The second is the community that powers the site. It is the comments that can give you additional insight and perspectives, that may mention alternatives or other information that improve the original story.

Reddit on the other hand is not the easiest site to use, especially its customization options require some explaining. When I first joined Reddit I tried to find public RSS feed links for categories, but could not find any that were working properly.

I then noticed that each Reddit account had its own private and customizable RSS news feed. These private news feed are accessible on the preferences page.

If you have already customized your frontpage, you can simply right-click on the RSS or JSON buttons and select the copy link option from the context menu to import it into your RSS feed reader of choice.

If you have not done that already, you need to click on the Edit link in the top nav bar first to customize the selection. All Reddit sections that you are subscribed to are listed in the right sidebar of the screen. You can simply click on an unsubscribe link there to remove a section from the feed. You can also add sections again by scrolling down the page and clicking on the subscribe buttons next to each section.

Please note that your private feed gets automatically updated if you are adding new sections to your frontpage.

You can only subscribe to groups here, and not subgroups. For that, you need to click on one of the listed subgroups on the page, and click on the subscribe link on the new page to add it to your frontpage (and thus your private RSS feed). This is useful if you are only interested in a specific subgroup.

Lets paraphrase again:

• A Reddit account is required.
• Edit your subscriptions on this page.
• Copy your frontpage RSS feed link

There does not seem to be an option to only subscribe to the top stories of a particular group. If you subscribe, you get all stories that are posted there.

The flyer reads: DON’T buy any magazine, newspaper, DON’T download ANY song (legally or illegaly), DON’T watch any movie at the cinema, DON’T buy ANY DVD or videogame and DON’T buy any book.

A boycott would likely send a message, if enough earth citizens would participate in it. It would also hurt people that have no say in the matter but earn their living from it, like the small bookstore owner, a record store and even the cinema in your town. It could also impact the creative people of the entertainment business, people who do not have any say when it comes to company policy.

When you look at the options that the average joy (you and I) have, it boils down to two. You can first vote with your money, which is what the operation proposes. Your second option is to make yourself heard in another way. Let politicians know what you oppose, send them letters, call their offices.

My counter-proposal would look like this:

• Boycott select media companies and all their sub-companies. These companies should be the worst lobbyists that influence politicians with fancy meals and money. Create and maintain a list of those companies. Boycott means to stop buying anything they produce until they change their minds. This includes boycotting company websites, their offers on streaming media sites and television.
• The second important part would be to inform said companies and politicians about it. Let your local representatives know that you are opposing those bills, that it is an important matter to you, and that you will vote for someone else if they support bills. Let them know that you will NEVER vote for them again if they should EVER support such a bill again. Affected Media companies should also be informed by you, that you have stopped buying their goods, and that you won’t buy them anymore until they change their ways.
• Maintain a list of alternatives, either free or companies that openly oppose censorship and other efforts to restrict access to the Internet and freedom of expression.

What’s needed for this? A list of lobbying companies and politicians needs to be created and maintained. This list needs to be publicly accessible on the Internet. Postal addresses, phone numbers and if possible electronic mail addresses need to be collected so that it is easy as pie to contact your representatives and the companies.

Let me know where you stand in the matter.

One way to find out is to look at Alexa’s comparison chart. Alexa computes a site’s global and local rank from data gathered by its toolbar and a number of additional sources. While not 100% accurate, it can give an indication of a site’s traffic performance over time.

Even better, you can key in up to four competitive sites to compare their performance with the selected site. When you do that for Megaupload, and the four sites ThePiratebay, Rapidshare, Mediafire and Filesonic, you come up with the following graph.

Megaupload was shut down on January 20, and you can see a big drop shortly thereafter (the blue line). The site stayed on a high level nevertheless. This is explained by users still clicking on links leading to the site. While these links return a 404 error, Alexa may still count the visits. It is likely that the site will slowly drop to 0 over the coming months.

You also see that Filesonic experienced a drop. This is because of the site’s announcement that they would block the site’s file sharing component.

The Piratebay on the other hand saw a huge increase in daily reach a few days after the takedown. The site went over the 1.5 daily reach mark in percent which it never crossed before in January. Mediafire saw a big jump in traffic as well during that same time. Rapidshare, another file hosting company saw a lighter increase.

