Security

Our world was full of acronyms even before social media came onto the scene. In business, someone could be SOL because he was in deep water with his boss. Or a member of the military might be AWOL for taking too much time off for R&R and didn't CYA. But today, acronyms of all sorts have popped into our lexicon as the result of smartphones and Twitter -  where it became even more important to find quicker ways to communicate with a limited number of characters for a tweet or text message.

The Swiss Army has the Swiss Army knife, Arthur Dent had his towel, and China has the latest in multifunctional do-it-all tools: the Chinese Military Shovel WJQ-308! Surrender now, resistance is futile... can you dig it?

Handguns are a danger in any industrialized country, and despite active gun registries and police presence, their use only seems to be increasing. Now, designer Sun Xiaotian has come up with a novel way of protecting the peace and the "piece" - the Fingerprint Gun.

Anyone who has seen the movie, The Social Network is familiar with how in the early years, Mark Zuckerberg pitted young students against each other in a heated competition as to who could "code" the fastest. The most savvy cognoscenti won a chance to join Facebook's start-up team back in 2004. On a recent installment of 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl noted that "Hacker" posters papered the walls of FB's HDQ. Which begs the question - what determines whether hackers are heroes or villains?

From the days of Napster to Peter Sunde most recently facing millions in damages and an actual prison sentence for his illegal music and video sharing on The Pirate Bay, torrent files are prompting the government to intervene. And with the release of Michael Jackson's posthumous album "Michael" being leaked via file-sharing sites this week, Big Brother may enact more forceful censorship laws.

Some baby monitors tend to pick up signals from outside the home.  As annoying as it can be to have these extra sounds coming through your monitor, it is also kind of creepy to think about the fact that someone else may be picking up sounds from yours.  The Philips Avent Basic Baby Monitor with DECT Technology keeps your nursery completely private with encrypted signals.

With hilarity that seems almost too on-point to be real, the Playmobil "Security Check Point" has seen a sudden resurgence of interest online.

Work, family, social obligations and household upkeep take up a lot of time, which means that many people are forced to fit in their workouts at the end of the day.  For those who enjoy outdoor activities this means that exercise often takes place in the dark.  This is when having a device such as the Ila Sport Pedometer Alarm can really come in handy.

The founder of WikiLeaks is not only a wanted man by the American authorities, his now infamous Web site WikiLeaks is also under attack by notorious hackers, while its services are being cut-off by Amazon and EveryDNS.net. Although not officially announced, Julian Assange might be considered today's public enemy number-one, taking the place of the illusive Osama bin Laden. Not since 9/11 has any one figure reached such notoriety due to what many consider acts against a state.

When Howard Stern titled his 1997 movie, "Private Parts," it was of course a double entendre that exposed the bad boy radio jock's origins while also referencing his obsession with the physical anatomy. When the video chat site Chatroulette graced (or disgraced, dependent on your point of view) our computer screens, that social network gave a whole new meaning to the psychological term "penis envy." With the recent launch of HowRandom.com, a new social media site looks to eliminate visuals from the chatting equation.

Are Internet bubbles on a 10-year cycle? Like the economic booms and busts that have occurred over the course of last 30 years, similar Internet peaks and valleys seem to follow suit according to John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. He refers to them as "waves" and it appears that we are currently transitioning from a simmer to a slow boil presently.

The power of a blogger's mobile input, the import of a Facebook status update and the ability of a tweet to report in real-time have been called 'off limits' by a judge and an ex-president this week. As perhaps, a sign of the times, there soon may be barriers as to where and when you can engage in user-generated content. In two separate cases this week, precedents might have been set as to just how social Internet users can be in public places.

Chatroulette, while adding to the growing interest in video chat technology has been unable to divest itself from some of human nature's baser instincts. However, it has inspired others to build out the video conferencing platform to develop business models that are now appealing to a much broader audience for business, special interests and branding purposes.

The Piglet Bank: Sick joke or slick marketing scheme? This cheeky product from, er, TheCheeky.com gives a new and unusual spin to your old change jar.

How does a book with the heinous title, "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure" make Amazon's Top 100 list for Kindle? How does Amazon accept pre-orders for the hardcover version of "I Am the Market: How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton, in Five Easy Lessons," or sell "RapeLay," a video game in which the protagonist stalks and rapes women?

Want to bug some bugs? Place them on an experimental nanotech coated surface that removes nearly all the friction generated by the bugs' bristled feet, then watch hilarity ensue as the critters are literally stopped in their tracks.

Amazon is once again in the news with its recent acquisition of Diaper.com for a cool $540 million. But the real story, somewhat overlooked in the States is the emergence of a black market (aka China's gray market) that's smuggling Kindle 3G's into the country for a specific purpose. Apparently, it's been discovered that Kindle is the only handheld device to date that can leap the "Great Firewall" of state Web censorship.

Social Media or Web 2.0 can be considered the battleground for Web 3.0's Semantic Web. The shift has been happening subtly but is picking up speed as Internet companies and nations vie for control of data. With 600 million users now on Facebook, Google's 1.3 billion visitors per week and China's 1.35 billion citizens, these three entities have the greatest opportunity to dominate the Web of the Future.

For anyone who has seen Christopher Nolan's mind-bending movie "Inception," the science of planting images and ideas into a subject's brain is not pure fiction. A research team at Northwestern University are actually working on a study designed to make people remember things that never happened. As a result, there is speculation that implanted memories into one's existing photos could alter one's reality of the past and subsequent brand loyalty.