My main concern with any kind of legislation regarding internet monitoring and privacy issues is that they are decided without full understanding of the technologies and people involved. There is simply not enough debate about it. The fact that this has been rushed through the troubles me greatly but is not at all surprising regardless [...]

During my final project ‘Webit’ at Ravensbourne I learned the difficulty and value of adequately presenting ideas in a way that is easy to understand for the masses. The initial  presentation idea was to have a super-real representation in a real-world scenario and show how Webit would be used. Sounds perfect until I tried to [...]

I am not sure how long this functionality has been available from YouTube but I recently noticed a small tab underneath the video showing a link to download the music from the video via iTunes. Now while I would probably not buy the music from iTunes (although they have rethought their DRM policy) it does [...]

Slylish Allows you to change the CSS of any page on the web. There is a large community already that have made scripts for you to use. Simply use the ‘find scripts for this page’ feature. Great for removeing text ads from Facebook, Google etc. ADD IT HERE Adblock Plus Removes LOADS of ads from [...]

Today I discovered a previously unknown password facility within Firefox 2 that is simply brilliant. While discussing password security and allowing Firefox to save username and password combinations so you dont have to with a colleague the other day I became aware that if my laptop got stolen… there was a hell of a lot [...]

I am now using Lightview to test it compared to Lightbox 2. On the plus side it looks a lot prettier (if that were possible) and its transitions are sleeker. It has two key features that Lighbox does not… It has the ability to have a slideshow in the same screen with the click of [...]

Whilst searching the interweb last night trying desperately to find a way to block google’s ‘sponsored links’ within its gmail system, I came across a brilliant little add-on for firefox that does that plus much more! It’s so simple too. Its called ‘stylish’ and essentially overwrites the existing css of the page by using !important. [...]

If the creator of the web itself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, says he will change his ISP if they start to monitor his web activity then we are in a sorry state of affairs. In interview with the BBC he said “consumers need to be protected against systems which can track their activity on the internet” [...]

There is a new application about to become a public beta that could change the way people sync data between machines but also the way people share data with each other. Its called Dropbox and its a revolutionary system for syncing across multiple platforms and requires no sophisticated setup, in fact very little setup at [...]

For those of you who I have not told about this. Here is what to do to speed up browsing in Firefox. This will only work on broadband connections. 1. Open a new tab in firefox and type in about:config 2. In filter type pipe and you should have 3 results. Double click the top [...]

An article from Tech Radar says French technology company Bell Labs have revealed they have managed to break the record for data transfer. They managed to optically transfer 16.4TB/s over a distance of 2550km. That’s 100 HD movies EVERY SECOND! What would the download limit be on this… kinda puts test to the ‘fair usage [...]

An article reports that today Firefox announced that it had reached a milestone of 500 million downloads of the open-source browser. I think that’s great. I love the whole open-source ethos but I am in a quandary, can you make any money from open-source software? Not that I’m a money hungry tycoon, but Microsoft are [...]

I know how tempting it is to set up a fake Facebook page and then message your friends with all kinds of abuse or stalker-like behaviour, but have you ever stopped to think what the ramifications could be? Well a Moroccan computer engineer certainly didn’t, although he did sign up to Facebook as Prince Moulay [...]

A planned meeting by the FCC has been announced to tackle the problem of ‘traffic shaping’ – the process of ISP’s dictating access to certain websites, services (such as peer-2-peer) and bandwidth – which is apparently in violation of the ‘net neutrality’ policy employed by the FCC. “The issue of net neutrality has come to [...]