Unlock your laptop with a webcam and more fun apps!

Adam Pash over at Lifehacker just shared an amazing amount of things you can do with your webcam which range from useful to entertaining and just amusing. My favorite has to be software which lets you unlock your computer using only your face! The software doesn’t work for Vista right now but I may have to take my Xbox Live Vision camera into the office and use it for facial unlocking on my work computer. Another cool application is the photo booth apps which come in a variety of names for many flavors of operating systems. Come to think of it, Microsoft should intro a photo booth style application for the 360 which you could set up to do cool affects and post the results to Flickr! That would really make the 360 the life of the party, especially if it could work while you were playing Rock Band.

How One Individual Hides Online

Torrent Freak has an incredibly interesting interview with the owner of a torrent tracker in which the individual describes the steps he takes to ensure privacy and the survival of his tracker site. Running a tracker site is currently a legal gray area, but running such a site does open up individuals to lawsuits scorn and other issues. While the details aren’t too down and dirty the overall information is fun to read.

Paying for Stuff Online

When we need to pay for something we use disposable credit cards, and the same via PayPal. We also have a few other PayPal accounts scattered around which we run unverified, then dump when PayPal start asking questions. ‘We’ is a term I (we!) get into the habit of using often, it’s less focused than ‘I’.

Using Email

Use a few varied accounts and try not to ‘cross contaminate’ them by doing *any* personal stuff on them at all – site business *ONLY*! If your email address typed into Google returns results other than to do with the site, you are taking risks. Ideally a search would produce nothing at all. In addition, I always hide my IP when I pick up or send email.

I get into these ‘expose’ style articles even if the content is somewhat generalized. I think a ‘spy’ novel type book about the torrent underground could easily be a big hit. Rick Dakan the author of the Geek Mafia series is an author who I think could do a great job with this niche in the tech/spy genre. Lord knows the RIAA and the MPAA make perfect villains especially when coupled with a corrupt spying ISP or two! You can read the current Geek Mafia books for free or purchase them from Rick’s site. Does this type of novel sound good to you? let me know in the comments.