Digital + Electronics Life + Pinoy

Sending a tweet is no longer just within the boundary of Earth. On Friday, a NASA astronaut made an history by sending the first ever tweet from outer space.

T.J. Creamer, a Flight Engineer broadcast the following message directly from the International Space Station:

“Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

The historical  tweet from the Space Stations was made possible when NASA upgrade their software . The upgrade rolled up gave  Space Station astronauts direct  access to the Web.  Prior to this, tweets from astronauts had to be e-mailed down to Earth, then later manually posted ground-based workers.

If you are into Facebook, I think you seldom read the changes on their privacy policy.

Facebook is making big changes to its privacy settings that may mean millions of people begin to expose information that they previously considered to be restricted to only their Facebook friends to the entire internet.

According to Facebook definition of terms, "Information set to 'everyone' is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet."

Also, "The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to 'everyone.'

Facebook is aiming to get people to be more public on the site and that anyone who hasn’t changed their privacy settings will now see it “recommended” that their status updates, photos etc. be exposed to “everyone” – to the entire internet.

If you make your information available to “everyone”, it actually means “everyone, forever”.

You are free, of course, to change that setting.

If you’ve never edited your privacy settings before, Facebook will set the new default on the “transition” page to share all your posted content with everyone.

Only 15 to 20% of Facebook users have ever changed their privacy settings before, so 80 to 85% of people will now be switched by “recommendation” to share their content with the whole web.

There’s a real danger that people will go along with Facebook’s recommendations without considering carefully the possible consequences.

eBay topped the most trusted company in terms of privacy according to a recent study. Facebook stole the spotlight by securing the 10th place.

The two-part study from Ponemon Institute and Truste – both privacy specialists, surveyed more than 6,000 U.S. consumers. The latest survey mostly reflects which companies were seems to have the best privacy practices based on consumer brand perception and doesn’t necessarily translate to the most trustworthy companies.

Top 10 Most Trusted Companies In Privacy

1. ebay
2. Verizon
3. US Postal Service
4. WebMD
5. IBM
6. Procter & Gamble
7. Nationwide
8. Intuit
9. Yahoo
10. Facebook

This is the first time a social network company – Facebook, to break the top 10 list. Facebook had been on the privacy blunders in the past but because of  the new privacy features that Facebook has offered, they were able to convinced the panel of judges to give the company a top spot on the “trusted list”. Some of the features added recently is the include friend list and increased control over public listings.

Among the criteria that were used in assessing the level of trustworthiness is whether a company:

• has a clear readability and easy to find privacy statement
• provides adequate access to account information
• uses cookies and discloses that to users
• shares data with other companies and affiliates
• has a data retention policy
• has a chief privacy officer
• whether they disclose a user’s e-mail during password reset
• and whether they use Web beacons.

What companies do you trust to guard your privacy?

Thew new iPod shoots video, a larger screen, and FM radio.

Want to post video on Facebook or MobileMe? Thew built-in video can record  either in portrait or landscape mode – perfect for sharing to any social network communities.The video camera in iPod nano lets you shoot video – with video effects.It lets you record fun wherever you are. Upload and share it with friends on the Internet with a single click.

This iPod is amazing, the video quality is really surprising.

The superb music player has now a built-in mic too. All the surroundings audio can be recorded together with the video.

Why a video camera for the nano? “iPod nano is the world’s most popular music player with over 100 million sold,” said Jobs, Apple’s CEO.”The company was inspired by the popularity of pocket flash memory-based video cameras like those from Flip and Kodak,”Job said.

Special Effects Feature

Apple throws in fifteen special effects which include:

• Thermal
• Mirror
• XRay
• Motion Blur
• Sepia
• Cyborg
• Film Grain
• Black and White,
• Security Cam
• Bulge
• Kaleido
• Light Tunnel
• Dent
• Stretch
• Twirl

Another new addition to the nano 5G  is an FM radio. Read the rest of this entry »