web

Instagram has been “securing” (i.e., suspending) accounts, giving users a deadline to upload a form of valid identification. Many initially suspected this was a phishing scam, but a Facebook spokesperson told CNET, “Instagram occasionally removes accounts due to violation of terms and, depending on the violation, may ask people to upload IDs for verification purposes.” This is another failure on Facebook’s part to handle issues within the photo-sharing site in a way that helps users feel secure.

Once upon a time, you could get adult content when you queried Google Images for obvious search terms like “tits” and “vagina.” In a silent move, Google has turned that ease of search off, so now, unless you search “tits naked” or “vagina porn”, you’re going to get pretty safe for work images of women in slightly revealing tops for the “tits” and medical imagery for “vagina.” Google is silently closing shop on adult content.

In this clip, Josh Robert Thompson imitates the voice of Morgan Freeman while reading excerpts from the popular ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and offering his own commentary. Here’s a sample: “There are some sick people in this world. I cannot honestly believe people read this crap. ‘Do you want the regular, vanilla relationship with no kinky fuckery at all?’ My mouth drops open. ‘Kinky fuckery?'”

The kinky social network Fetlife doesn’t take measures to protect user content and has shown incompetence or negligence in regard to user privacy, all the while prohibiting victims from warning others about predatory behavior in the BDSM community. As users, by enabling FetLife to continue espousing a code of silence and allowing them to spin security issues as “attacks,” we are letting our community become a breeding ground for exploitation.

At a whopping $13 million, sex.com is the most expensive domain to ever be sold. Without a doubt, it was at the center of one of the most interesting sagas of our time. Say what you want about the evils of porn, sex.com defined the way we understand and legally approach digital properties. And yet there it sits, like a Tickle Me Elmo five years after the craze.

In an effort to make itself feel better because no one uses their Facebook e-mail addresses (what? Facebook has e-mail addresses?), the social network decided yesterday to change everyone’s profiles to list only their Facebook e-mail addresses, thereby screwing up all your settings.

Two years ago Twitpic cracked down on nudity. They offered users no options, simply suspended accounts that contained inappropriate imagery. Now Twitter has followed suit, but their effort to clean up is considerably more mature. Instead of censoring users, Twitter is asking that people label their content “sensitive.” By opting in, users enable others to choose whether they want to see such content or skip it.

L.A. is not the best place to try to find love. Love is second fiddle to the Dream. The Dream is paramount. The Dream is why we’re here. Face it, when you’re working your way from the bottom, invites seldom come with a plus one. It’s true. L.A. sucks when it comes to love. And sometimes we’re so lonely, we want to pack up the U-Haul and go home. Okay, not really, but we do our fair share of bitching while under the influence only to delete the tweets in horror the morning after.

That’s right ladies, going out with your Facebook settings not fully locked down is a lot like wandering outside with too short a skirt. You’re practically begging for all of that delicious data to be harvested and abused. Statements like these clearly suggest that the fault lies with the girls who childishly don’t realize what they’re getting into by using a social network like — gasp — Facebook. It certainly doesn’t lie with the folks over at iFree who made the app. They are, according to Brownlee, “nice guys.”

In a world where employers can easily find out everything about you, where insurance companies can decide to give or deny coverage because they see some status update as representing a liability, where a judge at family court can take away your children because — God forbid — you had a photo taken at Playboy West some Halloween… It’s not a matter of the web exposing you. It’s a matter of no longer having the ability to segregate different aspects of your life as we were once easily able to do and the concern is entirely valid.