External Brain

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites.

John Graham-Cumming wrote an article today complaining about how a computer system he was working with described his last name as having invalid characters. It of course does not, because anything someone tells you is their name is?—?by definition?—?an appropriate identifier for them. John was understandably vexed about this situation, and he has every right to be, because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.

Years ago we suggested sticking a borked hard drive in your freezer for a chance at recovering your data before the drive goes completely kaput. Developer site Server Zone highlights the same tip, with more detailed instructions for saving your freezer drive.

My search for a program comparable to the Windows’ application DVD Decrypter is finally complete. If you’ve ever wanted to create an ISO of a DVD — in order to keep all of the menus, special features, language options, etc. of an encrypted DVD intact — I’ve got a straightforward solution — via Mac OS X Hints

Spam is an apparently unavoidable fact of life in email, but it’s still a shock to get an unsolicited marketing message to your mobile number. If you’ve experienced mobile spam, Australian communications regulator ACMA has set up a dedicated service to let you report it — via Lifehacker Australia

Twitter is testing a feature intended to make it more convenient and secure for end users to include shortened Web addresses, or URLs, in messages they post via the popular microblogging service and via its third-party applications. Expected to be rolled out broadly this summer, the URL shortening feature is now in limited testing and is designed to reduce the length of any Web page address, but particularly long ones

Olympus Japan has issued a warning to customers who have bought its Stylus Tough 6010 digital compact camera that it comes with an unexpected extra — a virus on its internal memory card. The first thing to point out is that the camera itself is not at risk — the autorun worm being carried on its internal memory can not activate on the Stylus Tough camera, but can attempt to infect your Windows PC. In other words, users are at risk of infecting their Windows computers with the autorun worm when they plug the device into their USB drive, a method of transmission effectively identical to the infected Samsung Wave smartphones

Google has launched one of the biggest revamps of its search engine in history, which it said would provide search results that are 70 per cent fresher than the current algorithm. The company later revised this to say it would be 50 per cent better than before. The new indexing system, dubbed Caffeine, will provide the largest selection of web content ever offered on Google. It’s faster — processing hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel every second — and takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database

Taking a page from the Australian broadband playbook, New Zealand has decided not to sit around while incumbent DSL operators milk the withered dugs of their cash cow until it keels over from old age. Instead, the Kiwis have established a government-owned corporation to invest NZ$1.5 billion for open-access fibre to the home. By 2020, 75 percent of residents should have, at a bare minimum, 100Mbps down/50 Mbps up with a choice of providers

When the phrase oil spill is typed on Google or Yahoo, the immediate result guides one to BP’s Gulf of Mexico response, its official page dedicated to giving information about its attempt to curtail the spill. Search engines — especially Google and Yahoo, are the first point of contact for anyone looking for related information in a crisis situation. Thus BP’s PR strategy is pretty straight forward. While a host of companies resort to this strategy in crisis situation, BP has received flak from many critics who condemned the move as unethical

The next version of the iPhone will hit Australia in July as part of the second wave of countries to receive the handset, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs revealed this morning after demonstrating the new device. The phone will be available in the US, France, Germany, the UK and Japan from 24 June, but Australia will have to wait until July

Google has denied suggestions by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy that its Street Viewcars inadvertently captured people’s personal banking details. Senator Conroy yesterday suggested that Google could have gathered financial information when its cars accessed private data through unsecured wireless networks. The data collection occurred while the cars were out gathering information for Google’s mapping service. But Google Australia said no banking data was collected because it could not read information transmitted over secure networks like a financial website. A Google spokeswoman explained that Street View cars did not keep encrypted data

The Federal Government, alongside the Internet Industry Association (IIA), yesterday launched a code of practice that aims to reduce the amount of zombie-infected computers on the internet. Zombie-infected computers are PCs connected to the internet that are infected with malware. Drafted in September 2009, the IIA released the code of practice to internet service providers (ISPs), outlining ways they could protect and inform their users about being infected with malware. One suggestion within the code is to put users into a walled garden if their computer becomes infected, which limits internet access to prevent further security problems until the PC is quarantined. Another option is to throttle infected users’ speed down

HP is set to unveil a line of printers with their own email addresses, allow people to print from devices such as smartphones and the iPad