I was visiting a website today and wanted to leave a comment. The problem was I couldn’t leave a comment without creating an account and registering as a user for the website. I may never visit this site ever again in my life, why should I have to register and create an account just to leave a comment?!

Now, with the BugMeNot website, you don’t have to create your own account, you can just borrow the credentials for someone else that’s already registered a dummy account with the site.

My question is, don’t you lose your own identity if you register with someone else’s login? That kind of defeats the purpose of leaving a comment as well. I looked around at the FAQ’s for the site to see if they answered my question. Nothing that I found.

I also wondered if BugMeNot would have a login for the site I needed. They have over 300,000 sites, but you can’t really search through their database to find out.

So, the next time you want to leave a comment or interact with a site and don’t want to uncover your own personal information, visit the BugMeNot website. They may have just what you’re looking for to get in there.

Oh, and if you were wondering, I didn’t leave a comment and usually don’t on any site that requires me to register first.

Post from: Uncover the Internet

The news is regularly peppered with stories of computers and networks being compromised and security being questioned. The new bill introduced as the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 will give the US Government extended reach in shutting down portions of the Internet as they deem necessary, as well as gaining control and access to data previously off limits to government review without due process and legal warrants.

Perhaps more interesting than the article itself is the amount of comments that have now been collected on the article. Read the article to get a better idea of the details of what’s being discussed, but read the comments to start getting colorful representation of how these proposed changes are expected to impact individuals and businesses.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides good overview of the impact to these proposed changes as well.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this legislation as it continues to be discussed.

Image: sxc.hu

Post from: Uncover the Internet

It wasn’t too long ago that I shared about a website that lets you look up information about a phone number that keeps calling you but won’t leave a message, that site’s name was WhoCallsMe.

Finding another website that shares some of the same and different information was pretty helpful when maybe you can’t find information about one number on just one of the websites.

The WhoCalled.us website provides additional information and feedback about phone numbers when you’re searching for more details on a phone number.

Now if I could just figure out a way to get my phone to at least grab the area code information and tell me what state and perhaps what major city a call is coming from, now that would be a great software feature on my phone. But, that’s a whole different request.

Uncover who called you at WhoCalled.us

Post from: Uncover the Internet

If you’re not a Facebook user you can see the new Facebook layout homepage in the screen grab above from my profile. Compared to the old-style below there’s quite a difference in layout and simplicity on the page.

With all the changes in aesthetics, are the previous concerns and questions about Facebook’s privacy issues with Beacon and everything else all in the past now?

Do you feel more or less at ease with how Facebook handles personal information? Does it matter to you at all? Do you feel better or worse about Facebook’s privacy issues compared to other sites you use?

Post from: Uncover the Internet