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“Digital tattoo” embarrassing to British 20-somethings

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Young Brits have expressed regret over their “digital tattoo” – the indelible marks their activities have left scattered around various social media networks and online video portals.

According to research by security firm Symantec, one-third of under-25s said that they would like to delete parts of their online history, including embarrassing photographs and throwaway comments.

Having said that, 35% said that they didn’t worry at all about what they’d posted online. Perhaps they’ve never inadvertently told their posse via Facebook that he’s a pervert, or had compromising videos posted on YouTube, and they’ve obviously not considered the implications of cyber-crime, either. [Read more…]

Originally posted on September 4, 2009 @ 3:26 pm

Shock! SpinVox speech-to-text service relied heavily on human translation

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spinvox-logoSpinVox was a great concept in principle: phone a number and speak your message which then gets translated and sent as SMS to your recipient.

Spin-my-Blog was based on a similar idea, except (wouldn’t you know it) it posted the resultant text to your blog.

Standards have been slipping of late, though, which led many to believe that the initial promise of highly intelligent supercomputers automagically translating your text weren’t quite as accurate as stated by the company.

That’s not to say they weren’t trying, but when you get Egyptian call center staff telling the BBC they’re hacked off with the whole deal, and then you see some of the laughable translations being sent back (after the computers have failed and the humans have had a go) you do wonder how scalable the whole thing is. [Read more…]

Originally posted on July 24, 2009 @ 7:55 am

Compelling Reasons to Use a VPN

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A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, allows a computer to access information via a public network (such as the Internet) all the while behaving as if it were connected to a private network. This achieves two things.
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One, what you do online becomes cloaked. That is, other people won’t know what you are doing online.

Two, your IP address is changed. That is, you will appear to originate from some other location.

I don’t know about you, but with all the privacy and security issues these days, those two things are more than enough to compel anyone to use a VPN. There are, however, other case-specific reasons that you may want to consider using a VPN. [Read more…]

Originally posted on January 27, 2014 @ 11:33 pm

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