1. Use One-Time passwords
Using Facebook on the go, such as in hotels, cafes or airports, jeopardizes your account's security, whether it's a public PC or wi-fi hacking that leaves you and your account vulnerable. To combat this, Facebook is offering one-time passwords if you're concerned about the security of the computer you're using.
To receive your one-time password, text "otp" to 32665 (FBOOK) on your mobile phone and you'll receive a password that can be used only once and expires in 20 minutes. This feature is rolling out gradually and will be available to everyone in the coming weeks. This is only available in the U.S.
2. Sign out remotely
If you forget to log out of Facebook at the office or at a friend's house, you can now do so remotely. From your Account Settings, you can see where you're currently logged in on other devices, and log out if necessary.
From "Account" choose "Account Settings," then "Account Security." Here, you can choose to get notified via SMS or e-mail if a new computer or mobile device logs into your account.
Gather more Facebook security intelligence - Read the ITBusiness.ca Facebook Bible
Another good feature: You can also view the latest activity--the time, location and device that accessed your account. If these locations are suspicious, you can choose "end activity" to log out of the location.
3. Be wary of games
Yesterday reports surfaced that several of the most popular Facebook applications--FarmVille, Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille, to name a few--broke Facebook's rules and transmitted identifying information to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, affecting tens of millions of Facebook app users.
While one data-gathering firm says it didn't purposely transmit the Facebook IDs it obtained to a dozen other firms, the breach still raises flags in Facebook's efforts to tighten up security and privacy. Although some progress has been made in making Facebook more secure, users still need to be wary and practice caution when using its games and apps.

        The latest Internet Explorer news is both good and bad for Microsoft. First, the good: IE9, the newest version of Redmond's browser, seems to be gaining favor with Web users. A post yesterday on Microsoft's Windows Blog cites usage-tracker Net Applications' latest browser statistics, which show IE9 with 3.56 percent of worldwide market share for March. For a browser that officially launched just over two weeks ago--albeit one that's been available in beta form for months--that's not too shabby.
"It's obviously very early but we are pleased with the reception," writes Microsoft's Ryan Gavin in a blog post. "The adoption rate of IE9 is about five times higher then what we saw for Internet Explorer 8 in the same time frame."
          A big-picture view of Net Applications' data, however, paints a less rosy picture for IE. The firm's over 60 percent for the same month a year ago.
Google Chrome, meanwhile, is gaining users at a breakneck pace. Praised for its speed and simplicity, Chrome had 11.57 percent of the worldwide market last month, nearly double its 6.13-percent share in March 2010.
In April 2009, Chrome had a tiny 1.79 percent share, while IE's slice of the browser pie was slightly below 68 percent, according to Net Applications.
How Are the Competitors Doing?
And IE's other competitors? In March 2011, Mozilla Firefox's share was nearly 22 percent, down from 24.52 percent in March 2010. Apple Safari was at 6.61 percent last month, up from 4.65 percent for the same period a year ago.
IE9 is getting favorable reviews and Microsoft appears to have silenced its critics, who knocked the sluggish performance, weak security, and lack of support for Web standards that plagued earlier versions of the browser. But does version 9 have the right stuff to slow IE's long-term slide? The company suggests that users of competing browsers are very interested, or at least curious, in IE9. "As we mentioned on Tuesday, all of our early downloads (through March 27) were user-initiated , with over 90% of the downloads coming from non-IE9 RC or Beta users, including over a quarter that came from Chrome and Firefox users," Gavin writes.
If IE9 does help reverse Microsoft's market-share slide, its impact will likely be tempered by Redmond's aggressive campaign to rid the world of Internet Explorer 6, the company's notoriously insecure, 10-year-old browser that still had an 11.6 percent global share in March. While less than 3 percent of Internet users in the U.S. run IE6, the browser remains popular in Asia. In China, for instance, IE6 has a 33.8 percent share, according to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 Countdown site.
"Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6. And neither should acquaintances," Microsoft states.

Burning questions: Will the ambitious privacy standard for Web surfers be effective? How will it work? What will it affect? And who should use it?

