Does this sound familiar? Your browser hasn’t been re-started in hours. It’s running continuously, you’re surfing around websites, and of course you’ve wasted lots of time. You could have instead spent that time doing something good and productive, rather than just flying around worthless sites.

Here are four neat Firefox extensions and 1 desktop app that help you track the time you spend online. They even give you reports so you can watch out and make efficient use of your time by cutting down on wandering around sites that are of no use.

LeechBlock

Time Tracker

8aWeek

MeeTimer

RescueTime

Although I have a feeling that rather than cutting down on wasted time it will just mean that I waste even more time checking up on how I am wasting time.

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The Washington Post reports that the online behaviour of a small but growing number of computer users in the United States is being monitored by their Internet service providers (ISPs) ISPs have access to every single click and keystroke that comes down the line.
They can then use this data stream to give them an insight into the customer’s interests.

The practice represents a significant expansion in the ability to track a household’s Web use because it taps into Internet connections, and critics liken it to a phone company listening in on conversations. But the companies involved say customers’ privacy is protected because no personally identifying details are released.

The extent of the practice is difficult to gauge because some service providers involved have declined to discuss their practices. Many Web surfers, moreover, probably have little idea they are being monitored.

But at least 100,000 U.S. customers are tracked this way, and service providers have been testing it with as many as 10 percent of U.S. customers, according to tech companies involved in the data collection.

Although common tracking systems, known as cookies, have counted a consumer’s visits to a network of sites, the new monitoring, known as “deep-packet inspection,” enables a far wider view — every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered. Every bit of data is divided into packets — like electronic envelopes — that the system can access and analyze for content.

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“There’s been a conventional wisdom or myth that the internet was immune from state regulation,” says Ronald Deibert, one of the book’s editors.

“What we’re finding is that states that were taking a hands-off approach to the internet for many years are now finding ways to intervene at key internet choke points, and block access to information.”

Mr. Deibert heads The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. The Lab, along with Harvard Law School, the University of Cambridge, and Oxford University, has spent the last five years testing internet access in some 40 countries.


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As I have argued time and time again, the inbox and the mobile address book are two natural social environments. It’s heartening to see innovators trying to capitalize on simple common sense. Of course, it’s even more delicious that giants who own our inboxes — Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL — are simply twiddling their thumbs.

If you take two of the more popular social networks — Linked In (professional) and Facebook (personal) –- as examples, the amount of email generated by these systems (if you don’t want to spend your entire day logged into them, that is) is astounding.

So it stands to reason that if you could develop hooks to various social services from within your email inbox, your entire experience would be much easier to manage. This is Xoopit’s approach. It’s launching a Firefox plug-in that basically looks through your GMail and automatically imports information from major photo and video services such as YouTube, Flickr, Kodak, Shutterfly and Picasa Web.

In other words, if you receive a URL link from one of your friends via an email, the photos appear in what’s essentially a gallery view. Similarly, you can share your photo and video galleries with your address book contacts without making your friends go to different sites; simply clicking on a photo rearranges the layout of GMail to offer you the option to share. (Check out the gallery of screenshots.)

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Since the dawn of time, geeks have been playing harmless pranks on their beloved (but unsuspecting) associates, and it’s up to all of us to carry the torch forward. On the eve of April Fools’ Day, when you’ve got local network access to your coworkers’ and family systems, cubicles just crying out to be filled with packing peanuts, and webapps that can do all sorts of things automatically, there’s no better time to baffle, confuse, perplex, and just plain mess with your loved ones and associates. Hit the jump for our top 10 favorite harmless geek pranks, just in time to get your prankster pistons firing for tomorrow.

10. Install the Blue Screen of Death Screensaver

Make your co-worker think their PC crashed when they get back from lunch. The BSOD (“Blue Screen of Death”) screensaver is a free download from Microsoft (ironically.) For other operating system “support,” check out the Linux BSOD ’saver with support for Apple, Windows, and Linux crash screens.

9. Fake a Desktop with Screenshot Wallpaper

Freak out your co-worker or family member by faking out their Windows desktop with an unclickable facade: Take a screenshot of their current desktop, then set it as the desktop wallpaper. Hide the actual taskbar and disable desktop icons (right-click the desktop and choose “Arrange Icons By” and uncheck “Show Desktop Icons.”) When your victim returns to the computer, watch the futile clicking begin.

8. Schedule a Phone Call with a Text-to-Speech Message from Wakerupper.com

Wake up calls aren’t just for the a.m., you know. Pop your victim’s phone number, a time, and a custom message into Wakerupper.com, a free wakeup call service, and they’ll get a call with the message read Silicon Sally text-to-speech style back to them. (original post)

7. Fill an Office with Packing Peanuts (Or Make It Look That Way)

Actually filling your co-worker’s cubicle with packing peanuts can be a pain in the ass, but if there’s a glass wall involved, it’s easy to make it look like you did. Check out Hack N Mod’s nifty gallery of what looks like a glass room filled with packing material.

April Fools: Cubical Chaos Fakeout [Hack N Mod]

6. Remote Control Your Co-Workers’ Computer with VNC

How would it feel to have your mouse taken over by a ghost and do things on your computer you never intended while you watched? You can inflict this feeling of utter confusion on your victim using VNC, a computer remote control protocol. You’ll need to install the VNC server on your victim’s computer first, and have their IP address, so this one will work best in the office when you’re on the same network. Here’s how to remote control a computer with VNC. Mac users, here’s how to remote control Leopard with TightVNC.


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Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you’re entering territory he may not have explored.

The result is there’s a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn’t mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it’s not anger that’s driving the increase in disagreement, there’s a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it’s easy to say things you’d never say face to face.

If we’re all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages. So here’s an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy:

DH0. Name-calling.

This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. We’ve all seen comments like this:
u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!
But it’s important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. A comment like
The author is a self-important dilettante.
is really nothing more than a pretentious version of “u r a fag.”

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After-all I already had 3 prospects who would be coming to the end of their trial in a few days. I was sure that they’d be as happy as I was with Prosperizer and that when their 7 day trial came to an end they’d be hooked too. I thought that even if I was wrong and they didn’t sign up then the use I would get out of the site was well worth £39.

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