The Balkan Chronicle

The Pirate Bay is the World's Most Efficient Public Library

The way "media piracy" works is that one person or group purchases a work, and then shares it with millions of other people. This supposedly deprives the author or artist of those millions of people's money. One group has acquired over 50 million media items, and makes each of them available to approximately 20 million people — which must be a tremendous hit to creative professionals' wallets. This notorious institution is called the New York Public Library.

How to Delete an Account from Any Website

Sadly, not all websites and social networks are created equal when it comes to breaking up. With some, it takes only a couple of clicks to say good-bye, and for a few sites, if you stop paying for service, the site cut ties fairly quickly. Others make you jump through more hoops than a tiger at the circus. Even after you follow all of the required steps, some of these sites never quite separate from you, but keep vestiges of your relationship around forever.

DuckDuckGo's searches are the anti-Google

Google's tiny, pugnacious search rival DuckDuckGo is using advertising to warn people about advertising. It bought a billboard in L.A. for a cool $7,000 and posted this anatidaephobic ad that says, "Google tracks you. We don't."

Field Test for iPhone Signal Strength

When Apple released iOS 4.1 for iPhone Wednesday, the company once again included a utility that allows you to measure your signal strength on your device, a utility that that had been available before the release of iOS 4, but was not included when iOS 4 was introduced earlier this year.

How to Disappear Completely (From the Internet)

If you've ever used the Internet, you have an online identity. Maybe it's slight: a Hotmail account here, a comment on a news story there. Or maybe you've been more prolific, leaving a trail of usernames, accounts, messages, and profiles across the digital landscape. In any case, an active internet user owes it to himself to do a bit of self-Googling. What you'll find will be both enlightening and humbling—even worrying.

How to Use Time Machine on a Mac. OS 10.5

1) Buy an external hard drive with a lot of storage space. Install it. You can also use a server, or any non-bootable volume formatted in Apple’s HFS Extended format, as long as the entire volume is dedicated to Time Machine

Check to see if the drive has a Master Boot Record partition (avoid it if possible). If so, you will need to format the drive, or else Time Machine may malfunction when 10MB of data is copied.

Upgrade Your Life: 5 ways to make an easy-to-remember, ultra-secure password

Nobody wants to get hacked. But when it comes to choosing a password, there are key steps you can take to reduce your risk of data intrusions from unwanted virtual visitors. This week's edition of Upgrade Your Life will teach you how to make a strong, safe password that's easy to remember — and how to reduce your odds of being an easy target for hackers.