Get Internet Access When Your Government Shuts It Down These days, no popular movement goes without an Internet presence of some kind, whether it's organizing on Facebook or spreading the word through Twitter. And as we've seen in Egypt, that means that your Internet connection can be the first to go. Whether you're trying to check in with your family, contact your friends, or simply spread the word, here are a few ways to build some basic network connectivity when you can't rely on your cellular or landline Internet connections. Do-It-Yourself Internet With Ad-Hoc Wi-Fi Even if you've managed to find an Internet connection for yourself, it won't be that helpful in reaching out to your fellow locals if they can't get online to find you. If you're trying to coordinate a group of people in your area and can't rely on an Internet connection, cell phones, or SMS, your best bet could be a wireless mesh network of sorts--essentially, a distributed network of wireless networking devices that can all find each other and communicate with each other.
42 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed No doubt your summer celebrations this weekend will leave you little time to catch up on reading. To help you out, we've compiled a handy roundup of this week's most helpful, informative and inspiring stories. We've celebrated iPhone's birthday, we've pondered celebrity impact on social good, and we've laughed over geeky gadgets. This week Mashable overflowed with engaging content. Editors' Picks HOW TO: Manage Your Online Reputation Using SEOWhile you might not be able to remove damaging content from the Internet, there's a good chance you can minimize its impact using simple SEO techniques.Meet the People Who Scored Twitter's Shortest UsernamesHere's a look at the users who snagged premium social real estate with the shortest Twitter usernames on Earth. Social Media
Broken on Purpose: Why Getting It Wrong Pays More Than Getting It Right Many of us managing Facebook fan pages have noticed something strange over the last year: how our reach has gotten increasingly ineffective. How the messages we post seem to get fewer clicks, how each message is seen by only a fraction of our total “fans.” It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access. As their advertising head, Gokul Rajaram, explained, if you want to speak to the other 80 to 85 percent of people who signed up to hear from you, “sponsoring posts is important.” In other words, through “Sponsored Stories,” brands, agencies and artists are now charged to reach their own fans—the whole reason for having a page—because those pages have suddenly stopped working. This is a clear conflict of interest. It doesn’t end with Facebook, either.
Password Generator Using the same password for multiple email, shopping and social networking websites is risky, it means that a security breach at one website will compromise all your accounts, possibly even leading to identity theft. So, the idea is that you memorise just one, reasonably long/secure master password and use that to generate a set of non-dictionary passwords. Copy and paste the new password(s) into the website and set your web browser to remember them. All the websites get different passwords, but you only have to remember one! Using a different PC? For any website that's not on the list, just type the name into the 'Custom' box (the last one in the list) and press Generate. This password generator works using Javascript, entirely within the page, no data is ever passed back to my server. Credits Simon Sheppard, Sept 2016