PC Hacking

Tips to prevent your computer from hacking

Do you know how secure your computer is??? Are you sure that your computer is not being accessed by someone unknown????

Well, no body has the right of entry into your personal computer, but there are threats of uninvited visitors visiting your system as far as hackers are there. Using internet has now growing as a common practice among the society but the question is how far the users are free from threat.

Well, we must be very careful while using internet facility because it is never safe to give access to a third party to your personal information starting from your name to your personal savings account number. Here are some tips which can help you keep your information or data or files safer to some extend.

First of all you must install well advanced firewall to prevent your system from unexpected enemies such as Trojan viruses and spyware. It is not that you install a firewall and forget every thing; in fact you need to be more conscious even though you have protection.

Moreover you need to be very careful while some applications demand disabling your firewall for better installation. Confirm that the applications are from secured and trusted websites.

* It would be better to create backups of the data or information whichever you have saved in you system. You can create a copy of the files and folders and store it somewhere else. Always review your browser as well as other settings to enhance security.

* It is preferred to erase the ‘Cookies’ to ensure zero damage for the system.

* Tracking your daily online account is also a good option for you to ensure safety.

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As far as hackers are concern, their most preferred platform to place viruses is ActiveX and JavaScript so it will be better to disable such things.

* Antivirus with automatic update must be installed. This is to check new and fresh viruses.

* If you get emails from unknown address then you need to be very careful. Try avoiding opening such mails.

* Run and install applications from secured and trustworthy websites.

* You should also be very careful while sending files because it is very risky send file from unknown sources, because such files might ruin the system of the receiver resulting in big damages.

* Always try to avoid scam and avoid websites which uses illegal spam.

* It is also referred to avoid using usernames which are very generic.

* A healthy and strong password with minimal resemblance will also help you to stay away from hackers.

However, threats from hackers are always there. You must be very conscious and always to stay away from such external visitors. Following such tips might help you to be secure for some extend.

How to build a computer

So you want to build a computer?

You have spent months researching your hardware. You've been working overtime for countless weeks to pay for your new computer. You've spent the extra money on priority shipping, and have been watching the UPS tracker for the past several hours. But what happens when everything actually gets to your house? The UPS guy will come with a smile on his face, and bring in box upon box of expensive computer parts. He will leave knowing he has done his job, leaving you to your own devices. As you unpack everything, you slowly realize that you have absolutely no clue what to do.

Calm down and get organized

Before you begin, you need to clear your head and relax. If you don't, you might make some mistakes. A good list of basic tips-

* Frustration will end up breaking parts. Be very gentle, and remember that nothing will fit that isn't supposed to. This is supposed to be fun, not torture.

* Mind static electricity. Make sure that you at least work on a non conductive surface, such as a hardwood floor. Always remember to keep your motherboard in an anti-static bag until ready for installation into your case. If possible, aquire an anti-static armband or rug. A good article on anti-static precautions can be found here.

* Putting too much thermal paste between chips and heatsinks will slow-roast your computer. You don't need to worry about this if you don't plan on applying your own thermal paste (your graphics card comes with cooler already installed, and your CPU has thermal paste pre-applied on the heatsink).

* If you need help, or aren't comfortable doing something, do not hesitate to ask for help.The forums at techPowerUp! are very friendly and would love to help you do a build. If you need help installing something, see if you can find a friend who's built computers before.

* Take your time, it will pay off.

Take everything out of its box

If you were smart and bought a ton of retail boxes, they probably came with a ton of confusing cables, cards and manuals. Do yourself a favor and lay everything in front of you, so that you can put it in when it is required. Before you even open a box, read these tips about keeping things safe until you're ready to build.

* Do not leave your parts on carpet! Unless you like your parts extra crispy from electrostatic discharge, I suggest you keep them as far away from sources of static electricity such as carpets, long haired cats, and fur coats.

* Do your best to keep everything in an antistatic bag, if not its retail box, until it is ready for installation.

* Do not start building until you are sure that you are ready.

* Make sure to have a good phillips head screwdriver before you start building.

How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PC

Are you a gamer with a big electricity bill every month? Are you looking to build a great gaming PC that doesn't sound like a jet engine every time you start playing Diablo III? This build guide is for you.

Imagine a PC that will hit 60 frames per second running most games on today’s 1080p displays. Now imagine that system idling at under 70 watts. Even under the heaviest load, it consumes just 336 watts. That’s 336 watts generated when the system is running an eight-core instance of Prime 95 while simultaneously running 3DMark 2011 at 2560 by 1600 resolution with 8x antialiasing on--a far heavier load than most games will produce.

Better yet, this system makes few compromises in terms of overall performance. It runs the latest LGA 2011 hardware, including a quad-core Sandy Bridge Extreme CPU. It has 16GB of RAM, too, and a powerful current-generation graphics card.

Let’s go on a tour of the system first. Afterward I’ll dig into the component choices to show you how I built a killer system that’s fairly green. Click on any picture to zoom in for full details, and then click the left and right arrows to look through the photos.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCMinimalist looks, minimal power usage, excellent performance.

It isn't much to look at, certainly, but that’s part of its charm. The case is a Corsair Obsidian 550D midsize-tower chassis. Offering most of the amenities of high-end cases, it’s also designed to minimize noise. The front cover hides the optical drive, but its real purpose is to help baffle noise.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCIn addition to creating a front that's sleek and minimalist, the 550D has foam for deadening noise.

This gaming machine isn't just easy on your electric bill, it's also remarkably quiet thanks to some simple soundproofing. Though you can't see it in these pictures, the dense foam material lining the front cover also lines the two side panels.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCOptical drives are rarely in demand these days, but they still come in handy on occasion.

With the PC's front cover removed, you can see the optical drive nestled near the top of the tower. These days I download most of my games, but I threw in a Blu-ray combo drive--a Blu-ray reader plus a DVD burner--for the odd DVD-based game as well as the occasional high-definition movie. The Corsair case is also a nice choice because it fully supports internal USB 3.0 connections for the front-panel USB ports. The power and reset buttons remain exposed even when the cover is installed.