This is no proof obviously, and traffic may have increased because of other reasons. It is however likely that Megaupload and Filesonic users simply moved on to use other services. And those are not only file hosting related, considering that The Piratebay’s traffic increased as well. What’s your take on the matter?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation in cooperation with Carpathia Hosting has started the Mega Retrieval project. The main purpose of the project is to connect affected end-users from the United States with the EFF to assess options.

It is not clear at this point in time if the EFF and its attorneys can aid Megaupload users in the retrieval of files that they have uploaded to the service. Affected users are asked to contact the EFF (an email address is provided on the Mega Retrieval website).

f you believe you are one of these users, are based in the United States, and are looking for legal help to retrieve your data, please email the best contact information for you to the EFF at:

Megauploadmissing@eff.org

The page notes that users shall not send any details of materials they have uploaded. It is likely that this initial step is needed to assess the number of users who are affected by the Megaupload take down.

Affected users should not get their hopes up to high though, as it is not clear at this point in time if anything can be done to prevent the deletion of all server data.

It may also be difficulty for users to come up with additional information if requested. While they may be able to look up their account name, they may have troubles listing the files that they have uploaded to the service.

What’s your take on the development?

It is fairly common that tech companies give away Cebit day tickets to trade experts and sometimes even interested visitors who have no ties to the industry.

One company that is currently giving away Cebit Tickets is the computer manufacturer Dell. Please note that the whole Registration process is in German. I have added annotations to the screenshots for your convenience. Visit the ticket registration page on this web page and fill out the form in the lower right of the screen.

All you need to fill out is your first name, last name, email address, phone number and company that you are working for. You also need to click on the pulldown menu to select the number of tickets that you want. You can select between one to five tickets.

You are then taken to the next page where your tickets are listed on as links. These links lead to the official Cebit website where you have to register again to complete the registration process.

Good news is that you can switch that registration form to English. The ticket code should have been entered automatically, so that you only need to click on the next button to go to the next step of the registration process.

You are then asked to enter user account information and business details into the forms on the next two pages, before you will receive confirmation that your ticket has been registered successfully on the last page. Please note that you need to complete the same steps – without the registration of course – for each ticket that you have ordered from Dell.

Each ticket is then send automatically as a printable e-ticket to the registered email address. You need to print out the ticket and have it with you to gain admission.

It is not clear if the contingent is limited. I suggest you use it immediately if you are interested in free Cebit tickets. I’m not sure if I can make it this year, but if I do, I’d love to meet some of you there. (thanks Caschy)

Webstagram is a web viewer and search engine for photos taken by Instragram users. You can just dive into the popular or hot listings on the site, or use the search to find photos taken by a specific user or by tag.

Each photo that you see on the Webstagram website actually links back to the Instagr.am website where you can view it in tiny, medium, large or original size. The Webstagram page itself lists comments and likes directly on the page which are also taken from Instagram.

Users can log into their Instagram account to use part of the functionality on the web viewer’s site as well.

The site serves three main purposes. It first can be used by Instagram users for inspiration. Ever wanted to see what the iPhone app is capable off? Look no further than the popular or hot listings on the site.

The second purpose is as an image search engine and viewer, and the third to use features of the service on the website. Instagram users can for instance view the photos that people they follow have taken. They can furthermore follow and unfollow users, use social faetures such as like and comment, or see their own followers and the people they are following.

The search functionality is available to all users, regardless whether they are just visiting or logged in with their Instagram account.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations is conducting market research to determine the capabilities of the IT industry to provide a social media application. The tool at a minimum should be able to meet the operational and analytical needs described in the attachment.

This is actually harder than it might appear.  On the face of it such a program would scour Twitter, Facebook and other websites for key words.  However disasters can never be predicted and, as such, determining the language people will use at the time is extremely difficult.  Even harder would be to determine where an event is taking place.

In theory such a program would also be able to highlight major crimes when people mention them online.  People have until February 7th to submit their ideas to the bureau.

In other Twitter news the company behind the hugely successful micro-blogging site has today announced that they have developed a way to selectively censor tweets on a country by country basis.  In it’s blog they said they could now “reactively withhold content from users in a specific country”.

