Internet tips

Imagine you referred to your supervisor as a "scumbag" in a Facebook post read by your coworkers. You might expect to be looking for a new job very soon thereafter, especially if your employer has a policy that prohibits making disparaging remarks about the company or posting anything about the organization or its managers without permission.

In a case involving Facebook posts by workers for an ambulance service, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) determined that the employee's name-calling was "protected activity" because it occurred away from the workplace and on non-work time.

The employer … Read more

The other day someone asked me how to save a copy of a Web page. The person wanted to preserve the content of the page--text and images--in a local file rather than simply bookmark the page's link to the hosting server.

There are many reasons why you would want to save the text and other content of a Web page. For example, you may want to access the information without a network connection. You may also want to record the page's content lest the information become unavailable for whatever reason. Pages go offline all the time, some never … Read more

Every day computer criminals find new ways to trick us into downloading viruses, keyloggers, adware, and other software intended to steal our personal information, spy on us, or simply irritate. But malware prevention doesn't have to be complicated. A few simple precautions can keep your PC free of infection.

Computer security begins and ends with the operating system. If you use Windows, upgrade to Windows 7. The upgrade-to-the-latest-version rule is less stringent for older releases of Mac OS X, Linux, and Android, but Windows XP and Vista should be considered … Read more

Somebody breaks into your e-mail account and sends phishing spam from your address to everyone in your contacts list. Somebody else steals your online bank ID and password and cleans out all the money in your accounts. And another crook swipes your Social Security number and opens credit card, cell phone, and other accounts in your name.

All three of these crimes fall under the umbrella of identity theft. Reports of declines in identity-theft incidents from such security research firms as Javelin Strategy & Research and government agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC's consumer-complaint statistics for 2010--pdf), … Read more

Web spies are getting stealthier and stealthier. Recently they've been caught peering into our browser histories to determine the sites we've visited, even in so-called privacy mode with cookies disabled, as Dan Goodin described earlier this month on The Register.

Many of the companies whose sites were discovered using the technique claimed to have had no idea and immediately decried the spying. Julia Angwin reported on many of these surprise responses on the Wall Street Journal's Technology site.

If the owners of the spying sites aren't even aware of the activity, what are unsuspecting visitors to … Read more

Who wouldn't want to blog for a living? Low pay, even lower esteem among your publishing peers, and the scorn of anonymous readers who aren't shy about telling you and the rest of the world what an idiot you are.

Yes, blogging is a career of the future, right up there with correctional officer and bankruptcy attorney.

Cynical? Moi? Actually, I've been blogging now for almost four years and I love it. Maybe somebody not named Arianna Huffington or Perez Hilton is making beaucoup dolares from a blog, but I haven't met that person. Still, money … Read more

Judging from the headlines appearing this week on tech Web sites, you'd guess anyone using a browser other than Internet Explorer was a fool.

After all, IE version 9 scored a whopping 99.2 percent in NSS Labs' worldwide test (PDF) of the ability of top browsers to detect socially engineered malware. IE 8 wasn't far behind at 96 percent--the difference attributed by NSS Labs to the Application Reputation component added to IE 9's SmartScreen technology.

By comparison, the four other browsers tested were veritable social-malware sieves: Google Chrome 12 had a 13.2-percent detection rate, Firefox … Read more

Facebook wants to be a part of everything we do on the Web. The company's philosophy is that the Internet is more fun when it's shared. In some ways social networks are like parties that never end. The problem is, we can't be sure who else Facebook has invited to the party, and whether these unknown guests can be trusted.

This week there was a minor dust-up about our friends' phone numbers being exposed to strangers. On Wednesday the official Facebook page explained that the feature has been in place for some time and does not publish … Read more

In June, Patco Construction Company of Sanford, Maine, lost its lawsuit against Ocean Bank to recover more than $300,000 the construction company had lost to online hackers, as reported by Kim Zetter on Wired.com's Threat Level blog.

The court found that while Ocean Bank's security procedures "were not optimal," in the words of Magistrate Judge John Rich of the U.S. District Court in Maine, Patco was ultimately responsible for securing the company's online bank accounts. Patco is not the only business to learn this lesson the hard way--far from it.

Greg Farrell … Read more