Disabling Website Tracking

As the internet grows users and beginning to step up efforts to prevent large corporations and entities like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter etc from tracking every move they make online. Many of the major stop tracking services are seeing major increases lately in downloads of there software and plugins. The most common way some of these services work is by limiting cookies from especially blocking third party websites and putting a time limit on allowed cookies.

Many of the modern web browsers offer privacy tools as well that should be looked into. A feature called incognito mode (control+shift+n) in Google Chrome or private browsing (control+shift+p) in Mozilla Firefox will allow you a sandbox like environment of privacy browsing. These privacy modes in browsing allow you to temporarily browse in a pirvate web session and when you exit your history, cache, and cookies are all erased. Also when a privacy session is open in a browser the browsers data will be kept separate from other tabs and windows in normal modes.

Another good tool to look into is called noscript for Firefox or Chrome. In noscript you can start with a blacklists all websites and as you surf to a domain name that you feel is safe to run that sites javascript you can put it into your temporary or permanet whitelist of trusted javascript. Many don't realize the advantages of controlling and preventing javascript from executing on a machine. You can basically prevent all malware from executing on computer and many other tracking websites from loading there garbage onto your computer without you first granting them a whitelists permission.

Town Buys XXX Domains

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan a town in Canada is purchased 6 xxx domain names for 2 years. The dot xxx domain name extension was originally created as a lure to get the adult industry off of the .com's and to clean up the internet. It was never intentionally created though to get towns onto the adult domain name extension. A spokesman for the town said there reason for purchasing the domain names was so that when people typed the domain name in an adult website would not come up. This is a typical practice in major cities, universities, and corporations however in an attempt to protect companies intellectual property rights. But that practice has mostly only been used for the major domain extensions like net, info, com, org, biz, co.uk, and us. The xxx extension is a new one and we will have to see what level of traction it gets online in the coming months to years.

Online United States Embassy Blocked in Iran

This story should come as not really much a surprise given the current relations between governments of the United States and Iran. Iran blocked the website iran.usembassy.gov one day after its launch earlier this month. The site had only been operational for about a day until Iran choose to block it. You might recall hearing other stories about Britain being forced to close there real Embassy in Iran around the same time in early December. Iran a country with one of heaviest filtered internets for a country is estimated to block 5 million websites currently. The US state department was encouraging users to use a proxy or vpn service to bypass the block on the embassy website. If you are in the country and are a United States citizen you are encouraged to visit the Switzerland embassy as Iran does not allow direct representation in from the US. One should be aware of the countries strict laws on use of internet bypass software as they may be found out and not tolerated very well.

Chris Dodds Sopa Lobbying

Chris Dodd former “retired” senator from Connecticut is now doing what he does best. Pushing complete garbage through congress. It is now reported that Chriss Dodd using what connections he has left in Washington is one key lobbyist for the stop online piracy act or protect ip act as it is known in the senate. Chris's official title is title is Chairman for the MPAA (motion picture association of america). As Chairman Dodd made a claim that quote, "The entire film industry of Spain, Egypt and Sweden are gone". And implied that if we don't act fast it will be gone in this country as well. These are the obvious scare tatic of mosts lobbyist rush rush, pass it, sign it, and ask question later when signed into law.

Street Car Game Blocked

A video game that used street car views from Google in its simulation got the plug pulled on it from Google earlier this week. The game was nick named Google Shoot View the part that bothered people was the first person shooter aspect of the game. Were the game created a whole new level of a life like video games by taking real images from Googles street car and placing them directly in the game. The violent tendencies and life like were some of the biggest reasons Google pulled the plug. What makes this story get even more twisted is the game was created by a company by the name of Pool Online to be marketing buzz for the company which Pool Online is a marketing agency themselves. One wonders why someone would pick a first person shooting game to be marketing material for an marketing agency.