It is curious as to why Twitter, a company that has always encouraged free speech, would make such a move.  Social networks were used extensively in the uprisings in Egypt and the middle-east last spring, and were widely hailed for helping protestors galvanise such huge crowds of support.

Having the ability to censor specific types of tweet in individual countries could potentially prevent this type of thing from ever occurring again.

As justification the company said “that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression” going on to cite France and Germany for banning pro-Nazi speech.

Anything that curtails freedom of speech online will not be welcomed by many people who believe the Internet simply should not be censored in any way, and it remains to be seen is there will be any negative impact on Twitter for enabling this feature.

No files were accessible anymore on the servers after the takedown, which had serious consequences for users who used the file hosting site for just that: to host their own files.

Users looking for a Megaupload alternative can check out our quick overview of file hosting services.

The Megaupload fallout has not ended yet though, as some file sharing sites have begun to change their business model, likely to avoid the fate of the service.

When you visit Filesonic’s website today you will notice an announcement on the frontpage that states:

All sharing functionality on Filesonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally

Users who try to download files see the following message instead on the Filesonic website:

All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.

If this file belongs to you, please login to download it directly from your file manager.

But FileSonic is not the only file sharing site that made changes to their business model after the Megaupload bust. Uploaded, another popular file sharing service, started to block visitors from the United States. Visitors from the United States see a blue landing page that tells them that the service is no longer available in their country.

Both file sharing companies are registered outside the United States. FileSonic operates from the Netherlands while Uploaded from Hong Kong.

Neither FileSonic nor Uploaded have released statements about the changes yet. There is no certainty that Megaupload’s takedown had anything to do with the decision but the proximity of events would suggest it did.

What’s going to happen next? It is likely that FileSonic will lose a good chunk of their traffic in the coming weeks. Users will move on and use other file sharing services to share files. It needs to be point out that this does not necessarily mean illegal activities. File sharing sites are ideal to share small to medium sized files with friends and family as well.

Users who have personal files on file sharing sites should consider making a backup of those files just in case. Services like Dropbox allow you to store files in the cloud, along with synchronization options and sharing.

Update: It appears that Fileserve has started to make changes as well. The file hosts affiliate program page is no longer accessible on the site, and according to Neowin, users are reporting that their accounts have been terminated. The message they receive when they log in states the following:

Unsuccessful login
Your account has been disabled due to violations of our Terms and Conditions

Update 2: File sharing service Uploadbox has announced that they will be shutting down servers. All files that they host will be deleted on January 30th.

Seven members of the site and two corporations – Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited – were indicted by a grand jury in Virgina, and charged “with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement”.

Arrests have been made in New Zealand, were Megaupload founder Kim Schmitz and three others were arrested at the request of US officials. According to The Verge, a total of 20 search warrants have been issued in the US and eight other countries including The Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Australia. In addition, assets worth more than $50 million US Dollars have been seized as well as 18 domain names associated with the business.

Users who try to open the Megaupload website, any of the site’s inner pages, hosted files or one of the related domain names will notice that all connections time out. Megaupload, which has been listed as one of the top 100 sites at Alexa, and its cousin site Megavideo, in the sub 200 rankings, have been two of the most popular file sharing sites on the Internet.

The core question that many Internet users will have right now is if this will affect other file sharing services like Rapidshare as well.

If you read the Department of Justice press release thoroughly you will notice that much of it can be applied to nearly every popular file sharing site on the Internet.

• A business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download
• A structure to discourage the vast majority of its users from using Megaupload for long-term or personal storage by automatically deleting content that was not regularly downloaded
• A rewards program that would provide users with financial incentives to upload popular content and drive web traffic to the site, often through user-generated websites known as linking sites.

Will we see a ripple effect? What’s your take? (via Neowin)

Update: The Department of Justice website, as well as several music industry related websites are currently targeted by Anonymous as a response to the take down of Megaupload. More information here at The Next Web.

If you do not know anything about IPv6, I suggest you read our IPv6 introductory post that explains the basics. Only that much: The current system, IPv4, has reached its limits IP address wise. This basically means that there are not enough IP addresses available anymore for the continued growth of the Internet and its infrastructure. IPv6 changes that by making available a much larger address pool.

