While it might not be news to some of our readers, more casual computer users might want to take note.

Pay web2.0collage a visit, and you'll learn just how easy it can be for a website (any website) to poke around and see what sites you've been visiting. The app limits itself to displaying polite websites, but it's safe to say it could just as easily display all the NSFW sites you've been visiting as well.

This isn't exactly a new trick. How web 2.0 aware are you? does the same kind of sniffing, comparing the sites you visit against a list of popular websites to see how savvy a surfer you are.

Both sites should serve as a reminder to everyone that unless you take steps to protect your privacy, there are sites on the Internet that will gladly help themselves to your data.

How can you prevent this from happening? I echo the suggestions from several Slashdot commenters and recommend using Firefox and the NoScript addon.

[via Slashdot]

Yes, we've been over the App Store approval thing a hundred times already, but never quite like this.

Apple's got a pretty strong policy when it comes to nudity, right? Right?

So Beauty Meter - an application that allows, hypothetically, a fifteen year old girl to share a nude pic to be rated would be totally out of the question right?

You'd at least expect there to be a nudity warning if you installed an app like this. I mean, it could be a non-nude hot-or-not app, there's certainly a precedent for that. In the case of Beauty Meter, however, you'll just get a warning that it might contain mature content and it's not for use by anyone under the age of 17.

Heck, in some countries 17 isn't even old enough to look at naughty things.

Now, clearly neither Apple nor the devs behind Beauty Meter can totally control who uploads what (the app even says as much when you launch it), but it makes me wonder: if an app like this can be approved, why not Drivetrain?

It's remote control for Transmission. It doesn't actually do any torrent downloading. There's no way anything it does is remotely illegal. It's pretty similar to a single-app MochaVNC, which has been in the store for ages, and I can certainly use to control Transmission from my iPod. But I digress.

Three things for certain: Beauty Meter will soon suffer the same fate as Hottest Girls, the approval process needs an overhaul, and the screenshot at Krapps is going to live in Internet infamy for a long time.

[via Krapps - thanks, @thmonline!]

No, Windows won't ever compete with Linux on price. However, even though Microsoft isn't giving away their RTM operating systems for free, they do offer a lot of great software and services at no charge. Here are my six favorites -- feel free to share yours with us in the comments!

1. Windows Live Writer - If you don't blog, Live Writer probably isn't that useful to you. If you do, though, it's hard to find a Windows application that can compete with WLW. It's got loads of great features including plugin support so I can add things like Twitter integration.

2. SysInternals - There are so many useful apps under the SysInternals umbrella - Autoruns, Process Explorer, Desktops, RegMon - the list goes on and on. There's also live.sysinternals.com to provide easy access to them all when I forget my usb flash drive. Awesome.

What could be more compelling than documenting the lives of characters from the video game The Sims? Okay, it doesn't sound all that compelling, and there are many examples on the web of it being done poorly. But once in awhile someone comes along and does something that seems like a bad idea in such spectacular fashion that it truly becomes noteworthy.

Alice and Kev is a blog by Robin Burkinshaw that documents the lives of two characters he created in The Sims 3, the latest iteration of Electronic Arts' blockbuster game franchise. The two characters are a father and daughter, and Burkinshaw decided that to make things interesting he would give his characters some real challenges, such as homelessness and in the case of the father, Kev, insanity.

The resulting story is somehow both heart-rending and hilarious. Burkinshaw's blogging style is almost entirely graphical, with occasional pithy comments thrown in. The few comments he includes give the story life, and the characters really do feel all too real.

Reading the comments for each update is almost as entertaining as the posts themselves; Alice and Kev have a huge following, and an average post results in 100 or more comments by people who seem to genuinely care about this duo, and the other characters they are involved with.

It's an inspired bit of storytelling, a bit of a surprise given the usual fare when it comes to Sims blogging.

[via Boing Boing]

Our readers are a pretty savvy bunch. You're up to speed on what software is and isn't worth downloading, and you're likely the "friend that knows about computers" to a lot of people. Wouldn't it be nice if some of those people started paying attention to our advice - and quit downloading things like...

