Users

The Baltimore Sun will begin charging frequent users of its website a subscription fee Oct. 10, joining several news organizations that have recently established price tags for online information. The Sun will allow users 15 free page views a month on baltimoresun.com. But for unlimited access, users will pay either $2.49 a week or $49.99 for six months. Those who already subscribe to The Sun's print edition will receive discounted rates of 75 cents a week or $29.99 a year for unlimited access to the website.

Regarding the recent debate on birth control pills and their morality, if a Roman Catholic woman can afford to buy the pills and then uses them, is she a sinner? No one seems to address this conundrum. Given their ability to purchase the pill, how do Christian women who use birth control against the rules of their religion rationalize that decision? One way is a perpetual confession of one's sins, which suggests hypocrisy. Another is to stand up and challenge one's religion.

These are sobering times for Internet users who value their privacy. The government has expanded its online surveillance authority in the wake of Sept. 11. And Web users are bombarded almost daily with warnings about cyberterrorism, hackers, worms, spyware, identity theft and cookies. Fortunately, there are myriad tools for those who want to reclaim at least some of their privacy. Encrypted e-mail, "anonymous" Web surfing, and software that crushes cookies and eats spyware, can all reduce your online exposure.

Facebook may be focusing users too much on their body weight and image, according to a new survey from the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt. The mental health institution took a look at the social media outlet and found 75 percent of Facebook users were unhappy with their bodies, and 51 percent said Facebook makes them more conscious of their bodies and weight. Researchers cited comments like: “l look so fat in that photo - untag me,” “You look so skinny, I could never wear those jeans!

Facebook Inc.'s latest capitulation to offended users offered another reminder of the social network's power for self-criticism. The Palo Alto, Calif., company rescinded a controversial change to its terms of use late Tuesday after thousands of members protested that Facebook was claiming ownership of all photos and other material posted to the site. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said that wasn't the intention. But Facebook reverted to a previous version of its legal user guidelines that didn't include the disputed clause.

If you've ever needed to wipe your hard disk completely clean and didn't have a Zip drive or other offline storage device for stashing the information, you already know what a hassle it is to back up all that data onto floppy disks.Now there's a way to get 300 megabytes of storage for free. You can use it for whatever you like, and the uses are limited to times when you need to reformat the disk.This storage is furnished by a Web site, so that means that your most precious information would remain safe, even if your computer were destroyed by fire.

On election night, computer users got news of the lates returns as quickly as the newscasters did. A modem gave citizens access to news wire services -- including the Associated Press -- and up-to-date information on the voting.And now that the election is long past, citizens can remain politically active with the help of their computers and modems.Compuserve's "candidate-gram" service allows users to send telegrams ($1.50 each) to the candidates directly from the computer. The service provides a form for writing the telegram and automatically addresses and sends the messages by the postal service.

THIS COLUMN WAS was supposed to have covered a clever new product, but the clever new product wasted most of my day in a futile attempt to get just one of its features to work. Substitute topic: If you wonder why productivity gains from computers have been so hard to measure, try counting up the hours of fussing, fuming and frittering their users have squandered through no fault of their own.In the computer world, as in horseshoes, close is good enough. In the computer world, products are considered perfectly acceptable when they almost work the way they are supposed to. The computer world often seems to be run by arrogant idiot savants who understand everything about their products except how they behave when human beings try to use them.

USERS OF CELLULAR PHONES in Anne Arundel County are getting a free ride at the expense of those who use traditional wired telephones. Cellular customers are exempt from the small monthly fee for 911 emergency service that regular phone users have long paid, even though they use the 911 system, too. State legislators recently passed a law allowing local governments to eliminate this inequity, and several jurisdictions, including Howard County and Baltimore City,...

The reasons PCs outsell the Mac 10-to-1 are numerous, but let's focus on two key issues: choice and price.All sorts of people need to use personal computers, and they have all sorts of requirements, budgets and experience levels. The PC marketplace offers any imaginable combination of price, service and selection; the Mac marketplace is dictated by Apple. PC users can buy a preconfigured Windows system with no installation needed or build one from scratch. There is a choice!A mildly experienced PC user willing to install Windows (it takes about 20 minutes)

Feeback • Email mobile@baltimoresun.com Apps iPad The Baltimore Sun iPad app combines the best of Web and print into one sleek, convenient experience. Keep up with the news • Whether it's a big story - or a small story that's big to you - you won't miss it. With top news right up front, you can easily navigate to topic-based sections, as well as breaking news and social media feeds, all updated throughout the day. …without being rushed • One-tap buttons make it easy to bookmark content for later, or download for offline viewing.

