I’ve been blatantly cheating at foursquare for the past week. Last Sunday, I wondered, “Can I become the mayor of the North Pole?”

"Nobody checks the signature. Credit card signatures are a useless mechanism designed to make you feel safe, like airport security checks. So my question was, how crazy would I have to make my signature before someone would actually notice?"

"The Torn-Up Credit Card Application – I get a heck of a lot of credit card applications in the mail. I almost always tear credit card applications in half and throw them away. Is that good enough? Could a determined and dexterous criminal gather all the bits, tape them together and apply for a credit card in my name?"

Google has begun to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6, the browser identified as the weak link in a cyber attack on the search engine. The firm said from 1 March some of its services, such as Google Docs, would not work "properly" with the browser. It recommended individuals and firms upgrade "as soon as possible".

The Rumpus: Do you save everything ever entered into Facebook at any time, whether or not it’s been deleted, untagged, and so forth?
Facebook Employee: That is essentially correct at this moment.
Rumpus: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?
Employee: That’s right.

Airlock allows your Mac to lock itself, plain and simple. Using your iPhone or iPod Touch, Bluetooth, and a smidgen of pixie dust, Airlock determines whether you're near your computer. When you leave the room – poof! – your Mac locks itself. “And when I come back?” You guessed it: your Mac unlocks.

In WordPress each Role is allowed to perform a set of tasks called Capabilities. This Plugin allows you to define and manage multiple subscriber profiles – called Roles and their Capabilities. Also you can create new Roles and Capabilities. If you use this Plugin to manage your Wordpress, Users can belong to only one role and can have individual capabilities assigned to them outside of the context of a role.

Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.

Over the past month, both HostedHere.net, his longtime webhost, and AT&T, his cellular provider since he was released from prison more than nine years ago, have told him they no longer want him as a customer. The reason: his status as a celebrity hacker makes his accounts too hard to defend against the legions of script kiddies who regularly attack them.

Jungle Disk lets you store files and automatically backup all of your data easily and securely to Rackspace Cloud Files and Amazon S3.

Security researchers found that poor shielding on some keyboard cables means useful data can be leaked about each character typed.

Clone, synchronize, backup. Schedule and forget it. CCC 3 features an interface designed to make the cloning and backup procedure very intuitive. In addition to general backup, CCC can also clone one hard drive to another, copying every single block or file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive. CCC's block-level copy offers the absolute best fidelity in the industry!

Annoyances.org: this update adds to Firefox one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities present in all versions of Internet Explorer: the ability for Web sites to easily and quietly install software on your PC. The only way to get rid of this thing is to modify the Windows registry, an exercise that can cause Windows systems to fail to boot up. This is a great example of how not to convince people to trust your security updates.

Using inexpensive off-the-shelf components, an information security expert has built a mobile platform that can clone large numbers of the unique electronic identifiers used in US passport cards and next generation drivers licenses. The $250 proof-of-concept device – which researcher Chris Paget built in his spare time – operates out of his vehicle and contains everything needed to sniff and then clone RFID, or radio frequency identification, tags. During a recent 20-minute drive in downtown San Francisco, it successfully copied the RFID tags of two passport cards without the knowledge of their owners.
Direct video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9isKnDiJNPk

Ma.gnolia Suffers Major Data Loss, Site Taken Offline.