http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/
Or, you can get one of these:
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Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Concerned About Facebook Privacy?
Yes? Then check this out!!!
http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/
Or, you can get one of these:
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad!
http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/
Or, you can get one of these:
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad!
Microsoft Upgrade Aims to Make Hotmail "Cool" Again
AGAIN??? Was it ever "cool?" Eric
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Microsoft Corp. is trying to make Hotmail cool again.
The free Web mail service soon will be switching to a new approach that Microsoft hopes will give Hotmail an edge over rival offerings from Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc.
The upgrade, expected to be available in July or August, will automatically sort incoming messages into different categories devoted to users' key contacts and Internet social networks. It will also provide previews of incoming photos, videos and other material without having to open an attachment or click on a link.
Other tools are being added to make it less cumbersome to send photos, videos, documents and other attachments to e-mail recipients. Another tweak is supposed to make is easier to sync Hotmail on mobile phones.
It's all part of the most extensive overhaul to Hotmail since Microsoft bought the service 12 years ago, said Chris Jones, a Microsoft executive who is overseeing the renovations.
"Our service wasn't doing the best job that it could," Jones said during a Monday preview of the makeover.
The new features are supposed to enable people to spend less time managing their inboxes and more time enjoying and digesting what's in the messages.
Microsoft is hoping the added convenience will help overcome the perception that Hotmail was growing stale as Google and Yahoo added more bells and whistles to their free Web mail services.
Even as it made relatively few changes, Hotmail remained the world's most used service with 360 million users, according to statistics complied by comScore Inc. Yahoo ranks second globally with about 284 million users followed by Google's Gmail at 173 million users.
Now Microsoft thinks it might have shot of supplanting Yahoo as the top Web mail service in the U.S. (Yahoo's e-mail service has 95 million U.S. users compared to 47 million for Hotmail and 43 million for Gmail, according to comScore).
Hotmail's most significant changes will provide new ways to look at photos and videos sent through e-mail. Microsoft expects this feature to be particularly popular because it says 55 percent of Hotmail's storage is consumed by photos sent as attachments.
The new technology will detect when an e-mail contains a photo attachment and automatically display a thumbnail of the image (or images) at the top of the message. Hotmail will provide similar previews when it detects links to photo-sharing sites Flickr and SmugMug or to video-sharing sites YouTube and Hulu.
Other changes are designed to make it easier to send photos, video and other Web content. A new insert bar will allow users to send up to 10 gigabytes - about 200 photos each containing 50 megabytes - by uploading them to Microsoft's free online storage service Skydrive, where they can only be viewed by the recipients of the e-mail.
Videos and other Internet material can be found through a new panel that will connect Hotmail to Microsoft's Internet search engine, Bing. The videos and other Bing-generated content can then be inserted into an e-mail with a mouse click. The e-mail recipient will then be able to see the video or other material without having to click through a Web link.
As it spruces up Hotmail, Microsoft also will try to make it more secure. Embracing a change recently made by Gmail, Microsoft is adding a so-called "secure sockets layer" (denoted by "https" before a Web address) that encrypts e-mail to make it less vulnerable to computer hackers.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad!
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Microsoft Corp. is trying to make Hotmail cool again.
The free Web mail service soon will be switching to a new approach that Microsoft hopes will give Hotmail an edge over rival offerings from Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc.
The upgrade, expected to be available in July or August, will automatically sort incoming messages into different categories devoted to users' key contacts and Internet social networks. It will also provide previews of incoming photos, videos and other material without having to open an attachment or click on a link.
Other tools are being added to make it less cumbersome to send photos, videos, documents and other attachments to e-mail recipients. Another tweak is supposed to make is easier to sync Hotmail on mobile phones.
It's all part of the most extensive overhaul to Hotmail since Microsoft bought the service 12 years ago, said Chris Jones, a Microsoft executive who is overseeing the renovations.
"Our service wasn't doing the best job that it could," Jones said during a Monday preview of the makeover.