1. A second (or third...or fourth) antivirus program. Despite what we tell them, some people think "more is always better" when it comes to PC protection. Inevitably, those people end up bringing their computers in for service saying "it just slowed right down" and - here's the kicker - "maybe it has a virus."

So wait...You installed Norton, AVG, Spyware Doctor, and Ad-Aware because you thought it would keep out all the badness and you still think it's a virus slowing down your machine? /facepalm

2. Just...one...more...toolbar (thank you J-Walk blog for the image). Apparently a lot of people love to search. So much, in fact, that they need dedicated toolbars for Google, Yahoo, Ask, Live, MyWebSearch, and a handful of others. They wind up with less browser real estate than an iPhone on their 22" LCD.

I launch their browser to download something, and it's like a punch in the face. Enough is enough, people. Use your browser's search box already.

Google's blogging service, Blogger is turning 10 in August. Google published a list of fun facts about Blogger today, including the fact that 2/3rds of Blogger's traffic comes from outside North America, the most popular sport for bloggers using the service is soccer, and at any given minute, 270,000 words are written on Blogger.

But while Google provides users with tools to publish Adsense ads on Blogspot sites (which can certainly help the company raise a fair bit of cash from all of those words), Google doesn't require users to post ads. And that means some users are basically using the service for free without generating any real revenue for Google.

Now Google Operating System reports that Google appears to be experimenting with another revenue generating opportunity. It's starting to place ads on the page that pops up when bloggers publish a post. These ads will never be seen by the readers of your blog, but there's a chance that some bloggers may click on contextual ads related to the articles they've been writing.

I tried writing a couple of test posts on several sites I've created using Blogger, but I didn't see any ads. If you use Blogger and have started noticing ads in the admin interface, let us know in the comments. It seems like a small price to pay for using a service that lets you host and update a blog for free. But I could certainly see it annoying some long-time users.

While some modern browsers include built-in spell checkers, and some operating systems include built-in spelling and grammar checkers, there are people out there using operating systems and browsers that do not have these features.

If you're looking for some help with your writing and don't have access to Microsoft Word or a similarly-powered word processor, there is a solution available on the web called After the Deadline. The site (at the memorable URL polishmywriting.com) offers spelling and grammar help, and even writing style suggestions.

There's some speculation over at the Google Operating System that Google is planning a microblogging search engine that will work a lot like Google Blog Search does now. gOS found some text on one of Google's help pages describing the format for a microblog search: entering "recent updates about" in front of a search term will search miroblogging services -- Twitter being the most important of the bunch -- for that term.

This hasn't been implemented yet, but the text that gOS found seems to suggest that it will be. Under the heading "recent updates about QUERY," they found this description: "This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format." This is all the evidence we have to go on so far, and it indicates nothing about which non-Twitter services will be included and what a possible Google MicroBlogsearch results page would look like.

Plenty of blame has been placed on Twitter for so-called failings in trending topics. Yesterday, Anna at Jezebel had enough of #urahoe, saying it was "Proof Of The Stupidity Of Twitter Trending Topics." Yep. That particular trend is a fine showcase of idiocy - despite the spelling, those messages were definitely not referring to gardening tools. Just ask Pimpbot.

Wait, what's the complaint, anyway? That trends used to provide some kind of deep insight into the collective consciousness of the Internet? Well, the Internet called, and it said it wants to screw around and play dumb games like #3wordsaftersex and #robotpickuplines. Yes, even I've engaged in the odd game of hash-tag.

When the Jezebel post says "Thanks, Twitter, for bringing us first #liesgirlstell, and now trending topic #urahoe," what they really mean is "Thanks, Twitterers."

Twitter is the arena. We can't blame them for the combatants who show up to the 140-character battles of wits completely unarmed.

If you're trying to use Twitter as a tool, there are plenty of good search apps out there. Retweets are another good way to find out what people are buzzing about.

But trends? Forget it. The fact is that Twitter is overrun with social white noise, and that's not their fault. It's ours.

As expected, the folks at Automattic unleashed Wordpress 2.8 on the public this week. If your blog his hosted on Wordpress.com, it should automatically be upgraded. If you have a self-hosted blog running Wordpress 2.7 or a more recent build, you should be able to upgrade from your blog administration pages. Or you can download Wordpress 2.8 if you want to upgrade manually or install the blogging platform from scratch.

