web

All too often adverts you see online are your past come back to haunt you. Advertisers use tracking cookies to capture the web history of users and monitor usage of a particular site. That information is used to serve up adverts most likely to influence you.But I discovered earlier this week that some advertising companies let you opt out of that tracking. Read on to find out how to free yourself from tracking.First, though, consider why you may want to. There are two ways of looking at this. Either you believe the advertisers who say well-targetted ads are actually helpful to users, or you think it best that your personal information stay that way.After all, the information ad firms gather can be enough to identify individuals.

Cliche demands that every romantic couple has its own song. A new proposal from security researchers could see that same song be the couple's password too. It was put forward at the recent HotSec conferenceWe all have too many passwords to remember, and most of them are insecure anyway (confess yours here).

This website attempts to guess the gender of its visitors, and provides an enlightening lesson about online security.Web browsers are happy to share your browsing history with all and sundry. The page uses data about the sex ratio of visitors to popular websites from this source to make a guess. My results are below:Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 0%Likelihood of you being MALE is 100%Pretty clear-cut. I think it's the dominance of tech- and science-centric sites that tend to have male-dominated audiences.This script exploits the way that links you have already clicked on appear in a different colour to unclicked links.

A new search engine launched yesterday. Cuil (that's "cool", phonetically) is today's buzz word on the web, primarily because the Cuil's founders - Tom Costello, Anna Patterson, Louis Monier and Russell Power - are respected search experts. Patterson, Monier and Power are former Google employees, and comparisons with the 300lb gorilla of internet search abound.Michael Arrington at TechCrunch compares sizes. At launch, Cuil boasted an index of 120 billion webpages.

Google's latest service, Knol, has just launched, intended as a repository of knowledge for everything from literature to DIY.In the words of its creator, it's meant to be "the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read".We predicted at the start of the year that Knol would kill off Wikipedia, mainly by choking off its hold on the top spot for search results. The motivation?

"Double-u-double-u-double-u" does not trip off the tongue. Yet I seem to say and hear it hundreds of times a day. Attempting to pronounce a web address in English is not easy.As noted in Wikipedia, www is the longest possible three-letter string to pronounce in English. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams remarked that "the World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for."You might expect a better way to emerge and spread, as new words usually do. But the www has been around for more than 15 years, and we're still waiting.

Bottom line:
The Behance Network has the potential to serve as the most finely tuned collaboration of creative thought on Planet Earth.
What might Da Vinci have made of this?
How is this possible?
We're living in the future. That's how.

Behance Network provides a beautifully succinct, feature-rich environment for Artists, Designers, New Media Ninjas and other inspired types to showcase what they're made of. A stroll around a half-dozen portfolios at random, and you're awestruck at what's out there.
Perhaps more impressive, is the means by which connections are made, and the graceful way the network organically operates across the globe. It works, and well.
Behance is based in New York.
Get it on at www.behance.com

Google is planning to release tools that let internet users know if their service provider (ISP) is tampering with their internet connection - for example by throttling access to popular bandwidth-heavy sites.It is the latest round of the net neutrality debate. Net neutrals like Google say the the internet should be a straightforward commodity.

Wikia Search, the nascent search engine that's promising it won't store your search terms for the benefit of creepy advertisers - or even creepier intelligence services - is beginning to look the part. A bit, anyway.The site has finally delivered on one of its unique features, explained in New Scientist last year. Users can now edit, annotate and re-order search results. Their changes will be reflected in the search index and seen by other users.The idea is to have the community of users help sort the good stuff from the trash.

The list of the most common passwords below was mined from the accounts of 34,000 MySpace users - I stumbled across it here. It certainly provides some food for thought:1. password2. 1234563. qwerty4. abc1235. letmein6. monkey7. myspace18. password19. blink18210. [your first name]If the list is true, it seems that not only are we too lazy to choose secure passwords, but we're also startlingly unoriginal. Although a split-second's musing about human nature should tell you that's not surprising.We should admit that we all do it, even if we know better. So now is the time to come clean and answer this question: What is the least secure, most guessable password that you use despite knowing better?

The big-money investments in social networking sites like Facebook are based on the notion that it will be possible to spin users' networks of friends into gold. But as a Google co-founder admitted today, no one has yet perfected it.One open question has been the strength of the connection between our online relationships and our online interests and buying behaviour.

Microblogging service Twitter is popping up all over the online and offline media right now and each mention refers to the fact that Twitter's purpose is not well defined.I'm getting a bit tired of reading the constant stream of neologisms that are coined in an attempt to defy that and define it anyway.

The Fulton Fence is a temporary installation in Fulton Street, New York City on view through the spring of 2008. The project is a response to the effects of development; in particular the visual pollution created by the presence of construction sites in a small concentrated area.

The project is also online as a 'digital' site and is linked to the street intervention by signs that show a mobile barcode and a URL which can be accesed by any mobile internet-enabled device.

This website parallels the physical intervention in lower Manhattan, and explores the notion of "site" as both location and information such as the project's process, localized widgets, street history and visiting traffic statistics among others.

Having a quick flick through in search of inspiration lead me to this little beauty.

Further than my fairly basic flash skills can comprehend - slick as you like and oh so clever. Giving me mad envy.