What You May Have Missed This Past Week and What's Upcoming.

Xbox finally extended its Games With Gold program to the Xbox One and released their big update which no longer requires a gold membership for its most popular apps. The biggest news of the tech world this past week involved Apple and their WWDC, because it garnered such widespread interest a few important, or at least noteworthy, items may have been missed in the process. 

• Miami-Dade police impound three Lyft cars in two days.
• Tesla wins back the right to sell directly to consumers in New Jersey.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook tweets a photo of an Apple assembly line running Windows.
• Facebook approved, and is now running, a Dogecoin tipping app.
• A computer has passed the Turing Test for the first time in history. Debunked
• Netflix lets users know it's Verizon that is impairing streaming quality, Verizon files a cease and desist letter.
• A patent troll is ordered to pay up for the first time.
• Telecom companies are to blame for you not being able to get Google Fiber.
• John Oliver asks internet trolls to tell the FCC they are against net neutrality, FCC's website gets bogged down.

This week I will touch on what exactly torrenting is including how to get started, if such a thing might interest you. I also plan on writing about getting started with animation and how I started the process of beginning a website. I would like to extend a Thank You to all of my readers in an amazing thirteen different countries in just two weeks.

Why The Government Doesn't Need To Spy On You.

People Overshare On The Internet: Individuals create their own online profiles to which they have attached their names, addresses, family trees, work history, pictures, cell phone number, hobbies, friends and almost anything else you could want to know about a person. Our cell phones have GPS that can give the exact location you are currently at and a healthy percentage of people are okay with letting the world know where they are at all times. In 2008 the Bling Ring robbed the homes of several celebrities by using Google, TMZ and the celebrities own Twitter accounts to learn when the stars would be home. The gang would then use Google Earth to study aerial photos of the celebrity homes to determine the best points of entry. The gang was finally caught after captured CCTV footage from the robberies of Lindsay Lohan and Audrina Patridge was released which led to the identity of one of the criminals while his Facebook led to the identity of the others.

People Don't Take Steps To Protect Themselves: The days of thieves dumpster diving to steal your identity are no longer needed, now criminals retrieve your personal data from improperly disposed of  PCs, servers, cell phones and memory devices. Carelessness in properly protecting your web device of choice can also lead to harder to remove adware, spyware and ransomware. There are plenty of people that spend their free time seeking and exploiting weaknesses in a computer system or network for profit, protest, challenge or simply enjoyment.

People Don't Realize Once Something Is On The Internet It Is On There Forever: In the old days if you wanted to take risque photos of yourself you would most likely use a Polaroid camera, the image would print instantly and you wouldn't have to take your photos to be developed where someone else could see them. Today if you wish to send risque photos of yourself than you would snap a picture with your cell phone and then message or e-mail them. Scarlett Johansson, Blake Lively, Vanessa Hudgens, Jessica Alba, Kat Dennings and many more celebrities have found themselves in the public eye for nude photos, some of which arguably may have been intentionally leaked. Girls that post themselves to popular nude posting forums, then later wish for them to removed, also learn that you can get a million sites to remove your image but all it takes is for one person to have saved them and those images are never gone. It's not just nude photos that people should concern themselves with, people can lose their jobs for what the post on Facebook. More recently in the headlines, Justin Bieber and his racist rants were released from back when he was fourteen years old.

If a service came along tomorrow that told people it would maintain their online profile from across Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and anywhere else they wanted to include, it would be a successful app/service but the same people that use it will wonder in ten years how there entire existence is documented online. Technology isn't going anywhere and it's only going to get more difficult as time goes on to remove this information about yourself, why not start protecting yourself better now?

Up Your Password Game

Let's pretend that the majority of people you know are in some way accessible on social media and for the sake of this post let's pretend they post about their lives. Some of the most regularly used security questions for password reminders are as follows:

• "Where did you meet your spouse?"
• "What school did you attend in __ grade?"
• "In what city were you born?"
• "What is your oldest sibling’s birthday month and year?"
• "What was your first pets name?"
• "Who was your childhood best friend?"