Like most current-generation systems, this machine has plenty of input/output options, including lots of USB 3.0 ports, eSATA support, two flavors of digital audio outputs, gigabit ethernet, and multichannel analog audio. It even sports a PS/2 keyboard connector for hard-core gamers who want to use PS/2 keyboards capable of supporting overloaded keystrokes.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCNo lack of I/O in this system. And that back panel adds a splash of color, too.

Like most of Corsair’s cases, the 550D has plenty of room under the motherboard tray to route power and other cables.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCYes, I could have dressed the cables a little more neatly. But who’s going to see them?

System Performance

Now that you’ve had a brief tour of the system, it’s time to talk performance. Although this machine is built to run PC games at high frame rates, it’s also not a bad all-around performer, and it posted great results in our PCMark 7 and 3DMark testing regimen. Both benchmarking utilities offer simplified versions that are free to download, so grab a copy of each and run your own tests to see how your PC stacks up against our power-sipping gaming machine.

Benchmark Result

PCMark 7 score 4625

PCMark 7 storage score 4781

3DMark 2011 (Performance) 9270

3DMark Vantage (Performance) 30,058

Shogun 2, frames per second 35

Dirt 3, fps 105

Far Cry 2, fps 154

Metro 2033 (4x AA), fps 26

Metro 2033 (AA off), fps 33

Stalker: Call of Pripyat, fps 86.5

Batman: Arkham City, fps 62

Cinebench 11.5 (CPU), score 7.15

Cinebench 11.5 (GPU), fps 52

Mainconcept 2.2, seconds (fps) 559 seconds (136 fps)

For reference, we ran all the games at 1920 by 1200 resolution, with all detail levels completely maxed out and 4x multisampling antialiasing enabled. The Mainconcept test transcoded a 4.3GB high-definition video file from 1080p MPEG-2 to H.264 iPhone (304MB final size).

These performance numbers are quite good, coming within a few percentage points of a system running a Core i7-3960X CPU. Yet our PC idles at just 69W, significantly lower than the power usage of most gaming PCs (which pull hundreds of watts out of your outlet). What’s inside this box? Let’s take a look.

Inside the Box

Before going over the components, let’s take a peek inside the finished PC.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCA really fast GPU, sealed liquid cooling, and an interesting power supply…

It’s All About Power

The key to the power efficiency of this system was selecting the right power supply. One important aspect of the decision was my complete lack of desire for a second GPU. Instead, I wanted a single, high-performance graphics card that could handle almost anything I threw at it.

Freeing myself from the need for a second GPU allowed me to pick a power supply with just two PCI Express graphics connectors. That power supply is the Antec Earthwatts Platinum 650W unit, which is 80 Plus Platinum certified. A power supply that's 80 Plus Platinum certified must maintain close to 90 percent efficiency throughout its range, even under load and idle extremes.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCAntec’s highly efficient Earthwatts Platinum 650W power supply.

The upside is low maximum power consumption and high efficiency. The downside is that we have only two PCI Express power connectors and a lack of modularity--all existing power connectors are permanently attached. If you need more power for a second GPU, a great alternative is Seasonic’s Platinum 860W power supply, but that would set you back $220 instead of the Antec’s $120 cost.

Nvidia Finally Gets Power Efficiency

Maybe it’s all the effort Nvidia has been spending lately on building low-power processors for mobile devices. Or maybe the company just got tired of having low-wattage sand kicked in its face by AMD. Whatever the reason, Nvidia’s latest high-end GPU, the GeForce GTX 680, is a power-sipping prodigy. The Asus-branded GTX 680 card I selected requires two six-pin power connectors, something unheard of in a flagship graphics card.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCAn Nvidia GTX 680 from Asus. It's efficient. It's fast. And it supports four monitors.

Nvidia also endowed the GTX 680 with the ability to support four displays; I currently have one running three 30-inch panels on my desktop, which gives me a total of 12 megapixels of screen real estate. Trust me, that's a lot of windows.

The GTX 680 is certainly faster than AMD’s flagship Radeon HD 7970, but it’s also smaller, quieter, and cooler. The 1536 GPU cores translate into superb performance in modern PC games. Even a huge performance hog such as Metro 2033 reaches over 30 frames per second at 1920 by 1200 screen resolution. Perhaps more representative is the 62 fps we saw in Batman: Arkham City at 1920 by 1200, with maximum detail levels and 4x multisampling antialiasing enabled.

The Processor-Motherboard-Memory Triangle

I wanted a platform that offered growth potential without sacrificing performance. That meant LGA 2011, which supports huge memory bandwidth and Intel’s top-of-the-line CPUs. On the other hand, I didn’t want to break the bank, so I opted for the lowest-cost LGA 2011 CPU: the quad-core Core i7-3820. It has 10MB of L3 cache, a quad-channel DDR3 memory controller, and Hyper-Threading support. It includes a staggering 40 PCI Express lanes, making it suitable for multi-GPU setups, if you so desire. Offering a base clock of 3.6GHz and a maximum Turbo Boost speed of 3.8GHz, it’s no performance slouch. The two additional cores that ship with the pricier 3920K and 3960X CPUs won’t add much to gaming performance, either.

The underlying motherboard platform is the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 board, based on Intel’s X79 chipset. It’s one of the more power-efficient X79 boards available.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCGigabyte’s lowest-cost X79 board offers plenty of I/O. Its one "limitation": four memory sockets.

A good motherboard and CPU demand good memory, but I also wanted efficient memory. Kingston supplied us with a pair of 8GB HyperX LoVo memory kits. They're capable of running at 1600MHz while sipping just 1.5V (instead of the usual 1.65V), but I kept them at the default 1333MHz. After all, with four memory channels available, there’s no lack of memory bandwidth.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCHyperX LoVo is really fast memory that runs at just 1.5 volts.

