Full Infographic via Pingdom.

In a world of increasing stratification, the competition between search engines, social media websites, and operating systems are fairly decided.  You’ve got Google, Facebook, and Microsoft Windows.  Sure, there are other choices out there, but the people who use Yahoo and Bing are few and far between, MySpace is slowly dying, and Apple and Linux are nowhere near threats to Windows (at least, not yet).  There’s not much chance of any of those things changing any time soon, yet there is change in the air.  Facebook is trying to become a search engine.

Increasingly, users are turning not to Google to search for things online, but Facebook, and Facebook is making this service more and more useful by tweaking their privacy settings to make more and more of your information, pictures, etc., searchable to their users.  Facebook, the social media giant, is taking on Google, the search engine giant, on Google’s own turf.  As we’ve seen from Google Buzz, Google isn’t afraid to take on Facebook, either.

This is an interesting transition.  Will Google be able to fight off their most serious challenger?  Will Facebook users revolt at the prospect of becoming search-engine fodder en masse?  What will Microsoft do to revitalize MySpace, MSN, Bing, and their struggling new media operations?  Things are going to get very interesting, very soon.  I know I wouldn’t want my private Facebook information as part of some sort of Facesearch.  How about you?

Image:  The State of the Internet, via Popfi.

This is a wonderful tribute to webcomic xkcd and the Internet in general, featuring most of the Internet’s notable celebrities and/or writers and thinkers.  There’s literally hundreds of millions of hits between these collected folks.  Just take a look at the list:  Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Bruce Schneier, Jason Kottke, Google Zurich, Hank Green, MC Frontalot, Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Mr. Toast, Miss Cellania, Team Genius, Phil Plait, Allan Amato, Maddy Gaiman, Charissa Gilreath, Belinda Casas, Chuck Martinez, Jeremy James, Joanna Gaunder, Lee Israel & Octavio Coleman Esq. of The Jejune Institute.

It’s based off this strip, which is further based off those Discovery Channel commercials.  It’s so sweet and wonderfully cheerful that I can’t help but smile.

In the old days, computer hijackers would simply steal your bank account information, credit card numbers, and other personal information and bleed your accounts dry, set up a bunch of fake credit cards, and that sort of thing.  If they weren’t those sort of hackers, they’d hijack your computer directly via trojan horses, install your machine as part of a bot net, and do nefarious feats with your computer as an unwitting host animal.  Both of those can be very profitable, but they’re also incredibly hard work.

Leave it to hackers to think up an easy way to separate you from your credit card information and/or hard-earned money directly.  It’s the latest trend in computer scamware.  Known as hijackware or ransomware, it’s basically a computer virus or piece of malware that is designed to block you from using your computer until you fork over a fee.  MSNBC’s Red Tape Chronicles has the full story on these evil programs.

In some cases, ransomware works off scare tactics, telling you that your computer has a virus (which it does) and that you need to buy an upgrade to some generic antivirus software program to get rid of it.  Those are the more harmless scamware programs.  The other, more destructive program actually encrypts your entire computer and forces you to pay a subscription fee to decrypt your hard drive.

The way to be wise of these programs is to know your computer.  Know your antivirus software’s name and what its warnings look like, and always keep it up to date.  If you have Norton or McAfee or something else you pay a fee for, I recommend dropping it in favor of AVG, which works better than either of those programs could dream of and is completely free for personal users (I’d even recommend buying the upgraded version of AVG to support the great job the company does).  Add in a secondary ad blocker like AdBlock Plus, just to be at max safety level.  Run a firewall, run adware removers (like AdAware or Spybod Search and Destroy) and for the love of all things electronic, be careful about what you’re clicking on!

There is no computer OS, program, or browser that can protect the user from the person behind the keyboard.  You are the cause of most of your security problems.  Browse smart, people!

A closer view:

Images: Bitmob

Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.  A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.  A rolling stone gathers no moss.  What do those things even mean?  Well, if you’re like most people and you have a bit of trouble learning the virtue of patience, not jumping to conclusions, or being grateful for what you’ve got through those old expressions, then not to worry.  Geek Dad has updated those old sayings for the modern age.

Of the ten listed, my favorite is, “A fool and his password are soon parted.”  Truer words have never been spoken, as the research shows!  “Hindsight is always 1080p” is also amusing, but I’d settle for hindsight being in 480p myself.  As for the one that reads, “E-mail, Twitter, and Facebook are three best friends and three worst enemies.”  There has never been anything said so wise.

Do you have any updated axioms for the modern era?  Perhaps, “That as dead as VHS,” rather than “as dead as a doornail” or “as dead as HD DVD?”  “It’s always darkest before the LED light kicks in?”

While I plan on being back later with lots of Black Friday ad links and some highlights for the gadget-minded, I just wanted to stop in and wish all the Shaktronics readership a happy Thanksgiving.  For those that don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, then I hope you have a happy Thursday.  Without you guys, this site wouldn’t be here.  You’re appreciated all year, but we make you wait until November before we tell you that we care.

Now get out of here and go eat some turkey!

Image:  Go Nintendo

According to some recent reports, Firefox isn’t quite the stury, safe browser that we’ve all come to expect.  Of course, like ALL browsers, it’s only as good as the user who is browsing.  That’s the premise behind the report of Firefox’s massive vulnerability list, which basically says that most of FF’s problems are due to add-ons.

I use Firefox on a regular basis, and since I made the switch, I haven’t had many virus problems.  When I used IE, I didn’t have many virus problems either.  That’s probably because I use the bare minimum of Firefox add-ons, but that’s because I like a clean browsing experience and Firefox’s memory leak problems are still pretty bad.

That said, I’m always on the lookout for some add-ons that are useful; what kind of things are you guys adding on when it’s time to browse?

Have some traveling to do?  Well, good news for you, then!  If you’re going through one of 47 airports in the United States, Google is going to give you free wireless internet.  Think of it as a holiday gift from Google to you-gle.  Check out Google’s Free Holiday Wifi website for lots more information, including the hows, whys, and wheres of the offer.

The offer runs from November 10, 2009, until January 15, 2010, but some airports have already made the change to free wifi permanent.  It’s about time, too.  The internet isn’t just a perk for business class anymore; it’s something people expect to get for free nowadays.