Sunday, February 21, 2010

Taking facebook quizzes and posting your results for the world (or at least your network of friends) from "What Sex and the City Character Are You?" or "What is Your Vampire Power?" is more just incredibly lame. It's also risky, according to the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

"Millions of people on Facebook who use third-party applications on the site, including the popular quizzes, do not realize the extent to which developers of quizzes and other applications have access to personal information. Facebook defaults privacy settings allow nearly unfettered to user's profile information, including religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, photos, events, notes, wall posts and groups," the ACLU warns.

The ACLU thinks Facebook should be doing more to protect its users and suggests that the social networking site upgrade its privacy controls so that quizzes can only see what people want them to see. One way to do this, the ACLU says, is to make the process for apps to access a user's friends data opt-in rather than opt-out.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Question:
I've been told that Window 7 32-bit is faster than Windows Vista 32-bit, because it can see and use all 4GB of RAM that you can have with a 32-bit operating system. I've looked on a Windows 7 box and it does show all 4GB RAM. Is this why it's faster?

Answer:
Windows 7 32-bit can't use all 4GB on a system any more than Windows Vista 32-bit or Windows XP 32-bit. To be able to use 4GB RAM or more, you'll need a 64-bit version of Windows on full 64-bit hardware. Both Windows Vista and Windows 7 are able to see 4 GB RAM, and may report 4GB of RAM as being present, but they can't use all. Windows 7 is faster for a variaty of reasons, but that isn't one of them.