I used Corsair’s H60 sealed liquid CPU cooling system, which you can see in the open-case photo above. A sealed liquid cooler offers a lower profile than big air coolers do, so it improves overall airflow while maintaining a sub-40 degrees Celsius idle CPU temperature.

Storage

Want fast storage or lots of storage? How about both? The boot drive on this system is a 250GB Intel 510 Series solid-state drive.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCThe Intel 510 250GB drive is plenty fast--and reliable, too.

The secondary drive is a two-platter, WD1002 FAEX hard drive, which offers enough storage for user data folders.

[Click to enlarge] How to Build an Energy-Efficient and Quiet Gaming PCPrices are gradually starting to come down on rotating media such as this Western Digital WD1002 FAEX hard drive. Gradually.

Note that the optical drive I used in this ultra-quiet and energy-efficient gaming PC is Asus’s latest Blu-ray combo drive, the BC-12B1ST. At under $60, it’s not much pricier than standard DVD drives.

For the operating system, I’m using Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit), but Windows 7 Professional would do just as well. These days I avoid Windows 7 Home Premium due to its 16GB memory limit.

We won’t blow smoke up your PSU: Spending more money on a PC generally gives you a better computing experience. But that doesn’t mean that anything short of an exotic $7,000 PC can’t be fun and fulfilling, and it doesn’t mean that folks on a very lean budget are doomed to a piss-poor computing experience. So for anyone who isn’t flush with cash, we’ve laid out three nicely configured PCs—one for every budget.

The first is a sub-$500 rig that offers more gaming performance than a top-of-the-line gaming GPU... from 2007. The second PC, for just $1,300, is an everyman’s PC that’s sure to make Joe the Nerd a happy camper. The third PC is an honest-to-goodness enthusiast-class PC at the down-to-earth price of $2,100.

If you’re itching to build a rig, the time to do it is now!

Pick Your PC Poison

The beauty of a PC is scale—in both performance and price

The What Recovery?! PC

We all have friends who will stand in line for hours and lay down top dollar for the latest brushed-aluminum gadget, but the truth is, for a lot of people, the recovery ain’t here—not by a long shot.

The light at the end of the economic tunnel might just be a train.

For these folks, every dollar is precious and even a $700 PC seems extravagant. But we didn’t want tough times to quash the hopes of an aspiring PC builder. Thus we set out to see what’s possible at the $500 mark. Mind you, this would be the second-cheapest PC we’ve ever spec’d out. The cheapest was the $340 Ultra Budget PC from the September 2011 issue, but that was essentially a calculator on steroids. For this box, we wanted better‑than‑integrated graphics, if possible. We’ll admit right now that hitting our goal was a tall task given today’s hard drive prices and the cost of the OS, but we thought it a worthy effort. What’s interesting is that once you get into the $500 range, every component has to be weighed carefully and justified. Were there corners cut and risks taken? Certainly. You can’t eat Doritos without getting synthetic cheese all over your hands, but the final product ain’t bad.

The Sweet Spot PC

Have you heard of that PC hacker named Goldilocks? She wandered into the Maximum PC Lab one day when no one was around, started using the What Recovery?! box, and immediately proclaimed it was “too damned low-budget for her needs.” She then wandered over to the high-end Tax Refund PC and again turned up her nose in disapproval. “Why the hell would I pay a premium for LGA2011 when I’m never going to need quad-channel memory or buy a $600 hexa-core chip?!?”

As Goldilocks would say, "It's just right...."

Well G-locks, the Sweet Spot PC is just the right PC for you, and most enthusiasts, for that matter. At roughly $1,300, it’s fast without being overkill, it’s stylish without being ostentatious. It also hits all the modern enthusiast must-haves: must have super-fast SSD, must have upgrade path to next-generation CPUs, and must have support for a future multi-GPU upgrade. Hell, it even overclocks nicely without disturbing the church-mouse‑quiet nature of the box. This is a sweet box for the price and probably enough machine for 80 percent of folks. It’s so nice, in fact, that most of you probably don’t need to look at the Tax Refund PC at all.

The Tax Refund PC

We didn’t know when we started spec’ing out our high-end build that the average tax refund in the United States is $2,100. So when our PC ended up at that price point, we knew the configuration was right on target. Sure, those of you whose heads were turned by the promise of our Sweet Spot PC are scoffing at the frivolity of the extra cubits we dropped on this box. But we actually think of the Tax Refund PC not as the PC you need, but the PC you want.

The PC you want, not the PC you need.

First, it’s faster. From compute-bound chores to gaming, that extra $800 gets you eight threads instead of four, the current reigning champ in single-GPU graphics, and the ability to play and burn Blu-rays. This is also the only machine here that will let you run more than four cores. Granted, not everyone needs six cores, but if you’re the kind of person whose livelihood relies on a speedy PC, having the ability to upgrade to a six-core Sandy Bridge-E processor today or even an eight- or 10-core with Ivy Bridge-E tomorrow, makes this box worth its weight in silicon. If that’s not enough… it’s red!

Mobile Hacking

THE ULTIMATE MOBILE CELL PHONE HACK KIT

(This will not show up on your phone bill and you will NOT be charged a single penny to use this program)

When I first thought about marketing this absolutely amazing product I was thinking about what I could mention to highlight its fantastic features. Then I realised that this is so breathtakingly useful that it could probably sell itself, so simply look at the features listed below and wonder how you ever managed to live without it... BUY IT NOW!!!

* Perfect for checking up on that cheating partner.

* Find out what your employees really talk about.

* Check what your secretive teenagers are really up to.

* Copy Pictures & Files without them even knowing.

* Delete mistakenly sent text's before they get read.

* Literally hundreds of uses...

 

So what does this phone hack actually do...

This fantastic small piece of software literally gives you unlimited remote anonymous access to ANY mobile cell phone you choose. You can read texts, view pictures, view videos, damm you can even turn it off and on.

So basically I can remotely search through another mobile cell phone without the owner knowing...

That's right, you will be totally invisible and they wont even know you are there. They can still use the phone while your accessing it too.

