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As with most new search engines, it's not that impressive out of the box. It doesn't seem to return much in the way of more relevant results than any other page, but the makers of Cuil (pronounced COOL) are saying that they index more pages than any other search engine. Because their algorithms analyze the content of the pages and categorize that way, in theory, they should return better results.

Their advantages are a clean, simple interface (like Google), but unlike Google, they don't keep logs and records of your searches to track you. As this is my only real complaint against Google, if they could just do as well as Google with the search results, but have better privacy, then perhaps Google's time is done.

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There are some companies that seem to be making videos for YouTube that don't specifically mention any products, but feature the products prominently none-the-less. At least one person has noticed the trend and reported on it in at least two videos, one that has already been proven to be an ad and the other only just released.

Obviously the new ad has the same goals as the old: to market a product without actually naming it, by appealing to the public's love of Internet stunt videos.

I don't really have a problem with this. They're getting attention for the product with legitimate interesting videos. Whether a pro company made it or not, the stunts are pretty interesting and people are watching it for that. Assuming they're not trying to give the impression that these are amateur videos anyway.

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

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Even though I've shown that bigger companies don't leak data (or didn't used to anyway), that doesn't stop smaller sites/companies. An easier way to see if someone is sharing your e-mail address when you don't want to is to use variations of your own e-mail address for each site. Google's e-mail service allows you to add data to your e-mail address and have it still successfully reach your inbox as described at this Makeuseof.com article. As of today, this tip does NOT work with Hotmail.

The short of it is that if you use your gmail name add a "+" sign and then write anything you want to remember a web service's name (usually just their name), the e-mail address will still work, but you'll have a code that lets you know if the company is selling your data.

For example, if I sign up with Yahoo, I might use gmailname+yahoo@gmail.com where gmailname is my gmail account name. Now if Yahoo sells their database without modification and another company uses it, I'll get an e-mail for Canadian meds or what-have-you with a "TO" address of gmailname+yahoo@gmail.com. When I get such an e-mail, it will be blatantly obvious who sold me out.

With help of a friend that uses Gmail, I was able to confirm that it works exactly as described in the article so I will definitely be using Gmail for all further account signups.

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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 drugs and underage drinking are likely problems that should be dealt with, some other things should remain private:

even innocent-sounding news can do damage. "They may be talking about how their father is losing a job, and perhaps a neighbor who's the mortgage broker for the father isn't aware that the father's job is in jeopardy,"

Golly. I wonder if posting private information online could be a problem

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This lady found Social Security Numbers on a state website. She's threatened to publicly release detailed instructions on how to find them like she did and to expose the SSNs of several important people in the state if they don't fix the problem.

A spokesman for the office responsible said:

The bulk of the "hundreds of thousands" of documents on the Web site are business filings, and only 5 percent or so are believed to include Social Security numbers

Why can't states realize that putting records online makes them available to the world instead of just local people? There's public information and global public information.

That aside, this lady is my hero and I hope she does post the data. I've often wondered how long it would take to solve some of our privacy woes if a few dozen members of congress had all their personal data posted on a website.