 Users concerned with online privacy have been struggling for years to come up with a solution to being tracked on the Web. Such users either want to avoid irritating, targeted ads based on browsing history or are concerned about businesses having too much access to our personal information.

Historically, each new workaround to escape tracking online--such as deleting cookies or enabling private browsing modes--is met with new and more effective forms of tracking, such as the much-harder-to-delete flash cookies. The situation may be changing, however, with a new standard that has been making some significant headway in the past few months.
The Do Not Track standard, created by researchers at Stanford University, is a simple solution that has found its way into new browsers--Mozilla Firefox 4 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. The promise of Do Not Track is the hope that users could opt out from all online tracking with one click. The concept has been under discussion in Congress and by the Federal Trade Commission.

How Does 'Do Not Track' Work?

By checking a box in Firefox's preferences, Do Not Track adds a message to your http: headers confirming that you don't want to be tracked. These headers are already sent with each request for information you make to any site, thus ensuring that any site that tracks you gets the message. The hope is that Do Not Track will let users quickly and easily opt out of all online tracking at once, instead of forcing them to find solutions for each type of tracking individually.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Do Not Track's current flaw is also what makes it so easy to use. Once you've flagged yourself as unwilling to be tracked, it is up to individual Websites to honor your request, and that creates quite a few problems. Hardly any site is complying with the Do Not Track requests--but new federal legislation proposed in Congress in the wake of the FTC's call for a Do Not Track system promises to change all that. However, predictions abound that Do Not Track could have larger, undesirable consequences.

The End of the Free Web?

Advertising makes up a significant revenue stream for plenty of sites on the Internet that provide free content (including PCWorld.com), and Do Not Track throws a serious monkey wrench into a certain type of targeted advertising. Exactly how serious a problem Do Not Track could cause depends on who you ask: Industry trade groups are very critical of Do Not Track legislation, and you'll find no shortage of doomsday scenarios suggesting that the passage of this type of legislation will destroy the advertising revenue that funds most free content online and put an end to the Internet as we know it.
The idea is that--without the financial support provided by targeted advertisements--ad-supported sites will no longer be able to sustain themselves, and that the buffet of free content that has been available to users online will therefore disappear.
Jonathan Mayer of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.While Do Not Track is likely to have some economic consequences, these predictions seem seriously overblown. Jonathan Mayer of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society has suggested that Do Not Track's effect on advertising will likely be far smaller than predicted. The behavioral advertising that the Do Not Track law would affect constitutes only about 4 percent of advertising online, according to Mayer--which makes the odds rather low that the content you like to read online would be targeted. In addition, if a site really depended on such behavioral advertising for a large proportion of its revenue, it would be relatively simple for the site to request, or even require, users to allow tracking before they entered the site.
Online tracking is an important tool for advertisers, but it's hardly the only one. Rainey Reitman, Activism Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thinks Do Not Track might let users who are concerned with privacy but who want to support advertising-based sites have it both ways. "The way things are today, the only reasonable method a consumer has to protect her online privacy is to block most of the advertisements on the Internet," Reitman says. "Do Not Track offers a way for users to protect their privacy in a meaningful way without just blocking all advertisements."

Would Tracking Move Underground?

A second, less hyped concern with Do Not Track legislation is that we might be targeting the wrong people. As PCWorld.com blogger Jared Newman noted in "Do-Not-Track in Chrome and Firefox: Different Approaches, Same Fatal Flaw," Do Not Track, even with legislation in place, affects only those sites that play by the rules. Users could end up punishing sites like Google that traffic solely in comparatively harmless advertising, while giving free rein to sites that have fewer scruples about using your online information.
This is a real concern with systems where compliance by trackers is voluntary. But it's also important to remember that Do Not Track doesn't exist in a vacuum. Microsoft's IE 9 offers a tracking protection list, that lets users manually exclude content from suspicious sites and actively excludes those sites that don't play by the rules.
It's also important to remember that Do Not Track isn't an all or nothing solution. If you want to support more reputable sites that still engage in tracking, the standard lets users manually allow some sites to track them. So, if you feel that a site like Amazon or Google actually provides value to you when it tracks, you can let it do so without losing your protection against other sites.