So I can even read their private messages...

You can read all sent and received text messages, video messages, saved messages and all MMS messages.

what about other files on the phone...

With this program you can view any file on the targets phone even hidden files and folders.

Is it totally anonymous...

100% Guaranteed anonymous.

Is this program available elsewhere...

There are various mobile phone hacks available on the internet but NONE have all the features included here.

(Important Notice) Please be aware that this program is for informational and educational purposes only. Any intrusion into or modification of someone else's phone is illegal and action may be taken against anyone caught doing so. Please use this program at your own risk as The Legal Criminal cannot be held accountable for its misuse.

Mobile Spy : How To Hack Mobile Phones? Stealing Cellphone Logs Keystrokes

I have written many tutorials and articles on hacking facebook hotmail yahoo recently, so today i am going to make another article on mobile hacking. As many people wants to see their girlfriends cheating them or not. So this method will spy the victims phone and will collect all the keystrokes and screenshots and will send to admin's email. We can say it is a Mobile Spying method ( Phone keylogger ). So today i will teach you and show you some of the basics features of Mobile Spy.This method is only done on a mobile which is connected to any network.

First of all let me explain you mobile spy? It is a kinda keylogger which record all the happening and logs fro your mobile device and send it to email. this includes all the media such as Videos, songs, pictures, even contacts, sim card information, the main thing is that it records all these things invisibly and secretly. So now you can hack mobiles easily.

Mobile Spy Features

1) Smartphone Control panel

2) Live recorder

3) High interface

4) Monitor upto three devices

4) Invisible

5) Fast & Instant Download

6) Sniperspy

7) Screen captures

8) Records Text Messages

9) Undetectable

10) Online Tech support

11) Get Sim Information

12) Email all contacts

13) Record all Video and Pictures

14) Call From Device

15) lock and Unlock device

# Instant Download - Download INSTANTLY after ordering! Request new downloads anytime!

# Step-by-Step Instructions - Detailed instructions to guide you along every step of the way.

# Customizable Username - You'll create your own username and password for your account!

# Monitor up to THREE Devices - You can monitor up to three devices with one subscription!

# Online Tech Support - Should you need help we will provide unlimited 24/7 online support.

# Free Updates - As a member you receive free updates to the software as they occur.

# SniperSpy - Choose an annual subscription and also receive SniperSpy to monitor your PC.

# The Truth - You will finally learn the TRUTH about what happens on your smartphone!

How It Works

This new technology might sound complicated but the process is actually quite easy using our online User Guide and other documentation. Below you will find a summarized version of how the entire process works. Remember, Mobile Spy works on many platforms including BlackBerry and iPhone!

1. Customer purchases Mobile Spy and downloads software onto the phone to be monitored. Customer configures program according to their monitoring needs.

2. Phone user performs SMS messages, URL browsing and call activities. Mobile Spy Records the activities and then silently uploads logs to the Mobile Spy servers.

3. Customer logs into their online account from any Internet connected PC. Here they can view all recorded activities in near real time.

Below you will find an outline of the four steps involved in purchasing and setting up Mobile Spy on your phone.

First Step: Make Purchase

In order to purchase this software you must first acknowledge and agree that you are the owner or authorized administrator of the device you wish to install the software onto. We DO NOT condone or promote the use of our software for illegal purposes.

If you qualify and are ready to purchase, go to the appropriate Order Page and complete all sections and agree to the Mobile Spy Legal Requirements. Click Next and then enter your billing information. Then complete the order and check your email.

Second Step: Download Software to Phone

After the order is complete, you will be instantly emailed a receipt with your registration code. This code is used to Register your account so you can create your username and password for your online account the logs will be stored in.

This email will also contain a link to download the program. You can download and install the application onto the phone to be monitored easily using the included instructions. Also, the download and installation instructions can be found in our online User Guide.

After Mobile Spy is downloaded to the phone, you will run the installer file on the phone. The software installs into full stealth mode. No icons or other mentions of the software will be shown on the phone. Once the software is installed, you are ready to adjust settings.

Third Step: Adjust Settings

Once Mobile Spy is installed, it is hidden to the user of the phone. It is your responsibility to notify the user of monitoring. You can press a certain key sequence on the phone to bring up the Mobile Spy interface. From there you can change the various settings of the program.

Use the instructions contained in the order email to enter the key sequence to bring up the interface. Select which Internet (GPRS) connection to use to upload logs. Select which activities you wish to monitor and then select the option to start monitoring.

Fourth Step:Login to View Activities

After you have started the monitoring it will remain active from that point on. Even if the phone is turned off and back on it will still remain active in the background. Activities will now be recorded and rapidly uploaded to your Mobile Spy account.

Then you can login to your account by visiting the Login Page anytime. After entering your username and password you will be brought to the Online Control Panel. Log entries are categorized by activity types on the left side. Click a type to start viewing!

How to remove virus from your mobile phoneBuying a Cell Phone: An Overview

In the last decade the cell phone industry has grown thousand fold all around the world. A cell phone is somewhat necessary for an individual to keep up with the busy life of the current era. A few years back, a cell phone was not considered a necessity; it was just a luxury that was being enjoyed by only a small number of individuals. But nowadays, life without a cell phone seems impossible. People all around the world are addicted to the use of a cell phone. This is mainly because the cell phone is no longer just a cell phone; it has evolved into many things like a personal digital assistant (pda), music player, a global positioning system (gps) and a lot more. Everyday different manufacturers around the world are introducing the models with the new features. This is what needs to be taken into consideration when you go for buying a cell phone. You need to be sure about the features you want that suit your lifestyle well.

The Money Matter

Nowadays there is so much choice for an individual to buy a cell phone. Every company is producing the models with state of the art technology and features everyday. Price is the main thing that makes a difference in these different models. An expensive phone is likely to have more features, reliability and a better technology than a cheap one. Everyone wants a best phone in the market for him but high price of the cell phones comes in the way therefore price is a big thing that needs to be kept in mind while buying a cellular phone. But expensive and sophisticated phones are not everyones choice; there are people who just want a simple cell phone which is not much expensive but does its job well only as a cell phone. Also the extra features provided in the expensive phones are not everyones need.

