It is very hard to keep a low profile if you are online – Google, Twitter, Facebook etc know a lot more about you than you might imagine and with tracking being high on the un-privacy agenda, it will soon become impossible to keep yourself to yourself.

My mantra has always been – if you don’t want it on the Internet, don’t put it on the Internet

But, Neowin’s round up of privacy reclamation is worth a read either way: How to regain your online privacy: part one – Neowin.net.

First: Download all your data and then delete/deactivate your Google, Facebook, accounts. Ditto Twitter and your Windows Live account. And, obviously, delete all your other accounts. Told you it was drastic.

Now, permanently set your browser to private browsing and run no tracking extensions and anti-cookie plugins as available. Instead of going through your ISP direct when surfing use an anonymized proxy or virtual private network (VPN).

Of course, the most drastic and simplest way is to unplug.

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Claim back your online privacy

Anyway, I tweeted a few more examples, posted a blog about it, and updated the hashtag on the What the Trend site…followers and others ran with it and it went on all day Friday. It didn’t quite go viral and as far as I know it never actually “trended” on Twitter. But, here’s the interesting thing. I did it purely for fun and perhaps got a wee bit carried away. Some people seemed to enjoy the Friday diversion but it had a side-effect too in that I presume most of my followers hanker after my relatively serious science and technology news and views rather than a tedious stream of spoof rock song titles. Of the 14632 Twitter followers for @sciencebase on Thursday (having seen 34 new people join the sci-tech party in the previous two days, there were 3 who jumped ship as the #mundanemetal meme panned out and another 4 the next day. That said there was a dip of 3 the day before the meme too…so conclusions are difficult.

However, Saturday after some more normal science and technology tweets Sciencebase was up 8 and so far today we’ve added 35. Total at the time of writing is 14668 and TwitterCounter reckons we’ll gain 23 tomorrow and have reached 15000 by the beginning of March at the current average rate. That’s a lot slower a rate of increase than at the time we were nominated for a Shorty Award early in January.

The point not being to brag about the number of followers I have, just to point out that creating an off-topic meme on Twitter can actually negatively impact on your followers but after the noise dies away things seem to go back to normal pretty quickly. Of course, if I’d created an on-topic twitter meme, things may have been different. But, I am a chemist, so what other kind of music would I reference than metal?

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Impact of a Twitter meme

It could become an essential tool for users in countries that restrict free speech, which is pretty much everywhere to a greater or lesser extent. The plugin would also help defeat implementations of  PIPA or  SOPA  in the US that will, should they pass into law, restrict sites across the globe.

Don’t be fooled, however, the very same plugin might also be used, perish the thought, to let people in The Netherlands, Italy, Finland and elsewhere access The Pirate Bay even if their ISPs are blocking it.

From TorrentFreak

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WordPress plugin unblocks blocked sites

Highway to Hull

Eels of Steel

Smells Like White Spirit

Sabbath Muddy Sabbath

Don’t Fear the Sweeper

The Number of the Yeast

That last one is a bit lame, but could be the start of a lab-based metal meme, or one just for bakers and brewers…

(Hat tip to my missus who was singing the line “Highway to Hull” just now…don’t ask.

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Highway to Hull #mundanemetal

An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25! Raspberry Pi.

Thanks to Classic FM’s Tim Lihoreau for the alert on this.

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Have a slice of Raspberry Pi

In this fascinating and worrying TED Talk, Clay Shirky asks: What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? He delivers his manifesto, a call to defend our intellectual liberty to create, discuss, link and share, rather than swallowing unthinkingly what the industry wants us to consume. Remember these are multinational corporations that hold global sway, freedoms removed in the good-old U.S. of A will be removed the world over and we will never get them back. Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the subject of the social and economic impact of Internet technology. He holds joint positions at New York University as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and as Assistant Arts Professor in the New Media focused graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program.

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SOPA sits you back on the sofa

I post all Sciencebase and Sciencetext blog posts to the Facebook fan page too and assumed that the viscous drizzle would get lots of interest there too. But, now that I’m checking over the Facebook insights, I can see that actually it got very little interest. A few comments, a few likes and only a limited “reach”, whereas unrelated post and far less exciting posts about email permissions and tech things reached far more people but never went viral in any way on the site.

One can never tell just how hard to please some readers might be…oh, so now you want to see the viscous drizzle?

More about the science here

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Hard to please

Here’s a simple script page you can visit on your smart phone to check whether your network is handing over privacte information too. The script prints out all the information that it sees when you visit. The site, of course, could be accruing phone numbers, but the author says he has no evil intent in mind and is simply revealing what your phone is revealing about you. Other sites are probably grabbing the same information with malicious intent (advertising!)

If your phone network is naughty you will see a line beginning with “x-up-calling-line-id” followed by your mobile phone number in plain text. If your number is not shown, you’re safe. If it is, it’s time to complain to your provider under the Data Protection Act.

Test your mobile phone for leaks: here.

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Mobile phones send number to website

This is where a neat little bookmarklet that focuses on the user comes in. The developers have created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure — the ranking of their organic search results — to determine what social content should be displayed instead of the hard-coded Google promo stuff at present.

You just have to add the bookmarklet to your toolbar and when you’ve done a search in Google, click it to redo the search without the googocentric stuff. Get it here Focus on the User. Hopefully, someone will write a userscript that automates the process and avoids the need for the bookmarklet.

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Try a more relevant social Google

Apple iPhone  (including the iPhone 4 and the new iPhone 4S)- 41%
Apple iPad – 31%
Apple iPod Touch – 5%
SonyEricsson LT15i Xperia Arc – 4%
Samsung GT-I9100 Galaxy S II – 2%
HTC Desire – 2%
Samsung GT-I9000 Galaxy S – 2%
Motorola DroidX – 1%
HTC EVO 4G – 1%
Not set – 12%

Other traces are seen of users browsing with Samsung GT-P1000 Galaxy Tab, Google Nexus S Samsung Nexus S, Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101, Samsung GT-S5830 Galaxy Ace and Fujitsu T-01C REGZA Phone T-01C. Maybe this doesn’t actually reflect the wider market at all. So, does anyone care to share their experience, is this skewed from the norm seen for sites not on the science niche?

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Mobile visitors to science websites