Internet security is as important as homeland security, and even home security.  Sometimes those terms are virtually interchangeable, since pretty much all the world’s important and sensitive information is locked behind some sort of password nowadays.  Every week we learn of new cyber security threats that could allow other countries or terrorist organizations to obtain intelligence about the United States of America that they have no business knowing.  Small time hackers delight in stealing people’s passwords for online banking accounts, too.  Obviously, having air tight passwords is important, but many people don’t know how to manage and create their passwords to lock down critical sites.

This infographic is all about how to make a really strong password that can’t be easily decoded by hacking software — the way most script kiddies and wanna-be hackers get their hands on passwords.  If a real hacker was after your stuff, you probably wouldn’t have a hope in the world.  But against garden variety security hackers, these tips will go a long way.

In the future, the user interface will be the user.  We won’t need a mouse or trackpad to interact with our technology, because tiny sensors will be like a second skin for us, allowing us to constantly be connected to our source of information, and to each other.  According to Dr. Kaku, this is not far from our grasp even today.  The evolution will take place sooner rather than later, and the next quantum leap in VR will feature us as the peripherals.  I have always sensed that the technology we have enjoyed as something separate from us would one day become fully integrated into our lives, as extensions (if not biological additions) to our bodies.

Dr. Kaku is speaking on Big Think in the following video, which is truly inspiring to those of us who have long awaited this cusp in humanity’s ongoing journey towards bringing it all together in a meaningful (and wearable) way.  Human enhancement through technology is something that would catapult the world to the next level.  Enjoy the video clip and keep an open mind.  It seems we have much to look forward to.

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, should probably really stand for the Surrender Online Privacy Act.  It’s a horrible bill that stands to rob us all of our basic abilities to conduct online searches and obtain information online.  It won’t just affect the so called “pirates” who are selling access to protected copyrighted materials online, or who are making illegal copies of software and ebooks and other media for profit.  It will also affect everyone else, from the ordinary home user to the largest networked corporation.  Why?  Because it seeks to punish those who violate rules imposed by the bill, and therefore will have to be enforced by ISPs, which means everyone will be monitored and your service could be suspended without any warning or establishment of just cause.  Read on.

If this bothers you, it should.  And if it doesn’t, you simply are not informed.  Read up on SOPA and the other current bills scheduled to be debated in the House and Senate late this year and into early 2012, and you will see that our American freedoms are in jeopardy of being eroded in ways unmatched anywhere in the world, except for parts of the Middle East, and in socialist China.  Protest while you can by writing your legislators and representatives to let them know that you will not stand for this.

iCloud was released by Apple today, free to people who own iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads, and Macs.  It comes with a free email address, which is nice.  The truly cool thing about it though is the fact that all of your pictures, songs in your iTunes music library, movies, select files, email, calendars, notes, and messages automatically sync to the Cloud.  This means the end of tethered software updates for devices running on iOS, too.  After you plug in today to update your iPhone or iPad through iTunes, you will not have to do that again.  Instead, you”ll now find a software update button under Settings, General.  And when you buy a new iPad or iPhone, you can set it up right out of the box without having to connect to a PC or Mac.

All of the items you sync in iCloud are stored there, but made instantly available to all your compatible devices, automatically.  The beauty of Apple’s cloud based service lies in its ability to hang in the background, just quietly doing its job while you live, work, and play.  That’s really the way it should be, after all.

Enjoy this introductory spot from Apple.  You can download iOS 5 today after upgrading iTunes.  iCloud is built right in.

The Internet is today what electricity was back in the 1890s:  recently invented, yet everyone now has it and makes daily use of it as a matter of regularity.  People now could not imagine a world without electricity, although during times of natural disasters and power outages we are sometimes forced to go back to the old ways temporarily.  Still, nobody wants to, and thankfully we don’t have to for long.

That’s about where we are right now with Internet usage in homes around the world, and in places of business as well.  Everyone has become so reliant on the presence of a reliable Internet connection that we can’t go back to living without it.  Even countries where you might be amazed at their Internet usage will surprise you.  Have a look at the infographic below, outlining the history of Internet usage worldwide from about 1995 to 2009, and see for yourself. (click to make the image larger if you need to.  Really good info!  Enjoy.)

In March, Google once again wowed the world with several ambitious announcements at its annual I/O Conference, but one of the most exciting things unveiled was the Chrome version of the madly popular smartphone OS game Angry Birds.  Angry birds itself isn’t new.  Neither is Google Chrome, for that matter, but the idea of a browser based version of a game designed to be played on touch screen devices is novel to say the very least.

Currently, Angry Birds is still free for users on Mac or Windows, but  it can only be played using Google’s Chrome browser.  You might wonder how this plays out, considering that several key features of this game are nowhere to be seen in the browser version.  Today, we’ll give you a brief review of the game, comparing it with the iOS versions we’ve known and loved for a long time.  We will attempt to describe how a touch screen app translates to an old school, non-touchy feely kind of experience.

The long and short of it is that a lot is lost in that translation.  The ability to physically pull back on the catapult band and let the birds fly is, astonishingly, difficult to get used to.  Not impossible — but it just isn’t a very smooth transition.  I think our brains are already hard wired to play Angry Birds a certain way, and this browser based way is not it.