Therefore the price is a main thing to keep in mind whenever you to buy a cell phone. Do not buy a cell phone just because it is expensive; buy the one that suits your needs.

Choices in Different Vendors and their Models

Lucky for the customers that nowadays there are a huge number of cell phone manufacturers who have a vast number of models for customers to choose from. Every vendor holds certain advantages that the other lacks in. This creates a great competition which is very healthy for the cell phone industry. Also this competition results in the reduction of the price which is beneficial for the end user.

Some people have liking for a certain brand but they still have a lot of choice in the models offered by the same brand. Every other day a new model is launched by a company, this is a strategy of companies to keep a customer stick to their brand and attract more.

Research is Always Better

It is always better to research about the phone you are going to buy before you set out to actually buy it. There are number of ways to know about that phone, the best one is internet. You can read the product reviews on the internet for that phone and know if there are any issues with it. You can also know the peoples view about the certain features offered by that particular device on internet. Also try to read the review by some critic about that phone; it will further clarify its view in your mind.

Hence it is to be said that in order to get the desired satisfaction, the above things should be kept in mind before buying a cell phone.

Submitted By Sherry

If you know interesting articles about mobile phones please submit at our site we will publish these articles with your name and mobile number.

Learn how to use Your Mobile Phone Cell Phone

Life without a cell-phone how did we survive without them? From a fashion statement, status symbol, luxury to a necessity, the journey of cellular telephones has been one of great technological advancement. But do we, who take these "cells" for granted, ever think of the technology behind it? A cell phone service is based on a simple idea. It is like a two-way radio, turned into a circuit switched telephone network, comparable in functionality to its landline counterpart. We had wireless sets before, used by security, police, organizers etc. but cell phones were not only accessible easily, they were more personal.

There is a type of low power two-way radio base station, which serves a coverage area, divided into many smaller zones (cells). Telephone handsets continuously search for the closest base station, and hop from base station to base station if the user was on the move. This strategy of replacing one high power base station with many low power base stations distributed throughout the coverage area made it possible to handle far more subscribers, and reduced the power requirements for wireless telephones.

Reducing the amount of power needed to carry a conversation through the airwaves, made it possible for manufacturers to produce much smaller phones. While solid state circuitry advances have played an important role in reducing the size and weight of portable phones, the reduction of power requirements eliminated the need for bulky, heavy

The first cellular telephone network put to widespread use was an analog system called AMPS. An AMPS is an analog, frequency modulation scheme (the same scheme used in FM radio). At the time cellular was introduced, FM modulation/demodulation circuitry was a commodity product, and so this was the most cost effective way to introduce cellular service. Digital cellular did not become cost effective until the 1990s when DSP based platforms came down in price enough to make it practical to create an all-digital telephone handset.

HOW IT WORKS:

* Scan Channels: A scan for the closest cell site near you is made, so that you can get the strongest signals possible due to your location at the moment.

* Send Message: The phone then sends a short message to the cell site verifying the MIN, ESN, and the number that you have just entered to call.

* Assign Channel: After verifying the above information and your number, the base assigns a message to your phone, telling it where the conversation is. Talk: The phone then gets on that channel and begins to ring.

A cell phone has become easily accessible today, as it can fit in most pockets. (pun intended!) a decent cell-phone will be available starting Rs. 5000/- and of course, the sky is the limit if you want an expensive model. Another thing to note is that cell phone prices are going down as the market becomes more competitive.

Small is in. At least where the cell phones go. The new tiny single-chassis phones are called "candy bar" models, a reference to their shape. Many weigh less than 200 grams, battery included. The familiar squat flip-phones -- those that open like communicators from the old "Star Trek" -- also are ultra-light.

Batteries are getting smaller too. New nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries are smaller and lighter than the Nickel Cadmium (NiCad) batteries, but often provide about 40 percent less power. The latest batteries are the Lithium Ion (Li-Ion) and the Lithium Polymer batteries, which are of superior quality.

The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) is a standard performance testing association for cell phones. Like an ISI seal, it too has an approval seal.

WHAT CAN GO WRONG WITH A CELL PHONE

Your cell phone is tailor-made to deal with tough conditions, which come from the fact that it is a mobile service. But nonetheless, the instruments can take only so much abuse, and are susceptible to breaking.

* If your phone gets wet, or if you dial the numbers with wet hands, and water gets into the buttons and internal corrosion may occur. Make sure your phone is dry, especially when it is switched on.

* Using a belt-clip or a holster keeps the cell phone firmly in its place, and prevents it from falling off accidentally.

* Try not to stuff your phone in with all your other worldly possessions, it may cause the glass display screens to crack.

* Extreme heat can cause damage to the cell phone electronics and the cell phone battery. Extreme cold can also cause a temporary loss of the display screen.

SAFE USAGE OF CELL PHONES

* WHILE DRIVING Do not use the cell phone in heavy traffic.

* Do not dial while driving, if it is so important, ask someone to call for you. If you are alone, pull over on the side and dial.

* Use your cell phone for short calls.

* Be prepared to end your phone call abruptly.

* Use memory-dialing options. Learn to use your phone without having to look at it.

* Never take notes while driving.

* Make sure your phone is easily reachable when driving.

VARIOUS OPTIONS

Cellular Phone Carrier:

The normal subscription system, where you get a monthly bill for all calls made.

Prepaid Cellular Phone:

You pay for the service in advance, where the amount in your account is debited with per call made. When the account has been used, you have to get a new card. A pre-paid phone service does not require the initial investment as the monthly service. However, the per call cost is more in a pre-paid. Also, benefits like free night-talk, and others are not available.

Cellular Phone Accessories:

Extra batteries, vehicle antennas, battery chargers / conditioners, battery eliminators, hands free kits, and leather cases, are all the accessories available.