There are a ton of changes, bug fixes, and new features, but here are a few of the highlights:

• It's much easier to customize widgets
• The admin pages are significantly more responsive and faster to navigate
• New syntax editor which adds color (literally) to plugin and theme editors
• New theme browser that makes it easy to find and install themes from the admin pages
• Added a Widget API
  

To see some more of the changes, check out the video embedded after the page break.

There have been multiple stories in the news lately -- even on Download Squad -- about the huge percentage of blogs and Twitter accounts that have been briefly adopted and then abandoned. Some commentators have suggested that Twitter is a flash in the pan because of the large numbers of people dipping their toes into the service and then walking away without ever jumping all the way into the pool. All those one-tweet accounts represent curiosity about what Twitter has to offer, though, and in that sense, they're a good thing. News commentary site Slate has assembled a collection of interesting "one tweet wonders."

Blogs don't seem to be going away anytime soon, yet only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs on the web are actually maintained. As a microblogging service and a publishing platform, Twitter should logically be putting up similar numbers. Certainly, the trend of Twitter growth will level off at some point, but I wouldn't be too worried about its health just yet.

[via Slashdot]

Pixelpipe defies definition a bit, but basically it's a mo-blogging / mobile micro-blogging tool that satisfies nearly every sharing feature I've ever wanted from my mobile since the first time I picked up a smartphone.

When I mention Pixelpipe to people they usually say, "Oh, like Ping.fm." Yes, yes, Ping.fm lets you update a ton of services but, Ping doesn't do video or audio -- although they've been threatening to do video for a while. On the other hand, while Pixelpipe does text, audio, photo and video, until recently there wasn't a convenient way to get your video to Pixelpipe while on the move.

Friday Pixelpipe launched a new version for Android phones, taking advantage of the newly released video recording features in Android 1.5. When I read the anouncement, I realized -- as much as I've pimped out Pixelpipe on my own Twitter feed -- I've never actually posted about it on Download Squad. For shame!

With clients for Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone and Android, you can send quick updates, longer blog posts, just-snapped photos, just-taken video, and audio snippets to over 75 different social services. All your favorites are there (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, 12seconds, etc.. ) along with some services you might not have used -- If you can name all the logos on the PixelPipe list, you're doing better than I am.

Added to that, Pixelpipe will do traditional, non-social sharing like uploading to any ftp server, email any address or post to just about any blog.

Pixelpipe clients for all platforms are available for free at PixelPipe's site, and the updated Android client is available via the Android Marketplace from your phone.

Popular blogging platform WordPress will get a minor update next week with the launch of version 2.8. The new version should be available to the public starting June 10th.

WordPress 2.8 will have an updated theme browser which makes it just as easy to install and update WordPress themes as it is to find and install plugins. Users will also have more options for customizing their Dashboard widgets and other admin pages. There have also been updates to the ways comments are handled, and WordPress 2.8 adds support for case-insensitive logins.

The other big news out of WordPress is that the developers are planning to merge WordPress MU (multi-user) with the main version of the blogging platform. Right now there are very few differences between WordPress and WordPress MU, and it looks like the MU code will simply be added to WordPress. But that won't happen before WordPress 2.8 is released next week, so expect there to be two different versions for now.

[via the Blog Herald]

Remember how I drew the similarity between Jack Napier dumping cash on the unsuspecting rubes of Gotham and Microsoft opening Technet to anyone who filled out a form?

Well, the poisonous gas has been released.

According to a lengthy phone call between blogger Kristan Kenney and a Technet support rep, you weren't supposed to have access to that offer. If you downloaded keys or software and weren't one of the select few actually invited in my Microsoft, you're a dirty pirate.

Don't use those product keys - they've been blacklisted, and WGA will eat you alive and burn down your house if you try to use them. They can see which keys were provided to which subscriber, and they'll track you down.

I understand that the link was leaked by someone outside Microsoft and they can't be blamed for the mayhem that ensued, but come on. Is this the best solution they could come up with? What's next? Waterboarding to find the original source of the leak?

Oh well. At least we still have our Windows 7 RC to use for free until next year.