Last Week’s Top Ten Posts

You wanted Carrier IQ removal, debates over online piracy and the truth about ejecting USB drives. Kick off your Monday by checking out the ten most popular posts from Lifehacker Australia last week:

1. How To Remove The Carrier IQ Rootkit
   Android developer Trevor Eckhart last week discovered a widespread rootkit, called Carrier IQ, that is often installed by carriers and seems capable of logging everything you do. Here’s how it works and how you can get rid of it.
2. The New Piracy Rules: How The Five Strikes Work
   A coalition of ISPs has proposed new rules for dealing with Australians thought to have downloaded copyrighted material. It has already generated a lot of controversy and discussion, but just how will the process work?
3. Busting Your Delusions About Content And Piracy
   We’ve spent a lot of time this week looking at proposals for how ISPs should deal with allegations of piracy via torrents and how those would work in practice. There’s broad agreement that the proposals aren’t perfect and that a dedicated downloader could easily work around them, but there’s also clearly some widely-held misunderstandings about the nature of the proposals and the alternative business models which might drive entertainment in the future. Let’s bust through a few of them.
4. Ask LH: Do I Really Need To Eject USB Drives Before Removing Them?
   Dear Lifehacker, Some of my computers (like my Mac) are always warning me about disconnecting flash drives without ejecting, while Windows doesn’t seem to have a problem — in fact, my external USB drive doesn’t even have an eject option. Does this mean it’s safe? How do I know when I actually need to eject a drive?
5. Office Starter 2010 Available As Free Download
   Microsoft has offered a cut-down, ad-supported free Starter Edition of Office 2010 for quite a while now, but it has only been available pre-installed on netbooks and other low-spec PCs. At the moment, however, you can download the whole thing for free from Microsoft’s servers.
6. How To Anonymise Your BitTorrent Traffic With BTGuard
   If you’re using BitTorrent without taking special measures to hide your activity, it may be just a matter of time before your ISP throttles your connection, sends you an ominous letter, or you find yourself the target of a file-sharing lawsuit. Here’s how to set up a simple proxy to keep your torrenting safe and anonymous.
7. Which Aussie Cities Offer The Best Quality Of Life?
   Listings that pit cities against each other as the best place to live tend to stimulate argument, and I suspect this one will be no exception. The 2011 Mercer Quality Of Living rankings rate Sydney as the best city in Australia to live in, and the 11th-best in the world.
8. Avoid These Phrases
   It’s all too easy to say the wrong thing; sometimes it’s just a matter of how you phrase something that causes etiquette snafus. Real Simple has rounded up 18 common phrases you should avoid, and what to say instead.
9. Five Reasons Why Regional Delays Still Exist
   One of the key reasons that torrented entertainment content is popular is because it gives us immediate access to shows or movies or music that might not see an official release in Australia for months or years, if ever. Staggering the release of new productions feels archaic in the internet age, but there are occasionally some good reasons it happens other than “we’ve always done it this way”. Here are five you might not have thought of.
10. The Done Manifesto Lays Out 13 Rules For Getting Things Done
    Sometimes (or maybe all too often), you have to churn out work — good, creative work done with tight deadlines. The Done Manifesto is a set of working rules based on a sense of urgency. No time for careful deliberation, move on.

Picture by David Mertl