I Feel Claustrophobic

I have been using the iPad for a few months now and the best way to describe the feeling it evokes when I use it *to do work is claustrophobic. Every app is its own tiny kingdom where access to data from other apps is sealed off by the operating system. And that's very claustrophobic [...]

How to Stop Twitter From Tracking You on the Web

A couple of folks in my RSS feed linked to Dustin Curtis’s blog post titled “Twitter is tracking you on the web”. That post seems to be making rounds around the blogosphere right now. My first thoughts were “isn’t this common knowledge.” Perhaps not.

All three social giants — Twitter, Facebook, and Google — have buttons on many websites. Any site with a social button present is being tracked by one of these companies. If you’re always logged into your social accounts, this information is most likely linked to your account. I cannot say how long these giants keep that information on file, it’s not something I could dig up from their privacy policies.

The good news is there is an easy way to stop being tracked. You can use the following add-ons to stop all three sites from tracking you. I use Firefox myself, but all of these add-ons are avaliable in Chrome as well.

• Ghostery – Blocks all three giants, as well as hundreds of other networks. If you need to disable one of the trackers for whatever reason, you can do it easily and quickly. Recommended. Link for Firefox, Google, Safari, IE, Opera.
• ShareMeNot – Blocks all three giants. Easy to enable the buttons on demand. Works well. Link for Firefox and Chrome.
• disconnect - Blocks all three giants as well as Linked In and Yahoo. I'd recommend ShareMeNot over disconnect, at least on Firefox. Link for atleast Firefox and Chrome.

These sites also have a bit more details about the tracking process and privacy problems that arise from it. Definitely read their about sections to get a better grasp of the information.

First Impressions of an iPad from an Android Phone User

I recently bought the Retina Display iPad. It also happens to be my first tablet device. Until now I’ve been using Android phones for the past two and half years. I’m more than familiar with Android—I know most of the tricks, rooting, installing custom ROMs…the whole nine yards. I also had an iPod Touch a while back, so I’m moderately familiar with an iOS device firsthand as well. Of course, I’ve played aplenty with friends’ iPads, iPhones and stay abreast with technology news, so I have a good idea about the differences between the two platforms and ecosystems. However, this was the first time I was an owner of an iPad so I thought it would be interesting to jot down my first impressions of the device and platform coming off the Android phone ecosystem. It’s important to point out that these are observations before I started meddling with third-party apps. Things of note in no particular order:

How To Minimize Tracking On The Web

These days a lot of web activity occurs behind the users’ back. Any link we click, any site we visit, is tracked and recorded by companies that we are completely unaware of. However, using some tools made by folks who are worried about our privacy and security, we can see and minimize the amount of tracking that is done as we traverse the web.

Buying a Good Phone

Buying a good phone is really frustrating these days. It seems that most manufacturers just go for the shotgun approach, hoping something will stick. And unsurprisingly, really nothing works. It’s just absurd.