A police official in the UK signed up a new account with a girls name and used data and a photo that suggested he was a 14 year old girl.

Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me. I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I'd never before communicated. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1256793/I-posed-girl-14-Facebook-What-followed-sicken-you.html#ixzz0hnk7qx95

If you plan to let your kids use sites like these, you have to know what they're getting into. Make sure you have the name and password to their account (being friends with them is not enough) so you can see what they see and talk to them about it. Also bone up on safety precautions like learning the proper way to secure your account.

If they made a DVD player with a giant red "play the freaking movie right freaking now" button, I'd buy it. Wouldn't you?

This totally made my day:

A Wisconsin college student filed a class-action complaint against Experian this week, claiming that the company's ubiquitous ads for FreeCreditReport.com led her to believe she could use the site to get a no-cost credit report.

Go figure! Someone believed that FreeCreditReport means you can get a free credit report? What are the odds!?

How this has gone on this long I'll never know. Even after 11,000 Better Business Bureau complaints the most that's been done to date was the very cool FTC spoof videos making fun of FreeCreditReport's TV ads where they did everything short of calling them crooks.

It's such an exquisite pleasure to watch this bogus company go down; let's hope this suit sticks.

LexisNexis and ChoicePoint are two of the largest data-brokers in the world. They’re only product is information about you which they buy and sell with little to no regulation of any kind. I have always wondered what kind of information they keep about us, and now I know. In the profile I ordered from them, I found not only several pieces of my personal information, but descriptions of other kinds of information that they collect. Here is a summary:

Information they Had

• Full first, middle, and last name
• Wife first, middle, and last name
• Address history with dates and locations
• Social Security Number
• Full date of birth
• Driver’s License Number
• Vehicle VIN
• Insurance history including companies, policy details, dates of coverage, accidents, claims filed, etc.

Information they Collect, but Didn’t Have For Me

• Auto and property insurance history
• Pre-employment background report including “personal credit information” and state driving record.
• An Esteem® report which lists admitted or convicted cases of theft while visiting or working at a retail company (used by retailers for hiring).
• A ScreenNow® report which displays a ChoicePoint national criminal records search of your name and personal information (used for hiring and volunteer work).
• A Resident Data® history that includes personal credit information and a criminal record search (used for rental applications).
• A Resident Data® eviction report used for resident screening.
• FAA Aircraft Registrations
• Uniform Commercial Code filings (when securing a loan with collateral).
• Bankruptcies, Liens, and Judgments
• Professional Licenses
• Pilot Licenses
• Marine Radio Licenses
• Controlled Substance Licenses (for physicians, dentists, pharmacies).
• Firearms and Explosives Licenses
• Business Affiliations (for officers or principals of an incorporated Company).
• Significant Shareholders Search Results – If your name and address appear at the top of a corporation record.

And the most exciting part of all of this is that you never asked to be part of their profiles, they just take it. Neat huh?

When you first hear about Blippy, the purchase-sharing website, you would think that no one in the whole world would be crazy enough to sign up. You’d be wrong.

Blippy is a service where you can share your purchases on most of the major web stores in real time (similar to Twitter). ALF just got a movie at Netflix (Full Metal Jacket… classic!). Jessestay just bought something at iTunes for 2.99 ( Epitaph One, by Dollhouse). On and on the purchases go. As they scroll by, I learn more about where the people live, what kinds of things they like, and what kinds of secrets they have. One user just purchased an iPhone app to find, let’s say, non-traditional bars in his city.

Believe it or not, the complete transparency of your purchasing habits is the least of your worries on Blippy. This site, supposedly run by four average sounding college graduates, promises good security and protection of your information, but history shows that even major banks and government agencies are hard pressed to keep data safe. Especially if they’re a big target!

So what makes Blippy a big target? Well, you may have heard my advice not too long ago to never give away your e-mail address password to these new sites like Facebook and Twitter that use your address book to add friends automatically. Blippy does the same thing, but for your web stores AND your bank accounts too!

In case you missed it, let me say it again more clearly: Blippy gets their information of your purchases by logging into your iTunes, Netflix, or eBay accounts and constantly monitoring them for new purchases. And not just web stores, but banks and credit cards too. Bank of America, Citibank, Chase, Paypal, and American Express are just some of the ones they’re set up for currently. All you have to do is provide all your usernames and passwords for each service you want to share your purchases for with Blippy.

You don’t have to be a privacy nut like me to find that prospect completely horrifying.

For whatever reason, the future proposed in the movie V for Vendetta seems to be approaching every day in the UK.

From the Guardian:

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ­"routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The UK is constantly in the news for gathering data on its citizens into databases so this comes as no surprise, but it's like watching your beloved sibling descending into drug addiction and homelessness. We can offer the people of the UK a safer place to live (for now anyway), but as far as the government's over-reaching dictatorship tendencies, all we can do is advise and hope for the best.