This new address pool and technology comes at a cost though. Computer systems and devices in the world need to be compatible with IPv6 so that they can stay connected to the Internet. There will be a transition period where both protocols run side by side. Eventually though, IPv6 will take over.

The Internet Society has now announced that June 6, 2012 is the official World IPv6 launch day.

Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by 6 June 2012.

Organized by the Internet Society, and building on the successful one-day World IPv6 Day event held on 8 June 2011, World IPv6 Launch represents a major milestone in the global deployment of IPv6. As the successor to the current Internet Protocol, IPv4, IPv6 is critical to the Internet’s continued growth as a platform for innovation and economic development.

Participants include website operators like Facebook, Google, microsoft and Yahoo, network operators like ATT, Comcast, Time Warner Cable or XS4ALL, and home router manufacturers D-Link and Cisco. Participating ISPs will enable IPv6 by default for new subscribers. They have furthermore agreed that at least 1% of their subscribers on their “networks will be using IPv6 when they visit websites that have enabled IPv6″.

Participating companies and websites will enable IPv6 on their servers so that users can use the protocol to connect to these sites. IPv4 support won’t be discontinued right away though, which means that you can still access those sites even if your systems or Internet Service Providers do not support IPv6 yet.

This day marks the beginning of the end of the IPv4 protocol. The basic idea behind the launch day is to push companies, ISPs and device manufacturers into going forward with the implementation of IPv6.

Do you know if your provider, favorite websites and hardware is already supporting IPv6? Lets discuss in the comments.

You probably think that bandwidth and storage costs have fueled that decision, but that’s far away from the truth. It seems that the German performance rights organization GEMA, the bane of all music on the Internet, has once again had its hand in play. The organization is for instance the reason that German users are not able to watch many music videos that are posted on YouTube.

GEMA in 2009 asked Google to pay $0,013 per song played on YouTube. Google declined back then and as a result, German users cannot watch the majority of music videos on YouTube.

Grooveshark likely faced a similar decision, and like Google, Grooveshark decided to pull out of the country instead.

A GEMA mail address is listed on the page for users to direct their complaints to. It may be more fruitful on the other hand to direct complaints directly to politicans and not the GEMA.

Grooveshark recommends the German Simfy service as an alternative. And while that service looks like a great alternative on first glance, it needs to be noted that free users (with an account) only get five hours of free music per month. Users who would like to listen to more music need to switch to the Premium account which sets them back €4.99 each month.

Existing Grooveshark users can export their music from the service. A link is provided in the announcement.

The mobile clients are currently still working. It will however only be a matter of time until they will be shut down as well. (via Caschy)

You can get lost in this for hours, should you have the spare time. You have programming topics like supercolliding a PHP array, Java coding tips, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python and various code topics. The bottom line is that this is a very useful site for anyone tech oriented or interested in tech topics as a beginner, but it has appeal for many others as well. This pulls together a wide audience and shares the most important thing that can be shared: information.

As far as the kids are concerned, there are a variety of online education topics and tutorials to help with both basic and complex academic subjects. This is an excellent way for your kids (or if you are a kid) to be introduced to intellectually relevant topics. You can build a fundamental understanding of many technical topics and delve into more important current news topics in addition to news humor. After sweating away a few hours of coding or tinkering with your operating system, you can enjoy some Anime or other fun videos.

This is not your average site by any stretch of the imagination and just about any user can find something on JimmyR.com to occupy some brain space for awhile. Should you care to understand certain coding topics more, that is one of the best features. For example, if you are struggling to understand algebraic data types, you can get a nice breakdown of the topic. Fledgling programmers and more inquisitive children can gain much from this.

Here you have part of a chart explaining algebraic data types, compliments of the site. It is quite different from the site you are reading this at now. However, every good user likes to browse dozens of sites on a regular basis. For the technically oriented, JimmyR.com will give you plenty of time-consuming reading. This is not a bad thing at all.

Finally, the site is not stuffed with ads and it is open to user posts for blogs, pictures and just about anything else relevant to the theme of the site. It is uncertain whether anyone who is not interested in the tech side would find the content interesting. At the very least, the average user can start to become more of a power-user with much of the information here and grow their brains in many other ways. Have fun!

