I might be late to this but it's something I discovered recently.
Let's take a fictional character and call them Joe Bloggs. Joe doesn't subscribe to all that fancy schmancy internet nonsense and has no clue what a 'Facespace' or a 'MyBook' is. He checks his email every now and then and might browse the web from time to time, but that's all he really does on the internet.
So imagine his surprise when he gets an email from some Facebook thing telling him he should sign up, because all his friends are on it. He'd dismiss it, only - it really is listing all his friends. How can Facebook know who his friends are? How does it know that Jane Bloggs is his sister and John Bloggs is his father? How does it know so much about him when he knows nothing about it?
The answer is that Facebook collects emails and search habits. You know that 'enter your email details to search your contact list for friends on Facebook' feature? Be careful with it. Facebook keeps all the addresses it finds and associates them with you. If you've got those email addresses in your contact list, they must be your friend, right? Repeat this for all the other members on Facebook who are doing the same thing and Facebook can build up a pretty good picture of who you are.
Facebook also allows you to list various family members on your profile, and if said member doesn't have a Facebook profile, it asks for their email address. Facebook then knows when someone invites you to Facebook that you're the brother of X and the father of Y and whatever else.
Facebook's privacy has come under fire recently and I'm not surprised - I admit to using the email search feature when I first joined Facebook and nowhere do I remember it saying it would collect all my contacts' email addresses and retain them in order to guilt-trip other people into joining. I had another look at it recently (without actually entering my details, of course) and I still didn't see it. Admittedly, I have not read their very long and very complicated privacy policy in some time so it is likely to be mentioned there.
Am I going to delete my Facebook profile after this? I'm not sure. It is a great way to keep in contact with people I haven't spoken to in years but if it's profiling me behind my back, I'm not sure I agree with that. Facebook are by far not the first or only company to do this, of course, but they are so far the most high-profile and media attention-worthy. With millions and millions of members, they can make some hefty $$$ from all this if they really wanted to (and there are rumours that they do want to. Imagine what advertisers could do with that data!). Then again, if I did delete my profile, Facebook never really deletes a profile in case you want to reactivate it. So they've got my info anyway, whether I gave it to them or not, and whether I want it there or not. Fun.
Scary stuff, if you ask me.
Tutorials. Everyone has them (ok, so not everyone. But a lot of people - even I had some... and for far too long, I might add). They bulk out the content of the average site and which makes the site look more important and useful and the site owner feels better about themselves, knowing they're helping people out.
The point of a tutorial is that it should help people out. It should take them through, step by step, instructions on how to perform a particular task which would otherwise be demanding and/or difficult. It should be clear, to the point, and easy to follow.
Let's take Jane Jones, a fictional website owner who loves writing tutorials. She writes them about anything and everything; Photoshop, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, you name it. She copied wrote all the iframe and blur effect tutorials first, dontchaknow. Anyway. Jane Jones comes across a script she likes - it takes text entered in a form and stores it in a database. She hasn't written a tutorial for at least a day now and she really loves this new script she's found, so she decides she'll write a tutorial for it.
She could start by writing about how the form could be extended - adding an extra field, for example. She could also write about how you can jazz up the layout a bit, for those who don't know how to do it. But this is all far too advanced for Jane... She starts with the traditional installation tutorial. "Create a database, see my other tutorial for details," writes Jane. "Then upload all the files. That's it!". Yay, one tutorial done. Second tutorial: "How to add text. To add text, write in the box and then press ok. That's it!". Next one: "How to delete text. To delete text, click the delete button. You're done!"
Let's say I'm using the script Jane has written the tutorial about. What have I learned here? I already know how to add text - it's fairly obvious, and anyone with half a brain would have guessed that you enter text in the box and then click the button. Even the most dim-witted person in the world would be able to guess that clicking 'delete' would, oh, I don't know, delete text?
So I ask you this: as a site owner, why are you writing that tutorial? Because you feel like sharing knowledge? Because you think that explaining the way you did something would help others? Or is it because you want more content? Or even because your hits are low and you want more on your site to keep them entertained?
Does your tutorial point out the obvious? Is it actually teaching anything? Writing a tutorial of the type Jane wrote above will insult the intelligence of your visitors. People will read it and wonder why you bothered writing it.
(And no, before anybody asks, this is not directed at anyone or any tutorial in particular. I see these sorts of tutorials all over the place and they do my head in.)
I came across a couple of websites discouraging the use of PHPAskIt because it uses a database and therefore absolutely must be insecure.
One such example states:
PHPAskIt isn't completely secure, either. It uses a database so I woulda thought that was more INsecure than the flat file of Waks Ask & Answer script.
Another says:
PHPAskit is just as insecure [as Wak's Ask&Answer] only people think it's secure because it's not flat file.
And so on, and so forth.
For the record, there is no difference in security in using one method or another, as long as they are both done properly. Wak's Ask&Answer and CuteNews (flat file scripts) aren't. PHPFanBase and SimpleDir (MySQL scripts) aren't either. Jem's Bella~ series and FlatPress however, are flat file scripts and they are fine. Similarly, WordPress and PHPAskIt are MySQL scripts and they are absolutely fine.
Yes, it's true that hackers discover more and more vulnerabilities in scripts and programming languages all the time, so those scripts may not always be secure in their current versions so it is very important to keep your scripts up to date. But to say a script is insecure because of the method of storage that they use is stupid and shows complete ignorance. If you are going to say a script is insecure, don't just back it up with "well I looked it up online and it said it was insecure". People seem to like publishing fake reports of insecurities (probably where all this is coming from, actually... PHPAskIt had a nice security hoax published about it - and in case you're still living in the dark ages it was wrong) so "looking it up online" isn't always the answer.
If in doubt, ask someone who knows what they're talking about. :)