High school students and parents have filed a class-action lawsuit against their own high school in Pennsylvania recently. Their reason: the school has allegedly used webcams from laptops given to the students to spy on them while at home. Apparently, the Assistant Principle, Lindy Matsko, had reprimanded one of the students Blake J. Robbins for inappropriate behavior within his own home, and had cited a photo from the webcam as evidence. The boys father then confirmed with the school that they had access using the remote desktop application to capture any images that may be visible from the webcam at any time. Parents have become outraged by this as no one had been informed that the issued computers had these capabilities, or more so, that they would be used in this manner. If all of this is true then the school district, its board members, and its superintendent are facing a multitude of charges such as invasions of privacy, violations of the Civil Rights Act, interception of electronic communications under the ECPA, violations of the Stored Communications Act, theft of intellectual property under the CFAA, and violations of the Pennsylvania wiretapping and electronic surveillance act. (more…)
Recently I was looking to find something new and fresh to add to my Firefox browser. I’ve been using the same old add-ons for quite some time and thought I needed to see what else was out there. I stumbled across an add-on that I’ve seen many times before but never really took the time to check it out and see what it really had to offer. I must say after getting to know it I kinda wonder why I didn’t look at it sooner. I’m talking about FastestFox. (more…)
Over the years I have run into a number of people who know basic ways of navigating around their computer. Many of them just simply go online and use the social sites or use messaging programs, some just type reports, and some play games. However, one thing I have noticed is how many people lack the ability to utilize their keyboard for more than what they thinks its for. Sure the keyboard is great for typing and creating the words we want to say, but there’s more to it than that.
Apple recently made their announcement about the iPad, a new market competitor for Amazon’s Kindle. The iPad has a ton of amazing features and with all the hype will no doubt give Amazon a run for their money. iPad is going to provide its users many cool features that the Kindle won’t, for example web browsing, games, music and digital media, while the Kindle was designed to help boost Amazon’s sales of books and provide a more easily accessible library. We don’t know yet what Amazon plans to do to counter the competition. (more…)
Several years ago Phoenix Labs created a program called PeerGuardian. PG was meant to block known “bad” IP’s and allow a safer web experience. PG was freeware software that a few years after its release was known to contain many bugs and unsupported by any OS after Windows XP. To fix a lot of these issues, users had to search the web and find patches. Why, all of a sudden, did users need to do this to keep up to date with the program? Well, back in 2007 its developers seemed to have just dumped the program. They let their domain for the block lists expire and then not long after that their DNS had also expired. They then released a statement regarding the issues saying “First, we lost blocklist.org. Now we let our DNS expire. What’s next? *sigh*. I’m sorry, everyone. We’ll try to do better in the future.” Two years later a group of developers who saw the need for improvement on the program got together and on September 30, 2009 they released the official PeerBlock 1.0 Stable release. (more…)