What Will 'Do Not Track' Change for the User?

If we get national Do Not Track legislation, what changes are end users likely to experience? The EFF's Reitman says that most users probably won't notice much at first. "What you have to remember is that Web tracking as we know it today is insidious in large part because it's invisible. [...] So, just as the problem is in itself hard to spot, the solution will be subtle--most people who enable Do Not Track won't notice a huge difference in their online reading experience."
Do Not Track is far from a perfect solution to online privacy, but it's an important step in the right direction for concerned Web users. When combined with other solutions--like tracking protection lists--it promises to help protect your privacy without seriously affecting your browsing online.

Google is the dominant force in EuropeSeznam—there is no other search engine which even comes close to Google’s market share. I think everybody will agree when I say that Europe could use some competition for Google. Bing should be the designated search engine to become that big competitor, but for now that is not the case. Even the recent launch of the “new” Bing in France and the years of Bing in the UK haven’t made most people switch away from Google.
But despite its dominance, there are alternative search engines in Europe, and they can be worth looking at. With Europe’s more than 800 million people, of whom about 60% spends time online, even a small percentage using alternatives to Google offer attractively large numbers, and targeting users of those search engines could be very profitable. Lets take a look at some of the alternatives.

Bing (UK and France)

As in almost every country Google is the dominant force in the UK, but here we see that Bing is more popular than anywhere else. That is not surprising since the UK has been the only European country until recent in which Bing showed its full potential. Bing now accounts for about 4% of the search market share in the UK. Adding Yahoo’s Bing-powered results can add another 4% making Bing a very good alternative to Google. Bing also is the “runner up” in many other European countries with France leading the way with a 2.8% share.
It therefore makes sense to optimize for Bing in Europe, but be careful: in many countries Bing is nothing more than Live Search with a Bing logo.

Yandex (Russia)

Going from Western Europe to Eastern Europe you can’t overlook Yandex. This search engine is the dominant force in Russia where it even outranks Google with a 64% market share. This is extra special because Yandex is one of the few non-English-language search engines which is able to beat Google at its own game. Yandex is growing rapidly, not just in search, but it also adding lots of other features to make it a bigger competitor in Eastern Europe. And Yandex will be aiming at Western Europe soon too. They recently launched an English-only search engine, so Google beware!
If you are targeting Russians, optimizing for Yandex is the best choice, not just because it has the biggest market share but also because it gets closest to how the Russians think. Yandex is able to recognize Russian inflection in search queries, which means that you can really understand the intent of the Russian user. Therefore, take extra care when it comes to keyword research. Get a native speaker to help you out here because Russian really differs from other languages.

Seznam (Czech Republic)

Its not far from Russia to the Czech Republic, where Seznam is dominant. This search engine was originally a web portal but today is used primarily as a search engine. In the Czech language they beat Google in numbers when it comes to dominance in search. If you want to target the Czech Republic this is one search engine you cannot leave aside. Seznam, which means “list” in English, is the only real force to reckon with in the Czech Republic—perhaps not the biggest audience, but one of the most active ones in Europe.

Conduit (Germany & Spain)

In Germany the second biggest search service after Google is T-Online. This really is a portal with Google-powered search engine. Therefore you can see it as an alternative but you will still be using Google. A real alternative is Conduit. This search engine, which also has quite the market share in South America, has a bigger market share in Germany than Bing or Yahoo. In Spain Conduit even has a larger market share: 2.9 percent.

Vinden.nl (The Netherlands)

The Netherlands has a huge Google culture. No other engine can even come close to the market share of Google (94%). If you have to name one it is probably Vinden.nl. Vinden (“finding”) is said to have a 3% market share but also relies on some Google technology. Vinden.nl, as well as “startpagina”, however also do it the old fashioned way: offering browsable lists, the good old directories so to speak.
These search engines are a few examples of alternatives for googe in Europe. For each specific country there are of course more alternatives. For example, Onet.pl in Poland, Ask.com in the UK and the Nordic countries, Orange in France and even more local search engines in other regions. I’d love to know what your favorite local search engine is, so let us know and we might just take a closer look at them!