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The Lifehacker Total Security Guide 
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The Stupid Things You Do On Facebook (And How To Fix Them) Earlier this week, a Lifehacker reader caught downloading copyrighted material using BitTorrent told us about the scary warning letter she received from her ISP about a big media company who filed a complaint. Fact is, whether you’re downloading copyrighted material or not, no one likes to have their activities online monitored. Let’s take a look at ways you can protect your downloading and file sharing privacy, and prevent the big media companies and other anti-P2P organisations from spying on your file sharing habits.
YouTube today launches a new feature called Insight which tells you when viewers are watching your clips and where they’re located. The New York Times reports: With the Insight information, video creators can dig into the specifics of a video’s performance and find, for example, that it peaks on Fridays in winter months, or it has taken several weeks to get traction—information that can help better promote their work. The information, presented as a color-coded map and a graph of a video’s popularity, is accessible through a link from a video creator’s account page on YouTube. The company will update the data once a day.
Not seeing Insight information on Lifehacker’s videos yet—are any of you? Send us a screenshot of what yours look like when you do (tips at lifehacker.com.) YouTube Feature Tells Video Creators When and Where a Clip Is Being Watched [NYT]
Windows only: You’ll often see a no-install, runs-from-its-own-executable program or utility get a special nod on this blog—and for good reason, as a jam-packed “Add/Remove” screen is not a pretty thing. But for those with a lot of one-use apps to wrangle and find, free utility ZipInstaller makes a lot of sense. It does what it sounds like—”installs” the files from their unpacked .zip archives to a dedicated spot, and makes their utilities accessible from the Start Menu (or Launchy or another favourite app-launcher). As the FreewareGenius blog points out, this has the added bonus of helping you remember you have the little guy available in the first place, rather than letting it collect dust in some corner of your Program Files folder. ZipInstaller is a free download for Windows systems only. ZipInstaller [via FreewareGenius.com]
More than a year after web-based photo editors began swarming the scene, Adobe this morning unveiled its free, long-anticipated Photoshop Express web app. It doesn’t have nearly a quarter of the options, tools, and tricks of its desktop-based namesake, but it seems like a good platform for anyone who likes to spend a little time refining, and then sharing, their digital photos. The Flash-based app has just 17 basic buttons for editing, a thumbnail display of all the different changes you’ve made, and the album storing (2 GB of space), import (from Picasa and Facebook, among others) and sharing features seem up-to-snuff. In other words, you won’t get layers, channels, and dodge-and-burn, but you can remove chocolate stains from white shirts pretty handily.
US-centric: Few people willingly sign up to get more ad pitches in their inbox, but doing so at a few restaurant websites can net you some decent free food. If you’re willing to delete, file, or click an “unsubscribe” link with the inevitable “Come and visit us!” emails, here’s a few examples of what can be had, according to the CyberNet blog:Cold Stone Creamery – Free ice cream on your birthday after joining their birthday club TGI Friday’s – Free appetizer after joining Friday’s E-Club Red Lobster – Purchase 2 entrees and get a free appetizer or dessert after joining “The Club”
The How-To Geek points to a nifty fix for Firefox extension fans whose status bars are seriously cluttered. Using a custom script and the Stylish extension, you can get your status bar icons to auto-hide and appear only when you move your mouse down to them. A lot of extensions pack handy utilities into their status bar icons, but it’s not always helpful to have a weight-lifting fox, a monkey, three or four exclamation points, and a weather sign staring at you while you’re trying to work. To use this trick, install Stylish if you don’t have it already, then head to the link below and hit the “Load into Stylish” button. Image by The How-To Geek. Statusbar: Mouseover for clutter [via The How-To Geek]