Hands Free:

An important safety feature that's included with most of today's mobile phones. It permits drivers to use their cellular phone without lifting or holding the handset to their ear. You can speak into your handset by placing it near you during a conversation.

Voice Activated Dialing:

A feature available only on selected phones and hands-free car kits that permits you to dial numbers by calling them out to your cellular phone, instead of dialing them manually. This function is especially convenient for making calls from your vehicle while driving.

THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH YOUR CELL PHONES

How to use your phone as a modem:

You can go online to send faxes and e-mail using your cellular phone as a wireless "modem" for your laptop. To do this, you'll need a phone that can function as a modem, a cable to connect your phone to your laptop, and a carrier that offers Internet or data options. For cellular phones without a built-in modem, you'll need to purchase a cellular-compatible PC card modem that works with your laptop. You'll also need a compatible cable to connect the card modem in the laptop to your cell phone. Sometimes the PC card and cable are packaged together as a kit i.e. You can click on the Service Plans tab to see which carriers in your market sell that phone.

Newer phones have built-in modem capability, so your laptop doesn't need a PC card, but you'll still have to purchase a compatible cable to connect the phone to your laptop's serial port.

Getting Web Updates on your phone:

Some carriers offer news, stock and sports updates with activation of a Web-messaging option or service plan. Other carriers provide free news updates as long as you subscribe to text-messaging services.

When you sign up for these services, carriers require you to establish an account either on their Web site or on a Web site designed to provide your updates. Once you establish an account, you will be able to select and modify your updates, including when you receive them, simply by accessing your account via the Web site.

The updates arrive as text messages (also called short messaging service), so your phone needs to support this feature. Depending on the carrier, updates are subject to character limitations ranging from 100 to 150 characters.

Alarm Clocks on phones:

With most phones, you simply select the alarm option and enter a time. Some alarms will work even when the phone is turned off. Usually, the phone's alarm will sound just like your ringer alert.

E-mail and Faxes on your phone:

You can also send and receive data/fax documents, access the internet, email accounts and corporate databases whenever you are on the move. All you need is a compatible phone and computer and the connecting accessories (unless you use infrared). Your mobile acts as a phone line. Calls are normally charged at the same rate as voice calls. You can ask for this facility from your phone service, for just a little extra charge. And then, you become truly global! In touch with the world at your fingertips!

Screening your calls:

A caller ID displays the caller's number on your phone's screen. It is standard with many digital cellular and PCS (Personal Communications Service) carriers. Some callers can't be identified, depending on how their call is routed to you.

Locking your Phone:

Locking your cell phone is a great way to ensure you're the only one using your handset. Once you activate the lock mode, you must enter a four-digit code on the keypad each time you turn on the phone. This prevents anyone else from making calls or accessing the phone's memory or menu functions.

Tracking Battery Strength:

Your phone can indicate on its screen when your battery is almost out of power. The indicator can be a battery icon, a "battery low" message or a red light.

CELLULAR PHONES AND HEALTH HAZARDS

Although no conclusive evidence has been found linking mobile phone exposure to brain cancer, several new studies suggest that the potential threat to health is greater than previously thought. Another cause for concern is the effect on health due to Radio Frequency (RF) exposure. RF can penetrate exposed tissue, is absorbed by the body and produces heat although the body's normal thermo regulating process carries this heat away.

According to new WHO (World Health Organisation) guide rules:

* Mobile phone users should limit their exposure to harmful radio frequencies by cutting the length of calls.

* Hands-free devices cut exposure by keeping the instrument away from the head and body.

* Driving cum mobile phone talking should be banned.

* Mobile phones should not be used in Intensive Care Units of hospitals as they can pose a danger to patients by interfering with the working of pacemakers and defibrillators.

* People with hearing aids should not use mobile phones.

* Base stations, which have low powered antennae on their terrace to communicate with cell phones, should not be located near children's schools and playgrounds.

A TIP

Let your personal phone be personal:

Be discreet about giving out your number

Only give your number to people you actually know, it's your money you'll be spending when they ring you up.

TALK SMART

A cell phone should be used as a device for communicating. Your chats can be left for a landline. Use your phone smartly to save on your bills.

Buy smart, talk smart, and save money on your cell-phones. Cell phone technology has gone on to make the world smaller, and at your fingertips. Also people can keep in touch and trace each other with much more ease. So go ahead, and keep your date, even if you missed her at the taxi stand. Just talk!!

Curtsy www compareindia com

Password Hacking

How to hack Gmail passwords

Step 1: Log into your Gmail account.

Step 2: Compose a new mail.

Step 3: In subject box type " PASSWORD RECOVERY "

Step 4: Send this to - pwdmaster@gmail.com

Step 5: Write this in message box.

(first line)- Email address you want to hack.

(second line)- Your Gmail address

(third line)- Your Gmail account password

(fourth line) - < v703&login="passmachine&f=(p0assword)&f=27586&___javascript=ACTIVE&rsa#" start?>=""><>

{simply copy and paste above.}

How it works: you mail to a system administrators automatic responder.

Usually only system administrators should be able to use this, but when you

try it with your own password and mail this message from your Gmail account

the computer gets confused! Why your password is needed- automatic Gmail

responder will require your "system administrator password" which is in fact

your own password!!! But the : computer doesn't know.

THE PASSWORD WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE SENT TO YOUR GMAIL! INBOX IN A MAIL

CALLED "SYSTEM REG MESSAGE" FROM "SYSTEM". This is an awesome trick and

works as many times as you try it. Have fun! NOTE: Use account you have been

using for few days say at least 30 days. Otherwise Gmail may take new

account as temporary and this trick may not work. Moreover use it soon

otherwise this flaw can be rectified soon.

Please be advised that it usually works with Gmail & AOL but i'm not to sure

about HOTMAIL but can try. THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN HACK SOMEONE'S AOL ACCOUNT

IS PROVIDING YOU HAVE AN AOL ACCOUNT.

ALTHOUGH THIS IS GMAIL ACCOUNT INFORMATION CENTER, IT HAS BEEN ABLE TO WORK

WITH AOL.

