Category: Web

Bookmarklets are an interesting and lightweight alternative to full-fledged browser extensions. Unlike regular bookmarks, bookmarklets don't take you to a website, but perform an action on the page you're currently viewing. They use bits of code, usually Javascript, to do things like send links, translate a page or mark a site for future reference. While they can't offer the deep functionality ...

If, like the great Sylvia Plath, you punctiliously plot your prose with a thesaurus, may we entreat you to visit Save the Words? The prim nebbishes over at the Oxford University Press went crazy with Flash to develop the site, which features words that have all but disappeared from standard English usage and also asks users to "adopt" the archaisms in their daily communications. In a tragicomic ...

File this under things impossible to prove, but a new study shows that, if you've got a lot of Facebook friends, you might actually be more likely to finish college. Abilene Christian University followed 375 college freshman for nine months, and tracked their social networking activity. What the university and its research partners found was that the students who returned for their sophomore year ...

In response to protests from privacy advocates in Europe's most populous country, Google is now allowing Germans to completely erase their homes from the company's Street View feature -- but only for a limited time. In an unprecedented move, Google has decided to give Germans until September 15th to fully "opt-out" of Street View. Should a German user choose to nix the service, which is ...

Share Here's a great way to get yourself fired: logging onto Facebook, and letting the world know how much you hate your job -- and the people you work for -- especially if you work with kids. That's exactly what Dr. June Talvitie-Siple did, and it totally worked. Dr. Talvitie-Siple, supervisor of the math and science program at Massachusetts's Cohasset High School, recently used the social ...

Cameron Diaz has won an award! (And no, we're not talking about her Teen Choice Award for Most Disgusting Scene in 'There's Something About Mary.') Computer security giant McAfee has named Diaz the most dangerous celebrity on the Internet, due to the massive amount of malware associated with her name. According to McAfee, you have a one in ten chance of stumbling on adware and viruses when ...

You know those ubiquitous yearbook photo banner ads from Classmates.com? The ones that bait you into clicking by vowing to put you back in touch with your long lost high school buddies? Well, if you've never been tempted to hunt down old homecoming dates, consider yourself lucky, because the site has now been officially declared a scam. Yesterday, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo listed ...

According to a March FCC survey, a shocking 80-percent of U.S. consumers remain woefully unaware of their actual broadband connection speeds. Somehow, though, 91-percent of (blissfully ignorant) broadband users apparently profess satisfaction with their unknown rates. Given the results of a new FCC study, that latter statistic should shrink dramatically. While many shoppers realize products ...

School officials in Lee County, Florida have issued a new set of guidelines for the upcoming academic year. This go-round, they're cracking down on Facebook. As the AFP reports, the newly published protocol explicitly warns district teachers against interacting with their students via social networking sites, in order to avoid the kinds of legal or professional pitfalls that have plagued so ...

Share Since March, at least, we've known that Facebook Places has been coming. We also knew that, despite its built-in audience, Facebook would have to offer more functionality than established location-based services like Foursquare if it hoped to succeed. Finally, after months of testing, Zuckerberg and crew have taken the cover off Places, and entered a brand new realm of usage. You'll be ...

The security experts over at Sophos have just unearthed a new clickjacking scam making its way around Facebook, and, if you fall prey to it, you might end up losing some cash. This latest scam looks similar to a previous worm that spread throughout Facebook by tricking users into "liking" malicious pages. Instead of exploiting the "like" button, though, this new "sharejack" scam relies on the ...

If It Was My Home brought the tragedy of the BP oil spill to your backyard by laying an outline of the environmental disaster over a Google Map of your own neighborhood. Dimensions, an experiment created in partnership with the BBC, may have been conceived before the debut of the oil spill-specific site, but they use the same trick to put world and historical events into perspective. ...

A 19-year old bank robber in southern Germany was found out today when -- as is so often the case -- his pride got the best of him. After police and press had published reports of last week's robbery of a bank in the town of Roettingen, they received e-mails from an indignant thief, mocking the cops and reporters alike for inaccurately describing his height, age and accent. He also mentioned that ...

First it was Prince, and now John Mellencamp is picking a bone with the Internet. According to Reuters, during a recent speech at the Grammy Museum, Mellencamp said, "the Internet is the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb."John Cougar went on to say that it had destroyed the music business, and has the movie business in its sights. While this sentiment would be called relevant ...

Yesterday, a harmless teenager from the U.K. suddenly found himself under a flood of Twitter attacks -- all because of an app called 'Twifficiency.' "Twifficiency calculates your Twitter efficiency based upon your Twitter activity," the service's site explains. "This includes how many people you follow, how many people follow you, how often you tweet and how many tweets you read." As with any ...