Ifttt is a new service that lets you create if then actions on the Internet. It basically lets you create automated tasks that consists of a trigger (the if) and an action (the then).

Lets take a look at a few examples:

• Post a message on Facebook on January 1 midnight
• Receive an email when a new Kindle Top 100 free ebook is available
• Get an email if it is raining tomorrow
• Get SMS notifications when you receive new emails
• Archive Tweets to Google Calendar
• Tweet when you publish a new blog post

Triggers and actions rely on channels to function. A channel can be a website like Twitter, Facebook, or a method to communicate like email.

New tasks are created by selecting a channel and a trigger for the if part of the task. Lets say you have selected Dropbox as the channel. The program displays triggers on the next page of the task creation wizard. Two triggers are available for Dropbox: new file in your public folder or new photo in your public folder.

Once you have selected the if, you are asked to configure the then, the action.

The service displays a list of channels that you can use the Dropbox information with. You could select to receive emails whenever a new photo is uploaded to a selected public folder, upload the photo to your Facebook account automatically, or post a new Twitter message that links to the photo.

You need to link most channels to your account before you can create actions using them. The program will use authentication on the official site to do that, which means that you never have to enter those account information on the ifttt page.

Tasks are then saved and checked once every 15 minutes. You can turn tasks on or off, delete them or publish them as recipes. You can take a look at existing recipes and all channels here.

The service keeps track of all user activities which are accessible in the activity log. You can also remove channel authorization right on the ifttt website.

The majority of tasks that you can create either notify you, or automate the publishing of information for you. Users who use at least one or two of the supported websites or services may be able to automate and speed up their workflow significantly.

When he left the company though he took all those followers with him and Phonedog asked if he’d keep tweeting about them, to which he said “Sure” and changed the name of his account to NoahKravitz.

All was well for eight months until Phonedog announced that the Twitter followers amounted to a “customer list” and announced they were suing, seeking damages of $2.50 a month for each follower for each month since Mr Kravitz had left the company.  In total the suit was for $340,000.

The suit is apparently in retaliation, according to the New York Times, for Mr Kravitz seeking 15% of Phonedog’s website advertising revenue because of his position as a “vested partner” tweeting about the company and its products.

Henry J. Cittone, a New York intellectual property lawyer told the New York Times…

“This will establish precedent in the online world, as it relates to ownership of social media accounts.  We’ve actually been waiting to see such a case as many of our clients are concerned about the ownership of social media accounts vis-á-vis their branding.”

Apparently the case could hinge on why the Twitter account was opened.

“If it was to communicate with PhoneDog’s customers or build up new customers or prospects, then the account was opened on behalf of PhoneDog, not Mr. Kravitz. An added complexity is that PhoneDog contends Mr. Kravitz was just a contractor in the related partnership/employment case, thus weakening their trade secrets case, unless they can show he was contracted to create the feed.”

It’s not uncommon for companies to hire bloggers to Tweet about their company and products with the New York Times citing  Samsung as an example.

If it transpires that Mr Kravitz did open the account specifically to blog about Phonedog then he could well lose the case but it will send interesting messages to both companies and members of the public who use Twitter to communicate about companies and their products.

It would also be interesting to see how the US legal system would value one individual Twitter follower in dollar terms.  It could be argued that if the standard online advertising rates apply equally to Twitter, which would seem logical, that $2.50 would mean each follower would have had to have clicked on of the company’s links 250 times each month.  This is unlikely and any financial penalty that may be issued against Mr Kravitz could be significantly reduced because of this.

What is your opinion of this?  I tweet and blog all the time about the websites and the publishers I write for and I’ve never once thought that one of those companies might consider my own followers their own property.  Do you blog or Tweet about your or another company?

Site owners have five days to file a counter-notice, but neither payment processors or ad networks have any obligation to respect it. Even worse, they are granted “immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement”.

I suggest you check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this post by Mythbuster Adam Savage and this nice infographic for additional information about SOPA.

The Internet can be a mighty weapon; the latest company to find out about this is GoDaddy, who support SOPA and Protect-IP.