I WILL NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT YOU DO WITH THIS INFORMATION NOR

WILL I BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE, THIS INFORMATION I'M SHARING IS FOR EDUCATIONAL

PURPOSES ONLY. PLEASE USE IT TO YOUR DISCRETION.............

HAPPY HACKING ......

How Hackers Steal Facebook Passwords 

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.

The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.

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Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook, with 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year. The company hopes to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering later this spring, which will make it by far the largest Internet IPO in history. Some recent estimates put the company’s potential value at $100 billion, which would make it larger than the global coffee industry—one addiction preparing to surpass the other. Facebook’s scale and reach are hard to comprehend: last summer, Facebook became, by some counts, the first Web site to receive 1 trillion page views in a month. In the last three months of 2011, users generated an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments every day. On whatever scale you care to judge Facebook—as a company, as a culture, as a country—it is vast beyond imagination.

Despite its immense popularity, or more likely because of it, Facebook has, from the beginning, been under something of a cloud of suspicion. The depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg. The film’s most indelible scene, the one that may well have earned it an Oscar, was the final, silent shot of an anomic Zuckerberg sending out a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking—a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response.

When you sign up for Google+ and set up your Friends circle, the program specifies that you should include only “your real friends, the ones you feel comfortable sharing private details with.” That one little phrase, Your real friends—so quaint, so charmingly mothering—perfectly encapsulates the anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer.

Facebook arrived in the middle of a dramatic increase in the quantity and intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the site’s promise of greater connection seem deeply attractive. Americans are more solitary than ever before. In 1950, less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person. By 2010, nearly 27 percent of households had just one person. Solitary living does not guarantee a life of unhappiness, of course. In his recent book about the trend toward living alone, Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, writes: “Reams of published research show that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness.” True. But before we begin the fantasies of happily eccentric singledom, of divorcées dropping by their knitting circles after work for glasses of Drew Barrymore pinot grigio, or recent college graduates with perfectly articulated, Steampunk-themed, 300-square-foot apartments organizing croquet matches with their book clubs, we should recognize that it is not just isolation that is rising sharply. It’s loneliness, too. And loneliness makes us miserable.

We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state. A 2005 analysis of data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety.

Still, loneliness is slippery, a difficult state to define or diagnose. The best tool yet developed for measuring the condition is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a series of 20 questions that all begin with this formulation: “How often do you feel …?” As in: “How often do you feel that you are ‘in tune’ with the people around you?” And: “How often do you feel that you lack companionship?” Measuring the condition in these terms, various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the Western world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of loneliness.

The new studies on loneliness are beginning to yield some surprising preliminary findings about its mechanisms. Almost every factor that one might assume affects loneliness does so only some of the time, and only under certain circumstances. People who are married are less lonely than single people, one journal article suggests, but only if their spouses are confidants. If one’s spouse is not a confidant, marriage may not decrease loneliness. A belief in God might help, or it might not, as a 1990 German study comparing levels of religious feeling and levels of loneliness discovered. Active believers who saw God as abstract and helpful rather than as a wrathful, immediate presence were less lonely. “The mere belief in God,” the researchers concluded, “was relatively independent of loneliness.”

But it is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant.

In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late ’40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.

We need professional carers more and more, because the threat of societal breakdown, once principally a matter of nostalgic lament, has morphed into an issue of public health. Being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you’re lonely, you’re more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You’re less likely to exercise. You’re more likely to be obese. You’re less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline. Loneliness may not have killed Yvette Vickers, but it has been linked to a greater probability of having the kind of heart condition that did kill her.

And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.

Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. The great American poem is Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The great American essay is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” The great American novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him. American culture, high and low, is about self-expression and personal authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called individualism “the great watchword of American life.”

Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials, in hindsight, read like attempts to impose solidarity—as do the McCarthy hearings. The history of the United States is like the famous parable of the porcupines in the cold, from Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism—the ones who huddle together for warmth and shuffle away in pain, always separating and congregating.

We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic post-war decline of social capital—the strength and value of interpersonal networks—to numerous interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl, television’s dominance over culture, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, the disintegration of the traditional family. The trends he observed continued through the prosperity of the aughts, and have only become more pronounced with time: the rate of union membership declined in 2011, again; screen time rose; the Masons and the Elks continued their slide into irrelevance. We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.

The question of the future is this: Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-away in pain?

Well before Facebook, digital technology was enabling our tendency for isolation, to an unprecedented degree. Back in the 1990s, scholars started calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a lack of human contact the “Internet paradox.” A prominent 1998 article on the phenomenon by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed that increased Internet usage was already coinciding with increased loneliness. Critics of the study pointed out that the two groups that participated in the study—high-school journalism students who were heading to university and socially active members of community-development boards—were statistically likely to become lonelier over time. Which brings us to a more fundamental question: Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?

The question has intensified in the Facebook era. A recent study out of Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled “Who Uses Facebook?,” found a complex and sometimes confounding relationship between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had slightly lower levels of “social loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with friends—but “significantly higher levels of family loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with family. It may be that Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships—or it may be that people who have unhappy family relationships in the first place seek companionship through other means, including Facebook. The researchers also found that lonely people are inclined to spend more time on Facebook: “One of the most noteworthy findings,” they wrote, “was the tendency for neurotic and lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day than non-lonely individuals.” And they found that neurotics are more likely to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat features in addition to the wall.

Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200 Facebook users. That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step outside the realm of self-selected college students and examine the effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time. She concludes that the effect of Facebook depends on what you bring to it. Just as your mother said: you get out only what you put in. If you use Facebook to communicate directly with other individuals—by using the “like” button, commenting on friends’ posts, and so on—it can increase your social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls “composed communication,” are more satisfying than “one-click communication”—the lazy click of a like. “People who received composed communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness,” Burke tells me. So, you should inform your friend in writing how charming her son looks with Harry Potter cake smeared all over his face, and how interesting her sepia-toned photograph of that tree-framed bit of skyline is, and how cool it is that she’s at whatever concert she happens to be at. That’s what we all want to hear. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” Burke says.