Natasha Brown-Wainwright, 41, still calls it The Twitter. She doesn't upload photos to Facebook without her 16-year-old daughter's help. Her grasp of the Web is fuzzy. But last summer, she decided to get a clue and join the latest, buzziest social media bandwagon around, Kickstarter, a site that connects entrepreneurs with small-scale donors. Her brittle business, barely making a profit after four years, needed a lift, even if it came from a source she still found baffling. "I think people in their 40s are beginning to realize their future is on the Internet, on Twitter, on Kickstarter," she says.

Atholton High School student Eric Lu whipped out his cellphone and displayed information about the 7.3-magnitude earthquake that occurred off the west coast of Sumatra on Tuesday. The information came courtesy of mobile application software called Quakes — Earthquake Notifications, and Lu vouches for its accuracy. After all, it's his app. Lu, 17, is an independent software developer who has four applications on Apple's App Store sites. They include Quakes, a free app that Lu says offers users information on earthquakes greater than magnitude 2.5, along with data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Howard County officials are launching a system to send urgent messages directly from police and fire departments, as well as select information about other county services via text messages or email. The notification service, NotifyMeHoward, will allow county officials to provide emergency notifications from the National Weather Service and public safety officials, but it will also let subscribers customize which county agencies they receive information from. Users can choose to receive information on recreation and parks programs, public works road projects or government news releases — all from the same system, beginning Tuesday.

The Baltimore Sun will begin charging frequent users of its website a subscription fee Oct. 10, joining several news organizations that have recently established price tags for online information. The Sun will allow users 15 free page views a month on baltimoresun.com. But for unlimited access, users will pay either $2.49 a week or $49.99 for six months. Those who already subscribe to The Sun's print edition will receive discounted rates of 75 cents a week or $29.99 a year for unlimited access to the website.

Where's that dislike button when you need it? Facebook's 750 million users awoke Wednesday morning to some dramatic changes on the social media site. And what did they do? Immediately posted about just how much they despised every last bit of it. "This is absolutely the worst of the many wrong-headed 'improvements' you have made, and that's quite a feat," a user named Franklin Habit wrote on the site's official Facebook page. "I think Facebook's usefulness to me has now been outstripped by its lack of ease in use. " Others, like Vincent Q. Nguyen boiled their frustration into a five-letter plea: "Fix it. " In Baltimore, blogger Meg Fairfax Fielding just wanted to turn back the clock — so her Facebook looked and behaved as it did the day before.

Last week, the Microsoft Corp. introduced DOS 6.0, the latest major revision of the most widely used personal computer operating system software.The new DOS adds a variety of new features, including data compression, that until now have been available only as add-on utilities from other companies.For people who are buying a new computer, some form of DOS 6.0 will probably come already installed on the hard disk. That makes the decision to use DOS 6.0 easy. And for most veteran PC users, the new DOS 6.0 features are an attractive bargain.

Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract. Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network's use of personal data. While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

A Northeast Baltimore clinic that once pitched on-demand methadone to desperate addicts during the late-night hours is focusing on a new idea — paying addicts to come in for treatment. "We are targeting a non-traditional population of addicts that isn't so interested in treatment," said the Rev. Milton Williams, who runs Turning Point Clinic, housed in his New Life Evangelical Baptist Church. "This will be an incentive. " The state has yet to approve the original on-demand, or "open access" idea, citing federal rules that require, for example, a lengthy examination of anyone getting methadone, a Schedule 2 narcotic.

This week, Watchdog wants to take a moment to alert Baltimore residents as well as those who spend lots of time in the city about a new way to report problems. Watchdog often hears a common refrain when talking to residents troubled by something they spotted in their travels: How should they report it? There's a new answer to that question with the launch of a free iPhone and Android 311 app. "The primary goal was to provide another tool, another way of access for the citizenry to submit problems to 311 for resolution," said Rico Singleton, Baltimore's chief information officer.