A Reddit user suggested to move away domain names and hosting from GoDaddy to other providers to boycott the company for their pro SOPA stance. This got the ball rolling with regular users and companies moving domains away from GoDaddy at a rapid pace. It is not clear how many webmasters and companies have moved domain names and hosting from GoDaddy to other companies, but it is likely that the value is in the tens of thousands already.

Other hosting companies sized the opportunity with special offers for GoDaddy customers who move their domains and hosting (see blog posts on Name, Hostgator or Easy DNS for example.

Godaddy released a press release a day later, stating that the company “is no longer supported SOPA”, and that “Go Daddy will support it [again] when and if the Internet community supports it”.

And while it is nice to see that GoDaddy has changed their stance on SOPA, you’d still want to ask yourself if you want to continue working with a company who supported the bill in the first place.

You may also be interested in a list of companies and organizations who openly support SOPA. You find the list here.

DumpTruck is owned and managed by Golden Frog. Giganews users currently can log in on the Dumptruck website using their Giganews credentials. The Golden Frog developers plan to release smartphone apps to manage the account on the go to access the core storage itself.

The only interface is simple but effective. New files can be uploaded via drag and drop, or by selecting upload from the toolbar which opens the file browser where one or multiple files can be selected for uploading.

Files can be sorted into folders, or moved, copied and downloaded from the storage space. Uploading at the time of writing was not super fast though, it took for instance more than 10 seconds to upload a 1.6 Megabyte file on a 10 Megabyte per second upload line. Downloads on the other hand are faster, with multiple simultaneous downloads reaching all transfer speeds of 1 Megabyte per second and above.

Dumptruck has no file size limitations. It is perfectly possible to download a file with a size of one, two or even four Gigabytes to the storage service. All uploads and downloads, and stored files, are secured with a 256-bit AES encryption key to make sure that no unauthorized parties can access the files at any time.

Planned features, besides the ones already mentioned, include extra password protection, file sharing with friends, and desktop applications for Mac and Windows to access the files directly from the desktop (not WebDav).

The service is rather bare bones at the moment. Options to stop and resume downloads are missing, as are options to synchronize date automatically between devices. It is however likely that the developers will integrate at least some of the new features in the future. For now, it is basic web storage service.

The option to use WebDav or a third party application for access would change this significantly. It would make file management that much more comfortable. Still, it is another free useful service that is free of charge for all Giganews users.

Update: I have just been told that WebDav is already supported by DumpTruck. Information on how to setup the service under Windows 7 are provided on this page.

Support for WebDav is definitely a game changer. Users can now manage their files comfortable from the system file browser, and not solely from the Internet client.

New PayPal accounts are limited automatically until they are verified. Limitations block certain site features and limits the amount of money that unverified PayPal users can transfer to other PayPal users or withdraw to a bank account.

Accounts can be verified either by adding and confirming a bank account or credit card. Both verification options may not be available in all countries. (You can use this page on the PayPal site for additional information on the process for select countries)

To verify a PayPal account click on the Get Verified link underneath the welcome message on the start page.

You then have the option to verify the PayPal account either by Credit Card or by bank account.

Verify PayPal by bank account

If you select the bank account verification option you are asked to enter the account information in the verification form. PayPal will make two small payments to the account in the next business days which you need to confirm once they are listed in the account statement. Just visit the PayPal website again to complete the verification.

Verify PayPal by credit card

PayPal will withdraw a small amount of money from the credit card as part of the card’s verification. The company will refund the money to the PayPal account after the verification. Verifying by credit card is usually faster than verifying by bank account.

Verify PayPal by virtual credit card

What can you do if you cannot verify by bank account or credit card? You could create a virtual credit card and use that card to get the account verified. Services like EntroPay offer virtual credit cards. This comes as a price though, as many services require you to deposit money into the virtual credit card account and charge you for that.

As far as EntroPay is concerned; The service does not charge for the account or the creation of the virtual Visa card. It does however charge for loading a credit card, exchange fees and money that’s transferred to the card.

Please note that EntroPay accounts need to be verified as well.

Closing Words

It also needs to be noted that the initial account limitation is different from other PayPal account limitations. There are a number of reasons why PayPal limits account, a common one being unusual account activity.

Using a virtual credit card to verify an account should work for users from all over the world. Please note that you may still run into troubles when withdrawing money from PayPal (To be honest, I’m not 100% certain that you can withdraw money to a credit card. You may need a bank account for that after all.).

