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The most controversial technology topics in President Obama's second term are likely to be two political flashpoints: piracy and privacy.

When Internet activists allied with an hastily assembled coalition of Silicon Valley companies blocked votes on a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills early this year, they didn't end efforts to slap stiffer anti-piracy sanctions on the Internet. They merely postponed the fight.

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are dead, of course. Those names have become radioactive on Capitol Hill, thanks to a broad public outcry that involved millions of Internet users and actually … Read more

Tor Browser Bundle for Mac is a package that installs and manages the Tor project software on your Mac. Tor allows you to hide your identity and prevent IP address-tracking back to your device. The Tor Browser Bundle for Mac comprises a number of files, but it's easy enough to install.

Tor uses a set of servers around the world, most maintained by individuals, that reroute your URL request through two, three, or more different servers in an attempt to make your path from your Mac to the destination URL difficult to track back. Each hop in the Tor … Read more

Making good on her promise, California Attorney General Kamala Harris has continued her crackdown on mobile-app developers and companies for not doing more to ensure users' privacy. She announced today that she'll be sending letters to 100 app developers and companies to formally notify them that they're violating California's privacy laws.

"Protecting the privacy of online consumers is a serious law enforcement matter," Harris said in a statement today. "We have worked hard to ensure that app developers are aware of their legal obligations to respect the privacy of Californians, but it is critical … Read more

My Verizon contract was finally up, and it was time to upgrade my slowly dying iPhone 4 to the long-awaited iPhone 5. October 26 was the day, and I was ready.

I had heard I'd face some delays getting a new iPhone, but after calling a few nearby Apple and Verizon stores, I learned that "delays" meant three to four weeks. I've been waiting for months to be able to upgrade to a new phone, so three to four weeks seemed like a lifetime.

My co-worker Sharon Vaknin mentioned that I could do an in-store pickup if I timed it just right, and pointed me to this NBC News GadgetBox story on a possible trick to getting the new iPhone within 24 hours. What the heck, right? … Read more

What do you feel like for dinner? Where can we go for amazing pizza? Replace the last word of either question with another meal or food type, and you have the two most dreaded questions on the face of the earth. Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I think we can all agree neither question is a welcome one.

The next time you hear either question, calmly open up the closest Web browser, be it mobile or desktop, and type lm4sqtfy.com into the address bar. If the question included a food category, enter it into the … Read more

MorphVOX Junior is a free voice changer software app for Windows. Although it's designed for online games, you can use it for any purpose that requires voice changing and it works well with most VoIP and IM clients. MorphVOX Junior installs easily, and a relatively clean interface makes it easy to work with. There is a paid version of MorphVOX Junior that adds a lot more capability and better quality, but the free version will be fine for casual users.

Whether you want to change the timbre of your voice, make yourself sound like the opposite sex, or simply … Read more

Yelp is taking aim at business owners that try to artificially inflate their reviews on the site.

The user-reviews site today announced today that it has launched a new initiative to root out companies that have made "significant attempts to pay for reviews." In the event it finds such attempts, Yelp will post a "consumer alert" on a company posting alerting users to the violation.

"We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business," the alert reads. "We weren't fooled, but wanted you to know because buying reviews not only … Read more

Download managers can make it much easier to grab and save video from the Internet. There's a lot of them, both freeware and shareware; but then, there's a lot of video clips to download, and not just from YouTube but hundreds of other sites. Nuclear Coffee's VideoGet is shareware that's designed to make downloading video files and clips as easy as possible. While it's not much different from other tools of its type, it has enough options to satisfy a wide range of users. It's free to try with a 20-download limit.

VideoGet's … Read more