The FCC launched a consumer broadband test on their blog broadband.gov yesterday. Internet speeds in the US are often 50% to 80% lower than advertised and its vital consumers have reliable information on the actual performance of their connections. One of the two tools the FCC is using is the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT), an [...]

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Earlier this week the credit industry was changed by new consumer protection laws. They’re hardly taking the cut in profiteering laying down, however, and it’s up to consumers to protect themselves from new money-grabbing tactics.

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I’ve read that Aristotle taught his students while they walked around. It seemed to enhance learning and make the activity more enjoyable. The self-experimenter Seth Roberts has found that doing two boring things together, like walking on a treadmill and studying flash cards, results in a pleasant experience…
Fact 1: For the last few weeks, I’ve [...]

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When Bunnie Huang was in South China overseeing production on his versatile ChumbyOne device, he discovered a major quality issue with Kingston’s MicroSD cards. At first, he assumed that he’d gotten a counterfeit batch, but further investigation proved them to be legit. Kingston wasn’t willing to give Bunnie any details on its QA process, so [...]

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Text messages – 6,500% markup
Text messages are short, quick and cheap to transmit. So why are they adding so much to your wireless bill?
The messages are such a tiny piece of data that they cost carriers only about one-third of a cent to deliver, according to computer scientist Srinivasan Keshav, who testified before U.S. senators [...]

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Craig Cunningham has made $20,000 from 18 lawsuits he’s filed against debt collectors for violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). In fact, it’s something a part-time job/hobby for him. To ensnare his first FDCPA-violating collector, with voice recorder running, he called back the number they left on his answering machine, and asked:
“Can you [...]

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Often, when we meet other game developers and say that we use OpenGL for our game Overgrowth, we’re met with stares of disbelief — why would anyone use OpenGL? DirectX is the future. When we tell graphics card representatives that we use OpenGL, the temperature of the room drops by ten degrees.
This baffles us. It’s [...]

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In Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, author Ellen Ruppel Shell asks, “What are we really buying when we insist on getting stuff as cheaply as possible?” Her answer: a low-quality food supply, a ruined economy, a polluted environment, low wages, a shoddy educational system, deserted town centers, ballooning personal debt, and the loss [...]

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When building your own desktop computer from scratch, how do you know what size power supply to get? The Newegg Power Supply Calculator figures it out for you with ease.
Simply enter your CPU, motherboard, video card, and the rest of your components into the form, click the Calculate button, and you’ll see an estimated wattage [...]

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Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out how to predict Social Security numbers from publicly accessible birth data with frightening accuracy. The researchers analyzed a public information source known as the “Death Master File,” which includes birth data and SSNs for people who have died. The scientists found that in many instances, if [...]

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AnnualCreditReport.com is free, mandated by law to provide you with one report from each of the big three credit bureaus once every 12 months. Note that you don’t get your FICO score (aka your I Love Debt score), just the reports.
FreeCreditReport.com is a business, selling worthless credit monitoring and tossing a free credit report in [...]

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A “Not Safe for Work” Tag has been proposed for HTML 5:
One of the most common descriptive notes people have to write using text when they post links or images to blogs, comments or anywhere in HTML is to say “this link is not safe for work” or simply “NSFW”. By adding the <NSFW> tag, [...]

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Facebook’s new terms of service brought to light the serious privacy concerns that changes to user agreements can bring about. Web site TOSBack monitors 44 web sites, including YouTube, Facebook, and others, and informs you as changes are made.

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Eventually we’ll all be at the mercy of robotic overlords. For now, though, the kind that steal your email address and personal info aren’t great readers. HideText.com throws them off by turning words into images.
Why go to such effort to make your text suitable for human eyes only? The principle reason is to keep information [...]

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Attention NoScript users · by Wladimir Palant
Recently I wrote about how not giving extension developers a good way to earn money might lead to very undesirable effects. The recent events give an impression of the kind of effects we should expect here. This is going to be about the popular NoScript extension which happens to make [...]

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Cybercrime is on the rise as organizations face the tough realities of a poor economy putting the squeeze on their security spending. But don’t panic — some creative ways to defend your data on a tight budget do exist.
The discrepancy between security priorities and the money to fund them is becoming painfully obvious. According to [...]

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Last week, someone shared with me an article from Cracked.com about 9 words that most people use when they want to sound really smart, but actually almost always use them incorrectly. Misusing words makes you look less intelligent than you really are. If you misuse words in your writing, it can damage your credibility and [...]

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I left a linux machine online with ssh open for a day. It dropped incoming login attempts after the username was entered. These are the usernames the “hacker(s)” tried:
account adam adine adm admin admin1 admin2 administrator admissions advice ahmed airport akademik alan albert alberto alex alfred ali alias alice allan alpha alumni amanda american andi [...]

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You’ve finally configured every aspect of your Linux system. All of your devices function, and everything is configured just the way you like it. At least you think so, until you start running out of memory when you have heavy mathematical computations (Matlab or something) or lots of browser tabs open, with Youtube, simultaneously. You [...]

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As you may have noticed, this site has been renamed from twinturbo.org to landofthefreeish.com. Below is how we made the transition from old to new and how to properly move a Wordpress blog without breaking image links or your precious seo backlinks.

Make a backup of your database. I simply logged into Phpmyadmin and made a [...]

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