Still, there are a few good things to be said of this bold new rendition.  For one thing, it’s free.  In this economy, anything that doesn’t have a price tag dangling from it is good.  Never mind that Google is using this free game as means to lure more users to download its Web browser.  Never mind that is coincides so closely with the release of the first Chromebooks.  Free is free.  We’ll take free any day of the week.

Another great thing about Angry Birds for Google Chrome is that all you have to do to install it is click through a couple of “yes” boxes after downloaded the Google Chrome browser, and it’s there.  No messy installations.  No having to go through an app store.  Virtually no waiting.  We like fast, too.  Almost as much as we like free.

Our final verdict:  Angry Birds for Chrome is definitely worth playing.  Download Google Chrome for free and see what you think.

Update: We recently heard that there is a possibility that the direct tv channel lineup may show case an Angry Birds cartoon. How cool would that be?!

Today at Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference at the Moscone center, iconic CEO Steve Jobs returned from his leave of absence to make some outstanding announcements.  Probably the most eagerly awaited was the revelation of iCloud.

iCloud is going to sync everything, bookmarks, books in iBooks, are all sent to the cloud.

Steve Jobs mentioned that MobileMe was not Apple’s “finest hour.” In recent weeks, the story leaked about how Jobs resorted to profanity over MobileMe when it was first noticed how far from the mark it fell.  Now, Mobileme is no more and has been replaced by iCloud.  We still haven’t heard what changes (if any) there will be to existing users’ email addresses, etc…

iCloud is a simple concept: it stores all of your content in the cloud and then pushes it wirelessly to all of your devices. This applies to your contacts, all of your calendars, emails, and so on. Everytime you take a photo, received a message, buy a song or movie — everything will be on all of your devices, automatically.

iCloud includes: a @me.com account (with the  promise of no ads!)

You can get this new iCloud service by purchasing a new device and setting it up.  iCloud will come standard on all of Apple’s iOS devices, and will be ready to activate out of the box.  But for those who do not want the features, it can also be disabled.

Some existing MobileMe customers whose accounts have recently been renewed have reportedly been given refunds, since MobileMe is now free.  Many people had speculated that email addresses would change from @me.com to @icloud.com — but that didn’t happen today.  It looks like the same old domain name for email addresses is still in effect.

iCloud will not be available until fall, but beta versions have already gone live for some of its new features including storing new purchases in the Cloud.

Another great and unexpected feature (well, some people did expect it, but no one actually seemed to believe it would materialize) is an inexpensive solution to adding your tracks not purchased through the iTunes Store to the Cloud;  say you ripped a few hundred songs off your CDs and you want them included in iCloud storage — for a small yearly fee of only $24.99, you can get iTunes Match, which integrates and upgrades all those tracks and makes them part of your account.

Internet speed can be a confusing matter for a lot of newbs.   By newbs, I don’t mean to be insulting in any way.  Rather, I am just using a term that many people are familiar with to describe the sort of person who has very little understanding of online things, but is not particularly offended by this deficiency and is not a self proclaimed “geek” in any way.

Newbs often purchase Internet services without really understanding the finer points involved.  This is especially true when it comes to Internet connection speeds.  A newb may see a commercial for high speed broadband Internet services from the local cable company and be completely flustered by the many prices and speed options available.  Here is some information that can help demystify things for newbs.

Does Google own the World Wide Web?   Yes, and no.  The truth is, what you turn up in search results goes depend on what Google has set forth in its very complicated algorithm. From time to time, Google will tweak this algorithm to help hone results for people who are searching on keywords, and to eliminate high ranking links to  low quality (and sometimes entirely bogus) information on the Internet.  There are companies and individuals out there whose sole purpose is to generate tons of useless web content and built massive and complicated link systems for it, to trick Google into letting is pass as high ranking information, though it may be little more than paraphrased articles and repetitive content.  That’s the marketing and search engine side of the argument — but what about regular people like you and me?  The web surfers who just want to find a certain piece of quality information as quickly as possible?

Have you ever typed a search term into the box of one of the major search engines and been disappointed by the low quality of information presented to you in the links ranking first through fifth on the first page of results?  Maybe you typed in “is it safe to take Tylenol with chicken noodle soup?” and were greeting with links to online pharmacies promising to sell you various prescription drugs with no prescription required.  Or maybe you entered the name of a pop star, and were led to pages where the pop star’s name had been typed for seemingly no related reason — but there was no information on that person to read there.  It was really a lot of affiliate advertising, piracy protection, or worse, senseless jibber-jabber.

This is more common than many people realize, and it has only gotten worse in recent years.  Google has lately sought to cut back on this level of spam and abuse within the search results by altering its ranking algorithm slightly, so exclude many of the suspected sources of useless or poor quality text used to rank websites.  Duplicate content has been an issue.  This is caused by people copying and slightly modifying articles and marketing them to article directories, which exist not really to inform, but only to help with link building campaigns.  Unfortunately, some valid directories with real, useful information written by paid writers were demoted in the rankings following the recent Farmer (Panda) update Google made to its algorithm.  Case in point:  Demand Media.  Demand Media publishes content on high ranking and valuable websites such as Livestrong.com and eHow.com.

Until all of this confusion is ironed out, it might be better to use a more natural search engine, such as Bing.  Got an opinion about all of this?  Comment below and let us hear from you.

When starting an online business or making a site for school or you podcast you’re going to want to have a website. Due to by having a website you can customize it however you want, add any content you want and it would be easier for people to find it on the web. You can set up forums on discussions people can take part of; you can have them pay a membership for being part of your site.