INFORMATION

We all have different ways of keeping track of our schedules; some of us favor Web-based calendars, whereas others prefer to keep paper planners. Although many people like software-based schedulers, these calendars have a major drawback in that they're not easily accessible if you're away from your computer. Exstora is a basic scheduler that's small enough to be carried on a thumbdrive. Although its features aren't particularly impressive, it's not bad choice for people who like to keep track of their schedules on multiple machines, whether they have Internet access or not.

The program's … Read more

PHILADELPHIA--Does privacy exist anymore? Do we even know what it is? A conversation between digital academics Jeff Jarvis and Danah Boyd on Friday morning at the Supernova conference capped off a week in which many peoples' perceptions of the tension between public and private data online were shaken (and stirred).

"We have no definition of privacy," said Boyd, a charismatic Microsoft researcher who says she has spent the past two months working on a data-intensive analysis of news stories pertaining to Facebook's ongoing privacy controversy. The massive social network has been criticized by bloggers, advocates, and lawmakers … Read more

There's no shortage of notekeeping software, which is a good thing because there's no shortage of things to note. Jocsoft's TopNotes has the usual notekeeping functions, saving and managing your electronic jottings in Rich Text format. What sets it apart is its hefty encryption capabilities: it collects all your notes, lists, documents, and even pictures, music, and videos and stores them as one big, secure file. A system tray icon and a fully customizable tree view give you quick access to your information, and there's also a hot key combination you can change for security and … Read more

Regular system backups are a matter of emphasis for us, and we like them thorough and often. Windows' built-in system recovery and backup utilities do a pretty decent job, but like many built-in features, they have their limitations, and they can be confusing and even daunting for many users, especially those who need them the most. There are more third-party backup utilities than you can shake a Registry at, however, each offering a different combination of power, flexibility, and ease of use. MagiCure Professional 9 from AdvantEDGE Solutions is aimed at less-experienced users, since its goal is to simplify the … Read more

Dealbreaker, a self-described "Wall Street tabloid," is scrambling to answer questions Monday about why it would give a freelancer--especially one with a history of questionable conduct--access to readers' personal information.

Zachery Kouwe, the former New York Times reporter who resigned in February after acknowledging he plagiarized material from competing publications, apparently tried to intimidate readers who made critical comments about his stories by informing them he knew where they worked, according to a report in Reuters.

Managers at Dealbreaker, owned by Breaking Media, told Reuters that they severed ties with Kouwe on Thursday, after learning that he "… Read more

When Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced a "Like" button that publishers could place on their Web pages, he predicted it would make the Web smarter and "more social."

What Zuckerberg didn't point out is that widespread use of the Like button allows Facebook to track people as they switch from CNN.com to Yelp.com to ESPN.com, all of which are sites that have said they will implement the feature.

Even if someone is not a Facebook user or is not logged in, Facebook's social plug-ins collect the address of the … Read more

Autotyping and autocorrecting applications can be a huge time-saver, sparing you from having to retype frequently used words and phrases (and even paragraphs and pictures), and they can instantly clean up your most common typos. Plus, if they work system-wide like Typinator does, they can provide you with functionality that might otherwise be limited to your word processor.

Typinator is a best-in-class example of this kind of app, with an easy-to-manage interface, above-average stability, exceptional speed (keeping up with even extremely fast typists using large abbreviation sets, even those whose keystrokes can overlap), and the ability to handle multiple languages (… Read more

Every computer, router, server, and other device that's connected to a computer network has an Internet Protocol (IP) address, a unique sequence of numbers used to distinguish network participants. Every now and then it's nice to know the name lurking behind the number, whether you're trying to identify the sender of a shady e-mail, a visitor to your Web site, or someone else. IPNetInfo is an easy-to-use tool that quickly delivers all available information about a given IP address. It's nothing fancy, but it's good at what it does.

Using IPNetInfo is quite simple. Users … Read more

We remember when checking the television listings was a matter of looking in the newspaper or picking up the latest issue of TV Guide with the week's groceries. Times have changed, and now people turn to their computers to see what's on TV. TV-Browser is one such option for this information, at least in theory; the program promises to provide up-to-date TV listings, but we found it to be severely lacking, especially for U.S. users.

TV-Browser starts with a setup wizard, allowing users to select their country and then choose the channels they want to include. There … Read more