Now, how many of those answers do you think could readily be found on a person's Facebook? People like to get worked up when they feel their privacy is being encroached upon but they never stop to think about how much more information that they themselves make available in the first place. Let's say that there are people that exist whom have an excessive amount of free time at their disposal that they spend on the internet. Hypothetically, of course, these people could use information from your Facebook to gain access to change your Facebook password. How much more personal information would they be able to acquire from your privacy settings, private messages or from pretending to be you and messaging friends from your account? Maybe you're smarter than that and a person wouldn't be able to get your password through those means, they could always go the password cracker route. The best advice I could give someone is to:

1. Answer a security question in only a way you would know, example: "In what city did you meet your spouse?" Answered with "Neil Degrasse Tyson". Clearly that isn't the answer to the question, but the only thing that matters is that is is an answer that you will remember.
2. Make a secure password. This should be a no-brainer but a lot of the time I am fixing a person's computer they utilize a very basic password. Do not use words followed by numbers or vice versa and for the love of god do not use a single password for everything. Lets say you use 'password1234', you could make a couple of changes to make that a lot harder to crack. First lets capitalize a letter making it 'passWord1234', then we could rearrange the number placement to '12pass34Word', we could also add a space before so it would be ' 12pass34Word' and finally you could make this universal revolving password by changing it to ' 12pass34Wole' for Google or ' 12pass34Woer' for Twitter. Here is a security check of the example password.

Now you may run into a couple of sites that do not allow for a space in the password but even without it you should be able to remember your password formula. You may not use your computer for more than Instagram but you need to understand that there are plenty of people that do, some of which want your information and could use that information as a stepping stone towards stealing your identity. It takes no time at all to create a new e-mail account, I would recommend having a separate e-mail address for your personal use and for social media. Beyond changing your security questions, password and using a different e-mail address you could always not use your name on social media, tomorrow we will delve a little deeper as to why.

PC vs Mac: Why You're Wrong and Why it Doesn't Matter

I would like to preface this by saying that I use Windows 7 and I most likely will not change my preference in OS until I am ready to, before Windows 7 I used Windows XP and completely skipped Vista. I am not opposed to Apple products nor do I hate Apple products, I just know that they are not for me. I build my own desktop computers so I can make my desktop bigger, stronger and faster than any Mac on the market and save money in doing so, I understand that these are not skills that everyone has and I am firmly in the minority here. There is a healthy percentage of people that just want to use their device for the internet and I am not going to look down on them for not spending hours researching/shopping/building a desktop to accomplish that task, again I find myself firmly in the minority. As it stands only religion or politics can bring about a more heated debate than Mac vs PC.

In case you weren't on Twitter, Facebook or the internet yesterday, Apple had their Worldwide Developers Conference and instead of printing out everything that was discussed, I will let Forbes do that. Now I don't expect anyone to sift through that wall of text, so thankfully Gizmodo put together a much shorter list. Does anyone actually believe that Apple "borrowed" their new iOS8 additions from any of the existing companies? Well, at least one of those companies' CEO's does. Apple also discussed their increase in overall computer market share yesterday but let's take an unbiased look at the numbers from companies that don't have a dog in the fight. It should be noted that though Apple is losing control of the smartphone market, from an application developer standpoint they are a more profitable option. Personally I am more impressed with the iOS8 features that Apple didn't address in yesterday's WWDC as well as the addition of cryptocurrency apps. I should also note that in my experience with Mac OS' I have found them to be very user friendly but I am a creature of habit. I will say that when I started programming I found it odd that Windows was the only OS that did not come with Python pre-installed.

Which OS is better? Which computer is better? Which smartphone or tablet is better? I belive Eddie Murphy's Coming to America put it best...