The Lifehacker Total Security Guide 
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Top 10 Pervasive Tech Myths That Are Only Wasting Your Time iPhone/iPod touch only: Amazon released a new mobile application for the iPhone and iPod touch today, ensuring that you can now get your online shopping fix no matter where you are. Not only does the Amazon app provide an excellent interface to search, buy, or add items to your wishlists, but if you’re an iPhone user, the application’s Amazon Remembers feature identifies any product you take a picture of—sort of like previously mentioned SnapTell. When you snap a pic, the app uploads the picture to Amazon, which looks for a match among its products. If it finds one (it can take anywhere between a couple minutes and 24 hours), it’ll send you an email and update the Amazon Remembers tab. So far it’s worked like a charm with all of the products I tested. I expected that my iPhone book might throw it for a loop, considering it has a picture of an iPhone on it, but even it was correctly identified within a few minutes.
YouTube is full of videos that don’t require singled-minded attention, but trying to keep a YouTube page visible in the background for passive watching isn’t easy. Digital Inspiration’s Amit Agarwal suggests two methods, though, that work great for browsing other sites or doing actual, you know, work, while keeping a video cornered and always on top. The first requires re-working a video link to its full-screen version and bookmarking it to load in Firefox’s sidebar—something we’ve covered before with other apps. The other method creates a mini-browser window that always stays on top using an AutoHotKey-coded app. Hit the link below for details on each idea, which should make burning through your favourite webisodes easier while still plucking away on your busy work. How to Watch YouTube Videos While Working on other Tasks [Digital Inspiration]
Windows only: Portable application Toucan backs up and syncs your data between two locations (like your hard drive and your USB drive). Weighing in at just over 4.10MB installed, Toucan offers several advanced backup and syncing settings, like incremental backup with compression (supporting 7-Zip format), portable drive variables, scripts and advanced rulesets. Similar to SyncBackSE but smaller and portable, Toucan is a nice option for making sure you’ve got everything on your thumb drive. Toucan is a free download for Windows only.
Toucan [PortableApps.com]Web site Windows 7 Centre reports that Microsoft’s forthcoming update to Vista, Windows 7, will release its first official beta on January 13, 2009—exciting news for anybody dying to test drive Windows 7′s awesome new features. On the other hand, if you’re not eager to upgrade, you can still enjoy some of Windows 7′s best features right now.
The All About Microsoft blog posts a seriously complete list of what’s going to be included in Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista, expected to be out in April 2009. Major items include the Vista Feature Pack for Wireless for easier/better connections, built-in Blu-Ray writing, and reduced resources required for sidebar gadgets. Nothing majorly huge, so it’s worth looking at Windows 7 features you can get in Vista.
Windows Live, intended to be a landing page for social activity and Microsoft’s cloud-connected apps, is rolling out a host of redesigns and upgrades, but none so exciting (to our eyes, anyways) as the anticipated jump of the SkyDrive online storage service to 25GB capacity. As the Digital Inspiration blog points out, SkyDrive seems to be a central part of the Redmond giant’s web ambitions, so it’s not likely to go away or shrink. Aside from the raw upload/download capabilities, having a SkyDrive account gives you a few other cool abilities, which we’ll detail below.
Wondering who’s making those seemingly random changes to your company’s Wikipedia page, or just curious to see what happens to celebrity pages when scandal breaks? WikiDashboard pulls out information on user actions from the mass-edited encyclopedia and lays them out on a time-scaled chart. Enter a Wikipedia page, click on any of the edit graph notches, and you’ll see what change was made. It makes better sense of the often dense and cryptic edit listings, and lets you better gauge if someone’s got a specific axe to grind, and find out when they’re grinding it. WikiDashboard [PARC via Open...]
Elmo Live (a super-robotic version of the infamous Tickle Me Elmo) has received masses of publicity and is expected to be a big Christmas seller. Digital Journal TV showed true hacking instinct by grabbing the all-singing, all-dancing Muppet and ripping his skin off to show the workings underneath; check it out in the video above. It’s surely only a matter of time before people come up with more elaborate hacks to repurpose Elmo.(Warning: your kids might not like this much.) Digital Journal [via Tough Pigs]
Code Magazine runs through the basics of building your own Web Slices. Web slices — one of the key new technologies in IE8 — act as a kind of RSS-on-steroids, letting you show updates and related information within a page. While the IE8 user base is small right now, if you’re in the business of developing sites, this is worth checking out. For a fuller overview of IE8, see our overview, and to see how IE8 ranks for speed against this year’s other new browsers, check out our browser speed tests. Conversely, if web slice mouseovers are driving you crazy, learn how to switch them off.
As plans for a government trial of content filtering with selected ISPs firm up, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that we might all get stuck with a degraded Internet service with very little justification in public service terms. Over at APC, I’ve rounded up half-a-dozen arguments for If the thought of your Internet connection being censored at the source bothers you, then then the EFA’s No Clean Feed site is a good place to get more information on campaigning against it.
Top 5 reasons to fight government ISP filtering[APC]