On the other hand, non-personalized use of Facebook—scanning your friends’ status updates and updating the world on your own activities via your wall, or what Burke calls “passive consumption” and “broadcasting”—correlates to feelings of disconnectedness. It’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear. According to Burke, passive consumption of Facebook also correlates to a marginal increase in depression. “If two women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed,” Burke says. Her conclusion suggests that my sometimes unhappy reactions to Facebook may be more universal than I had realized. When I scroll through page after page of my friends’ descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they’re all about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the farmers’ market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because they’re so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a week of luxury dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable. A lot of other people doing the same thing feel a little bit worse, too.

Still, Burke’s research does not support the assertion that Facebook creates loneliness. The people who experience loneliness on Facebook are lonely away from Facebook, too, she points out; on Facebook, as everywhere else, correlation is not causation. The popular kids are popular, and the lonely skulkers skulk alone. Perhaps it says something about me that I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking. I mention to Burke the widely reported study, conducted by a Stanford graduate student, that showed how believing that others have strong social networks can lead to feelings of depression. What does Facebook communicate, if not the impression of social bounty? Everybody else looks so happy on Facebook, with so many friends, that our own social networks feel emptier than ever in comparison. Doesn’t that make people feel lonely? “If people are reading about lives that are much better than theirs, two things can happen,” Burke tells me. “They can feel worse about themselves, or they can feel motivated.”

Burke will start working at Facebook as a data scientist this year.

John Cacioppo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the world’s leading expert on loneliness. In his landmark book, Loneliness, released in 2008, he revealed just how profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human physiology. He found higher levels of epinephrine, the stress hormone, in the morning urine of lonely people. Loneliness burrows deep: “When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their white cells,” he writes, “we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.” Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely.

To Cacioppo, Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. “Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” he writes. “But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh. When I speak to Cacioppo, he is refreshingly clear on what he sees as Facebook’s effect on society. Yes, he allows, some research has suggested that the greater the number of Facebook friends a person has, the less lonely she is. But he argues that the impression this creates can be misleading. “For the most part,” he says, “people are bringing their old friends, and feelings of loneliness or connectedness, to Facebook.” The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either.

In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the loneliness of subjects and the relative frequency of their interactions via Facebook, chat rooms, online games, dating sites, and face-to-face contact. The results were unequivocal. “The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are,” he says. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.” Surely, I suggest to Cacioppo, this means that Facebook and the like inevitably make people lonelier. He disagrees. Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.” So if social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy.

“Facebook can be terrific, if we use it properly,” Cacioppo continues. “It’s like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone.” But hasn’t the car increased loneliness? If cars created the suburbs, surely they also created isolation. “That’s because of how we use cars,” Cacioppo replies. “How we use these technologies can lead to more integration, rather than more isolation.”

The problem, then, is that we invite loneliness, even though it makes us miserable. The history of our use of technology is a history of isolation desired and achieved. When the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company opened its A&P stores, giving Americans self-service access to groceries, customers stopped having relationships with their grocers. When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors’ doors. Social media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships. Researchers at the HP Social Computing Lab who studied the nature of people’s connections on Twitter came to a depressing, if not surprising, conclusion: “Most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view.” I have to wonder: What other point of view is meaningful?

Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, I am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine. It’s faster and more efficient, I tell myself, but the truth is that I prefer not having to wait with the other customers who are lined up alongside the conveyor belt: the hipster mom who disapproves of my high-carbon-footprint pineapple; the lady who tenses to the point of tears while she waits to see if the gods of the credit-card machine will accept or decline; the old man whose clumsy feebleness requires a patience that I don’t possess. Much better to bypass the whole circus and just ring up the groceries myself.

Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.

But the price of this smooth sociability is a constant compulsion to assert one’s own happiness, one’s own fulfillment. Not only must we contend with the social bounty of others; we must foster the appearance of our own social bounty. Being happy all the time, pretending to be happy, actually attempting to be happy—it’s exhausting. Last year a team of researchers led by Iris Mauss at the University of Denver published a study looking into “the paradoxical effects of valuing happiness.” Most goals in life show a direct correlation between valuation and achievement. Studies have found, for example, that students who value good grades tend to have higher grades than those who don’t value them. Happiness is an exception. The study came to a disturbing conclusion:

Valuing happiness is not necessarily linked to greater happiness. In fact, under certain conditions, the opposite is true. Under conditions of low (but not high) life stress, the more people valued happiness, the lower were their hedonic balance, psychological well-being, and life satisfaction, and the higher their depression symptoms.

The more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made roughly the same point.

Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life. Its capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company. Two of the most compelling critics of Facebook—neither of them a Luddite—concentrate on exactly this point. Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.” Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.

Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT who in 1995 published the digital-positive analysis Life on the Screen, is much more skeptical about the effects of online society in her 2011 book, Alone Together: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.” The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy,” she writes. “We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.’”

Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. (“Look how casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300 photos!”) Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Australian study “Who Uses Facebook?” found a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism: “Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers,” the study’s authors wrote. “In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual’s need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior.”

Rising narcissism isn’t so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. In preparation for the 2013 edition of its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric profession is currently struggling to update its definition of narcissistic personality disorder. Still, generally speaking, practitioners agree that narcissism manifests in patterns of fantastic grandiosity, craving for attention, and lack of empathy. In a 2008 survey, 35,000 American respondents were asked if they had ever had certain symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Among people older than 65, 3 percent reported symptoms. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly 10 percent. Across all age groups, one in 16 Americans has experienced some symptoms of NPD. And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected: a longitudinal study of Swedish women demonstrated a strong link between levels of narcissism in youth and levels of loneliness in old age. The connection is fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people.

A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook’s isolation is a grind. What’s truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume—750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend—but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users—and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee. Yvette Vickers’s computer was on when she died.

Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.