Shelly Palmer Digital Living - Daily Radio Report

When we talk about hackers, the image that comes to mind is often of secretive computer geniuses hiding somewhere where they can’t be traced. But sometimes hacking takes little digital skill. Recently, Wired writer Mat Honan had nearly his entire digital life destroyed by hackers who were able to get his Apple and Amazon account [...]

NASA’s new Mars rover, Curiosity, has finally landed on the red planet, after over 14 years of planning. The project, which cost 2.5 billion dollars, had seen years of launch delays and problems with funding. But landing on Mars is no easy task. Many previous missions have failed and the United States is the only [...]

Much has been said during the 2012 London Olympics about social media and its relationship to television viewership. Obviously the Olympics is a huge topic of conversation in social media and NBC viewership of the games is at all time high. Many have even tried to draw a connection between the two, concluding that lots [...]

Newsflash: we are annoyed by our cell phones. As much as we now depend on them, a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that many Americans still aren’t happy with their phones and carriers. A common complaint that people have is that their cell phones don’t make calls properly. 72% [...]

Another day, another hack. This time it’s Dropbox and the cloud file-sharing service is blaming the breach on a stolen employee password.  The company found that usernames and passwords had been stolen from other websites and because of password reuse, the thieves were able to gain access to a small number of Dropbox accounts, including [...]

Hotmail may become cool again and no, we haven’t gone back to 1999.  Microsoft has unveiled Outlook.com, a new email service that will eventually be the home of all current Hotmail users. The product was clearly designed to compete with Gmail, with a simple, easy to use interface. If you’re a Microsoft user, the new [...]

The Olympic Games are in full swing and it is by far the most connected games the world has ever seen.  So far, this has been both a blessing and a curse. The results are spreading faster than ever before via Twitter and other social media networks. But The International Olympic Committee had to ask [...]

Last week, Facebook had its first earnings call since becoming a public company, hosted by Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives.  Though its revenue was slightly higher than predicted and it reported a gain in users, shareholders were not impressed.   Advertising made up 86% of its revenue, with Sponsored Stories bringing in over 1 million [...]

I wasn’t exaggerating when I said recently that the Internet speed wars were beginning. Google has now entered the race by building their own fiber optic network, and its new service is light years ahead of Comcast and Verizon when it comes to speed and price.  Google Fiber offers speeds of up to 1000 megabits [...]

In order to compete with Verizon Fios, Comcast has announced that it will increase Internet speeds in ten Northeast markets. Its new tier will offer download speeds of up to 305 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 65 Mbps. In case that sounded like gibberish, let me break it down for you. MBPS stands [...]

Apple’s newest operating system, Mountain Lion, has finally arrived.  Let’s take a look at the new features it will bring to your Mac: Mountain Lion is more compatible with other iDevices than past operating systems. iCloud plays a much greater role, allowing for easy syncing of media, calendars and contacts.  A few new apps let [...]

If you follow my blog, you’ll have read a post I wrote recently called Dear Apple – let me tell you where to stick your MagSafe 2 Plug. I wrote that blog after receiving my brand new, all singing, all dancing Macbook Air, only to find out that it has a new power adapter, rendering [...]

Still not on Google Plus? A lot of people aren’t, but maybe they should be.  In a new survey that measures user satisfaction of social media websites, Google Plus came out on top, while Facebook’s score was at a record low.  Google Plus’ growth has been slow since its debut in 2011. It currently has [...]

It’s time to celebrate. Your inbox just got one step closer to being junk free. Computer security experts have taken down Grum, the world’s third largest botnet, that until now was responsible for 18 billion spam emails per day. The researchers responsible started by blocking the botnet’s command and control servers earlier this week, but [...]

AT&T has announced that it will soon offer plans that allow customers to share data between devices.  The new plans are similar to Verizon’s recently available Share Everything plan. Let’s compare: AT&T’s data plans start $10 cheaper than Verizon’s, at $40 for 1 gigabyte.  Both plans charge a monthly fee for each device, but AT&T’s [...]