The credit card is on the other hand useful to get the account verified and to fund money. Plus, you can limit automatic withdrawals to a specific sum of money.

Have you had troubles getting your PayPal account verified? Let me know in the comments.

The flaw was first reported on the forums of BodyBuilding.com, presumably because the users of that website like taking photos of themselves and putting them online.  The bug exploits the way the offensive photograph reporting tool works.  I’m not going to detail it in too much detail here because I don’t want to encourage anybody to try and view photographs that other people have made private as they obviously want them to be kept private.  However the post does detail how the flaw works.

ZDNet used the flaw to show a picture from Mark Zuckerberg’s private album, taken from a dinner party where everybody seems to be having lots of fun making the food, it’s quite sweet actually as Zuckerberg clearly looks like the shy one.

Facebook have said they are looking into the issue which revolves around being able to report more than just the single photo you can see.  It’s not a bug with the system but it is quite a substantial design flaw and, oddly, surprising that nobody has noticed it before.

Facebook has been heavily criticised in the last few years for matters of privacy and so there are people who will leap on this story as yet another example of how the company simply doesn’t take its users privacy seriously.  Such problems have included a change to the terms and conditions that made all your photographs and statuses Facebook’s property and a settings change that made everything on everybody’s profile accessible to search engines by default.  Both times the change was quickly withdrawn.

ZDNet said…

Details of this flaw were examined in detail. While some browsers restrict this flaw, private photos that are hidden or inaccessible to people who are friends, can not only be accessed but enlarged to their full scale.  This flaw is open for anyone to use — and abuse. While Facebook anonymises the reports that it gets through, the user whose profile pictures can be viewed will also not know that their privacy has been invaded.

There are real problems with privacy and the Internet, much of which seems to stem from people not understanding what the Internet really is and how it works.  I have published a free Facebook Privacy Guide, though some settings have changed and the book needs a second edition when I get time.  There’s lots of advice in here though about how to keep yourself and your personal information safe and private when online, at least as safe and private as Humanly possible.

As is always the case with these things the best advice is not to put embarrassing pictures or messages online in the first place, or to remove them after they’ve been seen by close friends.  Some companies are working on solutions including one ingenious one I’m looking forward to where a picture can be programmed to expire after a specified time.  These types of technology will no doubt help all of us in the future.

When you look at the services that Dropbox offers, you will notice that they offer free and professional accounts. Part of the cloud hosting providers popularity stems from that fact. But free alone is usually not good enough when it comes to hosting documents or files online. Other factors play important roles as well, among them security and reliability.

Generally speaking, security ensures that your data is safe and cannot be copied or deleted by third parties. Reliability on the other hand means availability of data and the service in general.

We have seen new cloud hosting players come into business who promised Gigabytes of free space only to vanish soon thereafter. As far as Dropbox is concerned, it all checks out.

Dropbox uses modern encryption methods to both transfer and store your data.

• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and AES-256 bit encryption
• Dropbox website and client software have been hardened against attacks from hackers
• Public files are only viewable by people who have a link to the file(s). Public folders are not browsable or searchable

Dropbox uses Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage, which has a robust security policy of its own.

Dropbox launched their product in September 2008, and has since then shown significant growth. Today, the service has more than 45 million registered users who save one million files every five minutes.

New users who register an account can either select the free option which gives them 2 Gigabytes of free storage space, or one of the paid options which provide them with either 50 or 100 Gigabytes of space for $9.99 or $19.99 per month. Custom plans are available for teams and organizations.

Free users can increase their storage space by referring friends to the service. Both parties will receive 250 Megabytes of extra space up to a limit of 8 Gigabytes (Students receive 500 Megabytes for every referral).

They can afterwards download the Dropbox client software to their system. the client software is made available for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, Linux and mobile operating systems. The client creates a Dropbox folder on the system which acts as the root folder. All files that you copy in here will be synchronized with the online storage automatically, provided that you have enough space left for the operation.

Even better, Dropbox transfers the files automatically whenever they change. If you are working on a document in your Dropbox folder you will be able to access revisions of the file from the Dropbox online panel.

