Internet tips

The Internet and the death of ethics

Some people see the Internet as a mirror held up to our culture. If it is, the mirror shows us in an unflattering light.

From newsroom staffers caught off guard on camera in a private moment gone viral on YouTube to dorm room trysts streamed live online, people have no shame about the despicable content they post on the Web. Respect and courtesy are quaint, outdated notions to these Internet citizens.

The people charged with protecting us from such abhorrent behavior not only fail to prevent it, they tacitly or explicitly encourage these breaches in morality because it means more … Read more

Two simple ways to thwart Web spies

Some Web sites just won't take "no" for an answer. You tell them you don't want their tracking cookies, and they continue to figure out new methods for keeping tabs on your Web activities anyway.

CNET's Greg Sandoval reported last month that several big-name sites have been sued in the U.S. District Court for using Flash cookies to spy on adults and children. At the center of this and similar suits are ad networks Clearspring Technologies and Quantcast that track your online activities even if you set your browser to block standard Web cookies.… Read more

Two free programs help prevent drive-by downloads

As Elinor Mills reported in her Insecurity Complex blog, malicious code was added to a widget on the growsmartbusiness.com site of Web-hosting firm Network Solutions. The widget was also placed on sites "under construction" that Network Solutions hosts.

The widget has been removed, but Wayne Huang, co-founder and chief technology officer at security firm Armorize, claims in an August 14 blog post that more than a half million of these parked domains are infected. Network Solutions says this figure is "inaccurate" but hasn't yet estimated the impact of the infection.

Regardless of the final … Read more

Don't let your PC wear out your eyes

If you spend more than 2 hours a day peering at a computer display, you have at least a 50-50 chance of experiencing vision problems or other physical ailments related to your PC use. That's according to Dr. Wendy Strouse Watt, O.D., in her 2003 article Computer Vision Syndrome and Computer Glasses.

The advent of flat panels may have minimized the risk somewhat, but most office workers now spend more time each day at a computer than they did at the time of the study. In a series of articles on Computer Vision Syndrome, the American Optometric Association (… Read more

Google Docs delivers presentation basics

In last Wednesday's post pitting Microsoft's Office Web Apps against Google Docs, I said Google Docs doesn't support PowerPoint presentations. Wrong.

Google Docs wouldn't open my test PPTX file, but the service lets you create and edit presentations in the older PowerPoint PPT format, albeit without most of the desktop app's formatting options. You won't find much in the way of transitions, effects, and other advanced features in Google Docs, either. The best feature of Google's online presentation tool is its clean interface, which isn't a surprise considering the company behind the … Read more

Office Web Apps, Google Docs go head-to-head

Microsoft's first true browser-based versions of the venerable Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications won't make you abandon the programs' full-featured counterparts installed your hard drive. But if you splurge for Office 2010, you may find yourself spending a lot more time working in your browser.

You probably already do some word processing and spreadsheet work using Google Docs, Zoho, or another such service. (I described the Web's best desktop-app replacements in a post last month.)

These services have offered first-rate word processing and spreadsheet programs that run in a browser and let you create, open, and store … Read more

Spell check may be Internet Explorer's Achilles' heel

A reader named Lenny responded recently to a post from last August about browser spell checkers to ask whether Internet Explorer 8 finally has a built-in spell checker. Unfortunately, the only way to get spell check and suggested corrections in IE 8 is by relying on the spell check built into the site you're visiting or by installing a third-party extension.

But even then, Firefox and Chrome out-spell-check IE in a landslide.

The earlier post compared Firefox's built-in spell-check feature with the spelling checker in the free IE7Pro extension for Internet Explorer. It seems IE7Pro is no longer … Read more

Free Facebook privacy scanners help you lock down your account

Some people don't mind strangers rummaging through their Facebook friends lists, wall posts, status updates, and other details of their online selves. The rest of us attempt to control who has access to our Facebook information. The recent revamp of the Facebook privacy settings makes it simpler to adjust the many settings that determine whether and how people contact you, and how much of your information they can access.

Two free online scanners put your Facebook privacy settings to the test, though they take very different approaches to how they generate their ratings. ReclaimPrivacy.org gives you a Facebook … Read more

Keep tabs on what Google knows about you

Google is listening.

As Marguerite Reardon and Tom Krazit reported on May 14 in CNET's Signal Strength blog, the search giant has swept up wireless-network addresses, along with other data its Street View vehicles have been collecting on their unprecedented world tour.

Google or some other company may have already plotted the location of your home or office wireless network, but you can make it more difficult for the next nosy megacorporation--or a neighbor or passing stranger--to discover your hot spot by disabling its Service Set Identifier (SSID).

By default, wireless access points transmit their presence to let wireless … Read more