There are some cases where you might want to download software, movies, etc and it would be morally correct, but perhaps not strictly legal to do so.
For example, your son plays with your only copy of a rare movie and scratches it beyond recognition. I doubt any reasonable person would disagree with you downloading and burning a replacement (if you hadn't made a backup copy already).
Anyway, I'm not going to argue the ethics of downloading here. It's up to you to decide whether what you do online is correct and that's why this article about protecting you downloading privacy is important. Use the tips provided to make sure that the only person making a judgement call about your online activity is you.
Much love to my UK bretheren, but how the hell did you end up with such bad leadership?! (I know, pot, keddle and all that)…
Currently they're planning to add children to the DNA database:
Home Office officials said plans to include primary school children on the DNA record would be kept 'under review'. The DNA database includes 4.5 million samples of genetic material, many taken from people who have been arrested but never charged with a crime.
By next year, it is expected that 1.5 million of the samples will be from youngsters aged between ten and 18.
Congress sticks their noses into a lot of things they shouldn't and not where they should. They are corrupt, inept, and won't do much to protect Americans unless it will make a positive affect on their careers or bank accounts.
It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.
There are already plenty of cases of adults or college students who have lost jobs and dropped out of school due to MMO gaming obsessions. Now we're going to unleash this on our kids?
I've built several bears with my kids, but I always balk at the part where they're supposed to put in their information. They just don't need that much personal data about my kid. Instead, I put in MY personal e-mail address so that if it did get "lost" and recovered, they would be able to e-mail me at the least, though we'd probably just replace it anyway…
By doing simple searches with no special tools or gimmicks, they were easily able to find profiles of girls that were set to public (meaning anyone could read them) that contained more than enough information to find and contact them or their parents.
Parents need to make sure they're involved and knowledgeable about what their kids are doing online while resisting the temptation to ban kids from the Internet completely.
Embarassed that they got caught, Facebook is now offering a worthless Opt-out policy that will help only the users who know about the problem and manage to find out about the policy and then take the trouble to do it.
As a parent, or even not as a parent, it's a good idea to know when certain symbols have meaning. Imagine buying a piece of jewelry for a friend and then discovering that it's a known pedophile's symbol for boy lovers.
Theoretically, this supposed FBI report describes symbols used by the pedophile community. I don't know if it's true or not, so if you have informatino about it, please share it in comments.
Their new ad software broadcasts your current activities to your facebook friends. If you just bought a ticket to a concert, your friends might see an alert to that effect. If you just bought medication for your embarassing personal issue, they might see that too. But it gets worse:
Beacon will report back to Facebook on members' activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.
Well this is different. I knew that posting online can have severe negative effects on the poster, but I hadn't considered the effect on the parents.
"Whether we're talking about dad's work secrets or problems between mom and dad with their relationship," Sgt. MacDonald said.
We asked him to show us just how easy it is to find incriminating posts. It didn't take long.
"Not only do I have to live with my nagging mom, my dad does drugs. This person, Tara, says her parents are lazy alcoholics," reads Sgt. MacDonald.
He says it's not hard for police, or employers, to uncover the identity of teens from the details in their profiles
While those people might deserve to get fired (if the teen poster is telling the truth and not just venting), the article lists another example of a mortgage broker finding out that one of his customers lost his job.
Privacy is starting to become harder and harder to protect, but also more important at the same time.
The woman who was the first to successfully get a jury trial in a RIAA caselost. Even assuming they were able to prove that she had downloaded the files and left them in her share folder, the chances are she didn't know she was sharing what she downloaded and the RIAA has no way to prove actual damages, just theoretical. On that basis, they have no justification for the $200+ thousand award they recieved.
If you've been on college campuses these days, you'll often see the booths where you get a free shirt or coffee mug for signing up for a credit card. Well, it's pretty obvious that college kids have no idea how to handle credit and the credit card companies know it.
Rhoades took the job and signed up roughly 30 students for cards. He regrets any trouble he caused other students from his actions.
Still, his actions may have been most damaging to himself. He ended up with $13,000 worth of debt that he is now struggling to repay.
We don't get any training how to deal with and manage credit, but we get plenty of training on how to get and abuse it. So sad…
For those who were wondering, there were almost 30,000 sex offenders on MySpace who were computer literate enough to use the service, but dumb enough to use their real names. How many are still there using fake names I wonder.
While I usually throw out anything Comcast sends with the bill, this time I noticed an arbitration notice that says that you only have a little bit of time to opt out before you become bound to an arbitration agreement. What does that mean? It means that you're giving up your right to sue them for incompetence (which is a pretty big deal considering how incompetent they can be).
If you continue to use comcast service without opting out, you will automatically be bound by the new arbitration agreement. Fortunately, you can opt out very quickly by going to their website:
Note that you must type your account number EXACTLY as shown on you bill (spaces and dashes included) or it will error with barely any indication of what went wrong (no error message).
You will be amazed by how much you can learn about a person if you only pay attention to the signals they give off. Read this book to learn the language.