The new features are supposed to enable people to spend less time managing their inboxes and more time enjoying and digesting what's in the messages.
Microsoft is hoping the added convenience will help overcome the perception that Hotmail was growing stale as Google and Yahoo added more bells and whistles to their free Web mail services.
Even as it made relatively few changes, Hotmail remained the world's most used service with 360 million users, according to statistics complied by comScore Inc. Yahoo ranks second globally with about 284 million users followed by Google's Gmail at 173 million users.
Now Microsoft thinks it might have shot of supplanting Yahoo as the top Web mail service in the U.S. (Yahoo's e-mail service has 95 million U.S. users compared to 47 million for Hotmail and 43 million for Gmail, according to comScore).
Hotmail's most significant changes will provide new ways to look at photos and videos sent through e-mail. Microsoft expects this feature to be particularly popular because it says 55 percent of Hotmail's storage is consumed by photos sent as attachments.
The new technology will detect when an e-mail contains a photo attachment and automatically display a thumbnail of the image (or images) at the top of the message. Hotmail will provide similar previews when it detects links to photo-sharing sites Flickr and SmugMug or to video-sharing sites YouTube and Hulu.
Other changes are designed to make it easier to send photos, video and other Web content. A new insert bar will allow users to send up to 10 gigabytes - about 200 photos each containing 50 megabytes - by uploading them to Microsoft's free online storage service Skydrive, where they can only be viewed by the recipients of the e-mail.
Videos and other Internet material can be found through a new panel that will connect Hotmail to Microsoft's Internet search engine, Bing. The videos and other Bing-generated content can then be inserted into an e-mail with a mouse click. The e-mail recipient will then be able to see the video or other material without having to click through a Web link.
As it spruces up Hotmail, Microsoft also will try to make it more secure. Embracing a change recently made by Gmail, Microsoft is adding a so-called "secure sockets layer" (denoted by "https" before a Web address) that encrypts e-mail to make it less vulnerable to computer hackers.
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Saturday, May 15, 2010
How To Stay Anonymous Online
If you want to stay inconspicuous while online, here are some products, services, and best practices to put to use.
Some might say that the Internet was built on anonymity. Without it, the Internet might not have become what it is today—a place where free speech reigns supreme (maybe to a fault). However, as social networks prevail—and über-companies like Google do all they can to market to you more effectively—your privacy on the Web comes into question. The good news is that you can take back control of what others see and know of you online. Here's how.
CHECK YOUR STEALTH
Put your PC through an Internet anonymity test to see just how stealthy it really is. Whenever you connect to Web sites, you're basically telling them your IP address—if nothing else. Based on that information alone, sites can tell a lot about you, such as your general location. If you want to get an idea about what you're telling the Web, check out sites like What the Internet Knows About You and Stay Invisible.
The key to keeping all of your data from hanging out is a good firewall. Don't rely on the firewall in your broadband router alone. For true security, you should couple it with a good software firewall and load it on every PC you use. I recommend the free firewall from 'ZoneAlarm' or the free firewall in the 'Comodo Internet Security 4.0.' Once you've got the firewall installed, use 'ShieldsUP!' to check for open, or vulnerable, ports on your system. 'ShieldsUP!' won't tell anything if you have a router-based firewall in place, but it's good info if you're brave enough to hook a computer directly to a broadband modem.
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Some might say that the Internet was built on anonymity. Without it, the Internet might not have become what it is today—a place where free speech reigns supreme (maybe to a fault). However, as social networks prevail—and über-companies like Google do all they can to market to you more effectively—your privacy on the Web comes into question. The good news is that you can take back control of what others see and know of you online. Here's how.
CHECK YOUR STEALTH
Put your PC through an Internet anonymity test to see just how stealthy it really is. Whenever you connect to Web sites, you're basically telling them your IP address—if nothing else. Based on that information alone, sites can tell a lot about you, such as your general location. If you want to get an idea about what you're telling the Web, check out sites like What the Internet Knows About You and Stay Invisible.
