Nata's Corner

I have no idea which Facebook users Facebook is talking too, because I find their ads far more than just annoying.

If you're dumb (or mean) enough to post pictures of your ex on line, don't get caught in California. Also in California, teenagers get a Facebook do-over.

It's National cyber Security Awareness Month. You can bet the NSA is aware.

I'm one of those people who uses the browser that came with my computer, although I keep it updated, have a very solid antivirus program, and made sure that the other half locked down our wireless router. But that doesn't mean I take security of my information any less seriously or that I've decided I'm going to live with Internet Explorer forever. I know there are other browsers that people use a lot -- Firefox and Chrome are the ones we all hear about -- but I came across an article a couple of weeks ago that listed some alternative browsers (and Apple's Safari wasn't one of them).

• Avant is the one the other half would love, because it lets you render pages in any of three engines, so if you're a web developer, you don't have to open three different browers just to see what your style sheet is doing.
• Maxthon is a browser the other half will probably never use because it's from China. It comes in versions for mobile devices, and includes a built-in screenshot grabber and cloud storage.
• SRWaare Iron is for the highly security/privacy conscious. It gets rid of any identifying information and disables all of that code Google wants so it can track you, even though it's built on the Google Chromium rendering engine -- so if you have extensions, they'll still work.
• Midori has one advantage: It's lightweight, and therefore fast, and if you're into customizing or tinkering, this is a browswer you can fiddle with, without having to learn a lot of programming.

Just remember that EE might not render perfectly in any of them.

You must have gotten the idea that I'm a little paranoid when it comes to my privacy and personal information -- not as bad as some, I guess, but I still do think about it. It's not just that the government is looking at every little thing we do, or that companies are collecting all kinds of information from our searches and emails and likes. A lot of that information winds up in the hands of big brokerages that collate data from a variety of sources and then sell it to other companies. And as you might expect, those companies get hacked.

Finally, if you're changing computers or had to reformat and reinstall or anything that involves having to import your data to it should be (like your email), and you dutifully backed it all up onto a CD, you might run into the "Access denied" error, even if you're logged in as the administrator on your own computer. That's because when you burned the data to the CD, the file was automatically turned into a read-only file (think about it -- it's a CD). So the trick is to first copy the file to your desktop. Then right click and change the properties so it isn't read-only. Then try importing it.

In Brief

Coming to Google SERPs: Advertising purchased by the NSA. Its spy activities weren't affected by the government shutdown. Neither were those of Twitter users or the students at South Park Elementary. And apropos of the shutdown, this reads like a description of House Republicans.

Coming to a street corner near you: BlackBerry addicts can breathe a little easier. So can its CEO.

Coming soon to an airplane near you: Shorter announcements from flight attendants. Must hope the plane isn't packing.

Coming eventually to a courtroom in California: The wiretapping lawsuit against Google for scanning the content in emails. Meanwhile, in London, a teenager's arrest for that springtime DDoS attack that slowed down the Internet was disclosed.

Coming soon to the NYSE: TWTR (here's a Q&A); on the horizon, Yahoo's Chinese partner Alibaba.

Coming soon to your SEO company's office: Someone from the attorney general's office.

Possibly coming to your mailbox: The eventual settlement from Adobe following a data breach that possibly accessed financial information. As jason1178 noted, "So not enough that Adobe now forces everyone to subscribe to their service to get the software... they don't even protect it properly."

In requiem: Author and baseball fan Tom Clancy; also, these people's lives courtesy of Facebook Graph.

There goes the neighborhood: Traffic to the dark web is going to skyrocket, but bitcoins could start having some problems.

Not a great earnings report: Yahoo was paying a bounty for bugs -- a whopping $12.50 -- in Yahoo store credits. It has since bumped up the bounty by an ordero of magnitude or three.

What do you get when you cross a Lizard with a Badger? YouTube -- moderated.

Add a few zeros and you might get their attention: France is moving to fine Google $200,000 over privacy issues.

We'll have these in our Christmas issue, so get yours now: Shirts that befuddle Facebook's facial recognition.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Apple is still having problems. Ctrl-Alt-Del was a mistake. Yahoo's stock is now trading at the price Microsoft offered for it -- five years ago. Pick your poison: Steve Ballmer or Miley Cyrus.

Milestones

New Geniuses: hanccocka has earned his fifth Genius certificate, in Server Hardware. He is the 15th member of EE to have that many. Nice work!

My First Million: Reaching the 1,000,000 point level in September were The_Barman, madunix and roopeshreddy. Congratulations!

Milestones:

• ozo has earned 13,000,000 points since joining Experts Exchange in August, 1997.
• byundt reached the 12,000,000 point level overall. He is the 23rd EE member to have that many points.
• Reaching 9,000,000 points overall was kaufmed.