almost two weeks ago, I wrote my Google Reader Gets Social With Friends Shared Items post detailing how disturbing it was that Google Reader was now sharing items with people it considered my friends, on an opt-out basis.
So here I am, burning some brain cells and taking some time to relax playing a game on Kongregate, when a little window pops up in the corner of my screen and says “Kongregate is sending this to your Facebook profile: Nate played Desktop Tower Defense 1.5 at Kongregate.” Which immediately elicited a “Hellll no” […]
Linux, like Microsoft Windows, is simply a computer operating system. When I talk to friends or co-workers who are embarking on the Linux experience for their initial time, this is the first point I stress. Linux in itself is not a magic wand that can be waved and make all sorts of computing problems disappear. […]
Internet phone books, people-finding services, and other online directories make it almost impossible to keep your personal contact information entirely off the Web. It’s fairly easy for anyone to find your name, phone number, home address, or e-mail address—for business or social purposes, advertising or marketing, or even criminal intent.Here are a few ways to […]
All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it. But be careful – tampering with a passport […]
There is no magic in cell phones. From a transmitting standpoint, they are either on or off. It is true that many phones have an alarm feature that permits them to "wake up" from a seemingly "off" state. However, this is not a universal functionality, even in advanced phones such as PDA cell phones, which […]
Without getting into the quagmire that is the debate over P2P, fronted on one side by sane technologically able people and on the other by a dying breed of middlemen with an outdated business model (ok, so I dipped a toe into the marsh), the use of the technology aptly includes both legitimate claims of […]
Most email messages you send travel vast distances over many networks, secure and insecure, monitored and unmonitored, passing through and making copies of themselves on servers all over the Internet. In short, pretty much anyone with access to any of those servers - or sniffing packets anywhere along the way - can read your email […]
You are being watched.
Regardless of the government you live under, your actions on the internet are being tracked. Your every search recorded and kept in a database for future use/abuse. US citizens have had their web traffic monitored by the NSA and AT&\1T, and their every search history subpeaned by a […]