Files can also be accessed on the Dropbox website directly. This means that access is available even if you are working on a computer where Dropbox is not installed on (say Internet Cafe, public computer).

The files that you add or modify online are automatically synced with your devices.

Lets take a look at some usage scenarios:

• You are often on the road and need to access specific documents regularly. While you could carry around an USB device for that or even a laptop, you later need to make sure that the document is synced with your desktop computer and other devices where it is needed.
• You need to backup important data, e.g. spreadsheets, financial documents or your passwords managers encrypted database. Storing data online makes sure it is still available even if your computer is stolen or your house burns down.
• You need to share documents or files with select users. While you could use file hosting sites for this or email, you probably want to use a more secure option without storage restraints. You can also share entire folders with other users, which is excellent for project work.

Top 5 Tips

• You can use keyboard shortcuts to perform actions more quickly while browsing the files on the Dropbox website. You may need to enable keyboard shortcuts first in the online client. Click on Account > Account Settings and enable “Enable file browser keyboard shortcuts” to do so.
• You can limit the upload and download speed of file synchronizations in the client software.
• Check out My Computers under Account to see a list of computers that have recently connected to your Dropbox. You can unlink computers right here as well in case you want to remove a devices authorization.
• Version Control is a great feature. Free users get 30 days of version history. This can be used to preview and restore file snapshots.
• Use third party software like Dropbox Folder Sync or Boxcryptor to customize your experience even more.

Take a look at the following video for a short introduction if you have never heard about Dropbox before and want a quick overview of the service.

Dropbox Video

Verdict

Dropbox is a versatile file synchronization and online storage provider. Clients are available for all major operating systems, and website access ensures that files are always in reach.

Two Gigabytes of free space may not seem like a lot, but it depends in the end on the individual user.

Giveaway

If you need more space and cannot find users to refer to, you can take part in the giveaway to get 2 Gigabytes of extra Dropbox space. We have ten promo codes that you can use to get that extra space assigned to your Dropbox account.

To take part, leave a comment and let me know if you use a cloud storage provider currently. Good luck everyone. If you have not signed up yet, you can do it here with my referral code which gets you 250 Megabyte extra storage.

The new beta site can be found at http://beta.bbc.co.uk and displays an almost metro’esque sliding panel system with more traditional links in the bottom half of the page.  The whole web needs to move inexorably towards full and complete touch-friendliness in short order.  The amount of people using Tablets to navigate the web is already growing exponentially, and the forthcoming Windows 8 with it’s touch-centric interface will mean that by the end of 2012 touch-screens will be the norm on new PCs and laptops.

I myself am currently revamping my own website to make it completely touch-friendly and will be relaunching the new design within a week or two.  It’s noticeable however that the major players, including Amazon, eBay and YouTube haven’t yet caught on to the fact that traditional drop down menus, text links and crowded lists simply can’t be used effectively with touch.

This does raise interesting questions as to whether website UI components that we’ve come to know and love such as dynamic drop down menus and text lists can survive the transition to touch at all.  Any touch website has to be cross-compatible with every touch device, and many will work in their own unique way.  When it comes to touch on computers a proper standard is yet to emerge, if it ever will, about how swipe and touch gestures are interpreted.

The BBC haven’t got everything right when it comes to touch, but this is still a beta and with a website as utterly enormous as this, with literally terabytes of video, educational and article content sitting underneath it would be extremely difficult to create an interface simple enough and that included everything.

In part this is the biggest challenge that the touch web, and touch-screen apps as well, has to overcome.  For things to be truly finger-friendly you have to limit what is available and make clever use of screen real-estate, this is a challenge I had to content with as I too have ever growing libraries of video and other content on my own website.  For a small site like my own it’s easy to juggle things around, for the BBC and other major corporations however the challenge might simply be too big.

The new design is lovely, I think anyway and a radical departure from the current BBC homepage with it’s customisable and arrangeable tiles (circa Yahoo from some years ago).  The design will no doubt change slightly, indeed I have noticed changes being implemented within the last 24 hours.  It is great though to see this website, deliberately or otherwise being made finger-friendly.  Pressure now needs to be brought on the other major website owners to do the same, and do it quickly.  It is entirely possible however they they won’t even consider this until their visitor numbers begin to drop, and by then it might well be too late for them.