The key to keeping all of your data from hanging out is a good firewall. Don't rely on the firewall in your broadband router alone. For true security, you should couple it with a good software firewall and load it on every PC you use. I recommend the free firewall from 'ZoneAlarm' or the free firewall in the 'Comodo Internet Security 4.0.' Once you've got the firewall installed, use 'ShieldsUP!' to check for open, or vulnerable, ports on your system. 'ShieldsUP!' won't tell anything if you have a router-based firewall in place, but it's good info if you're brave enough to hook a computer directly to a broadband modem.
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The Grand Canyon State!
What do YOU think of the new AZ immigration law??
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad!
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Is 'defragging' your hard drive as important as it once was?
Today's hard drives are 10+ times faster than the drives of old — is defragging really still worth the bother?
There's much more to defragging than simply improving hard drive performance.
Before we dive in, let's run through a 60-second defragging refresher.
Windows normally stores the files on a hard drive in a series of blocks. When a drive is new or well-ordered, each file's blocks can be written to the drive more or less sequentially. But over time, holes open in that orderly sequence as files are changed or deleted; they are then filled with bits of data from other files. Eventually, a file's blocks may end up scattered all over the disk.
When a file's blocks aren't contiguous, the drive heads have to seek out the blocks, physically navigating to each block's location. Each seek adds to the time it takes to read or retrieve the entire file.
Defragging corrects this by moving data blocks back to contiguous, sequential series — the system can again access the files smoothly and quickly, with little or no extra head seeks.
The seek times of today's hard drives are over 10 times faster than those we used in the 'old' days. So the benefit of reducing seek times is an order of magnitude less. You probably won't notice any difference accessing a given file, whether the drive is defragged or not.
But the aggregate seek times still matter. We now use our drives far more intensely than we used to. (My first hard drive held 20 megabytes of data; nowadays, I take individual photos larger than that.) So the total number of seeks our hard drives perform today has increased by an order of magnitude.
Speed aside, there other benefits from defragging. For example, it improves your odds of recovering a deleted file, folder, or partition; it reduces overall wear and tear on the drive heads; and it helps minimize noise and heat during normal operations.
Initial disk defragmentation can take hours. But after that, it takes just a couple of minutes if you run the process every day. Because you can run defragging as an unattended process in all current versions of Windows — no third-party tools needed — one might ask: why would you not defrag?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad!
There's much more to defragging than simply improving hard drive performance.
Before we dive in, let's run through a 60-second defragging refresher.
Windows normally stores the files on a hard drive in a series of blocks. When a drive is new or well-ordered, each file's blocks can be written to the drive more or less sequentially. But over time, holes open in that orderly sequence as files are changed or deleted; they are then filled with bits of data from other files. Eventually, a file's blocks may end up scattered all over the disk.
When a file's blocks aren't contiguous, the drive heads have to seek out the blocks, physically navigating to each block's location. Each seek adds to the time it takes to read or retrieve the entire file.
Defragging corrects this by moving data blocks back to contiguous, sequential series — the system can again access the files smoothly and quickly, with little or no extra head seeks.
The seek times of today's hard drives are over 10 times faster than those we used in the 'old' days. So the benefit of reducing seek times is an order of magnitude less. You probably won't notice any difference accessing a given file, whether the drive is defragged or not.
But the aggregate seek times still matter. We now use our drives far more intensely than we used to. (My first hard drive held 20 megabytes of data; nowadays, I take individual photos larger than that.) So the total number of seeks our hard drives perform today has increased by an order of magnitude.
Speed aside, there other benefits from defragging. For example, it improves your odds of recovering a deleted file, folder, or partition; it reduces overall wear and tear on the drive heads; and it helps minimize noise and heat during normal operations.
Initial disk defragmentation can take hours. But after that, it takes just a couple of minutes if you run the process every day. Because you can run defragging as an unattended process in all current versions of Windows — no third-party tools needed — one might ask: why would you not defrag?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad!
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