It seems there's a been a big push recently to punish those naughty whistleblowers who leaked government secrets and put everyone in danger. The only problem is, they didn't leak any secrets or put anyone in danger. Instead, they embarrassed their leaders and paid the price.

I always recommend having a Software Firewall on your computer, but the one catch is that you have to know what to do when you get an alert. It's not very hard once you've seen it once or twice, but to help you walk through it, I've made this firewall flowchart:

Click on the image for a larger view

Just start at the green oval and answer the yes/no questions to trace your way through.

Surprise, surprise. A company has giant data breach due to negligent security, but not to worry! They'll protect you by offering you credit monitoring for one year free!

It would be nice if people could spot this B.S. easily by now, but I'm guessing there are a lot that won't so let me spell it out. Credit monitoring is a waste of your time and is likely only offered to make it seem like they're doing something for you when they probably don't. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the credit monitoring companies have a "data breach plan" where companies can get a bulk discount by offering monitoring to all their victims.

It's a classic win-win-lose. The breach company wins PR points, the monitoring companies continue to make money for not providing any real service, and we all lose.

If you're worried about id theft, just freeze your credit reports!

With the kids constantly losing, scratching, or breaking DVDs, I've been looking into building a home media center for a while. I'll get my DVD's, copy them to the computer, and play them from there (kind of like Hulu or Netflix on-demand). If you think that sounds like a great idea, check this out:

Are you looking to for a way to play your media DVDs without rifling through your collection and swapping discs? Today we’ll take a look at ripping a DVD to your hard drive and playing it with some popular media players.

There are some easy tools available for copying DVDs to your computer

This doesn't go into the particulars of how to build a good machine or hook it to a TV, but it's a great start for the software side of it. They recommend some software that costs money, but there are always alternatives or if it's good enough, it might be worth the money anyway.

So it's not just Facebook that's full of holes and privacy issues. Twitter has been warned by the Federal Trade Commission for their "serious lapses in data security".

The FTC had originally accused the social media service of making private tweets and the login credentials of users easily available to "hackers" between January and May of 2009. During that time, someone was able to gain administrative access to Twitter's system (and therefore access to thousands of user accounts, passwords, direct messages, and more) simply by using password-guessing software. That user reset numerous user passwords, allowing others to access those accounts.

As is always the case, when not required to provide adequate security or privacy, most companies will do what they can get away with and no more. If there's no penalty for doing a bad job, don't be surprised when they don't.

This is my first post in a continuing series I'm going to call "Geek Culture". Like many other societal groups in the world, geeks have certain tendencies, traits, features, and history. I've decided that now might be a good time to begin sharing some with you.

First up: some fan art (artist unknown) from one of my all-time favorite shows – The Big Bang Theory

Bazinga! A graphic representation of one of the funnier moments in the Big Bang Theory show

I don't know where this came from, but the furthest I can trace it so far is here.

The city obtained a transcript of Quon’s messages during an investigation to determine whether officers were using their pagers for personal messages. The transcripts showed that Quon had been exchanging sexually explicit messages with his wife, his girlfriend and another SWAT team member.

In the end, the US Supreme Court ruled that for government employees at least, there is no privacy for your use of government furnished equipment.

To me, this is no shocker. What does surprise me is that this made it all the way to the Supreme Court! This guy really wanted someone to blame since obviously someone who's cheating on his wife AND his two girlfriends shouldn't be pointing fingers at himself.

As illustrated by The Oatmeal, you may suffer more than you imagined for loving your apple products. Take a look and decide for yourself though it does get a little raunchy in parts (fair warning). Tags: Apple, Ipad, Mac, Steve Jobs

This is much better than beatings and bullets:

Nursery rhymes set to music are deeply uncool. Just ask the bottle-throwing teenagers on the Twinbrook estate on outskirts of west Belfast. Ice cream music was played to them as they misbehaved and it stopped them.

The rest of the article talks about how they were trying to solve the issue with humor and not violence, and yet these police heroes instead got scolded by their command. Not only was this awesome, there are many other examples where a non-violent solution was effective.

Further down in the article is an example where a Los Angeles gang was removed from an area by renaming the street "Gay Street" and "Pansy Square". A commenter mentions that a New York bus terminal was cleaned up by playing classical music instead of rock. And of course there's the Arizona sheriff who found that making prisoners wear pink underwear made them less likely to fight each other.

So you think all those online games rot your brain, make you slovenly, and are a complete waste of time? You're still right, but there are some unexpected benefits it seems.

A Norwegian boy who apparently plays the popular online game, World of Warcraft (something I scared to even try due to its reputation as being addictive), used the skills he learned in the game to save his sister and then himself from an angry Moose.

Hans and his sister got into trouble after they had trespassed the territory of the moose during a walk in the forest near their home. When the moose attacked them, Hans knew the first thing he had to do was ‘taunt’ and provoke the animal so that it would leave his sister alone and she could run to safety. ‘Taunting’ is a move one uses in World of Warcraft to get monsters off of the less-well-armored team members.

Once Hans was a target, he remembered another skill he had picked up at level 30 in ‘World of Warcraft’ – he feigned death. The moose lost interest in the inanimate boy and wandered off into the woods. When he was safely alone Hans ran back home to share his tale of video game-inspired survival.