As always happens with current events and especially with relief and aid efforts, scammers come out of their holes to steal money meant for the unfortunate. E-mails and social networking messages will start pouring in and fake relief websites have popped up already. Avoid scams that only make scammers richer and donate only directly to major organizations (such as the Red Cross) or at least do your research first.

The Better Business Bureau has a listing of charities that are in good standing at http://www.bbb.org/us/charity/

For more information about the scams, see the Ars Technica article on the subject.

As justification for the complete jerk-move Facebook recently made that forced many people's private information into the public against their will (his included), Mark Zuckerberg claimed publicly that privacy is no longer the social norm:

I think that people can agree they don't like things like getting embarrassed, getting fired, or getting robbed by the things found in their Facebook page (each of which happened). Sadly, people experiment with getting involved with the Internet via Facebook and it takes something drastic for them to learn that they should be more careful about what they share.

Things I Love about Windows 7

Program search

Navigating through a series of menus, no matter how well organized causes a delay in launching programs. For the stuff you use the most, you can just make desktop or taskbar shortcuts, but every now and then you want to run a program you haven't used in a while (and may not remember where it is).

Click in the white text box and type what you want

Using the program search feature of the start menu, you can click the windows button, type a few letters in the search box and up come any matches. Using it, I can find my programs much faster than hunting around in the start menu. It's even better when using someone else's computer where there may be little to no organization to the programs at all!

Matching program names or menu items will appear.

Alt+Tab

The Alt+Tab menu in Windows XP

One problem with having many windows open at once in XP is when you hit Alt+Tab to scroll through the open programs, you only see the program icon which isn't very helpful if you have many browser windows open.

Improved Alt+Tab function in Windows 7

Windows 7 fixes that by using thumbnails of the windows making it far easier to tell WHICH browser window is the one you want. You can very easily see which one you want visually particularly ones that are animated, games, or movies. The thumbnails for these types of windows will be animated too instead of just static images!

Note! If a movie/game is minimized, the thumbnail will not be animated.

Win+Tab

This is a completely new feature from Windows XP, but if you press the windows key and tab, you'll get a scrollable series of large thumbnails. While still holding the windows key, continue to press tab and they'll file forward similar to flipping through a roladex.

The main difference between this and Alt+Tab is that it looks way cooler and the "thumbnail" is actually about half the size of the screen making it even easier to identify the window you want.

Bonus: Both Alt+Tab and Win+Tab include the desktop as one of your windows.

Grouped Taskbar Icons

This is actually a feature I really hated in XP. When it grouped my windows on the taskbar, it made it impossible to quickly click from window to window since I'd have to find the group and then figure out which in that group was the one I wanted.

With Windows 7, all windows for the same program (multiple Explorer windows or Firefox windows etc) will be next to each other on the taskbar. The default is to group them if the taskbar gets full (just like XP), but now, when you hover over a grouping, it shows you a series of thumbnails. When you see the one you want, you can just click it to open that window.

Instead of reading each title, you can tell in an instant which one you want. Even better, the function still works even if you turn grouping off. Just hover over any Firefox window for example and you'll still get a thumbnail list for all open Firefox windows.

Windows Explorer Thumbnail Size Control

Click this on the upper right...

... and you get this menu

For someone who uses images a lot in graphic and web design not even counting the thousands of family photos lying around, I often found myself using the old hack to increase the size of thumbnails in explorer.

Now, thumbnail size is built right into the view options of Windows explorer. You can select medium, large, and extra large (there are some other options, but they don't produce thumbnails):

Medium Thumbnails

Large Thumbnails

Extra Large Thumbnails

Things I Hate About Windows 7

And while there are some great new things about Windows 7, there were certainly bound to be a few things that aren't as good. Here are a few:

User Access Control

Ok, granted this doesn't bother you near as much as it used to in Vista and that's a HUGE improvement. BUT! Why, oh why, is it necessary to be prompted EVERY time a program opens? Firewalls have had a "remember my choice" function since they were created so, what? Microsoft hasn't noticed? They didn't think perhaps I don't want to be asked every single time!?

I'm sure the Microsoft programmers are smart enough to have been able to put a "always allow" and "always deny" option on their UAC prompts. I mean, seriously What excuse do they have for making this kind of mistake after all this time?

Driver Signature Enforcement

In the 64 bit versions of Windows 7, certain programs and hardware will no longer work because they can't afford to purchase Microsoft certification. Either that or it's an old program of yours that you really love, but isn't being actively developed. Because of this restriction, you have to say goodbye… or do you?

Fortunately, there's a workaround for this so if you can't figure out why your hardware is unresponsive or certain programs won't work while others do, try this trick.

Folders Refuse to Expand in Windows Explorer

While browsing around in Windows Explorer, you may have noticed an unpleasant change. It used to be that if you click a subfolder, the folder listing on the left would auto-expand all folders at the same level.

This is the kind of thing that you either notice becuase it bothers you as much as it does me or you don't notice at all because you don't use Explorer the same way. If so, no worries, but if you hate it like I do, here's a simple fix to make it work like it used to.