Summer's here, and it's time to come out of hibernation and enjoy the great outdoors. Here are our favorite tips, tricks, recipes, and apps for making the most of the season.

Photo by Salem Eames.

10. Master the Art of Grilling

We've covered grilling tips from head to toe here at Lifehacker, whether you're just starting out on the grill or you're making some serious DIY mods. From shaping the perfect burgers to cooking the perfect steak, we've done it all—just remember that the five second rule only applies outdoors. Be sure to check out our #grilling tag for even more summertime tips. Photo by Another Pint Please....

9. Keep the Bugs Away

Nothing ruins a warm evening like getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, so the trick to a happy summer is to stop them before they start. We've shown you how to avoid all the stings, bites, and nuisances you can imagine, including a few DIY tricks like repelling mosquitoes with plants, homemade candles, fabric softener, and even a bubble machine. Of course, if all else fails, you can conquer those itchy bites with a few household items. Photo by John Tann.

8. Avoid and Soothe Nasty Sunburns

You can develop a sunburn after only 30 minutes outside, so it's crucial that you protect yourself in the summer, especially if you are of the pale-skinned variety. We've covered a lot of ways to protect your skin from sunburn, including finding the best sunscreen with the least controversial ingredients. If that fails, you can treat that sunburn with a ton of home remedies, including vinegar, black tea, witch hazel, vanilla extract, and oatmeal. A lint roller does a surprisingly good job of cleaning up that sunburned skin, too. And, if you want to get techy with it, you can build your own electronic sunburn alarm to keep you responsible. Photo by kirinqueen.

7. Take Advantage of Tasty Summer Produce

There is nothing like freshly grown produce to go with those summer burgers, and it's the perfect time to grab it. If you're growing it yourself, make sure you plant it at the right time, and stock your garden with foods that are cheaper to grow than buy. For the foods you aren't growing, it's pretty easy to find a quality farm stand in all 50 states. Photo by Pam Brophy.

6. Keep Up on the Weather Forecast

We've shared numerous weather apps, notifiers, widgets, browser extensions, and Taskbar displays, so there's no reason not to know what you're getting into when you declare an outdoors day. Prepare yourself with sunscreen, avoid heat fatigue, and make sure you don't get soaked in an unexpected rain shower. If you're trying to avoid the technology, you can learn to predict the weather without a forecast, too.

5. Make Your Own Backyard Fun

If you've got a bit of time on your hands, you can have some serious fun at home with simple outdoor projects. We've shown you how to put together an outdoor movie theater, build a wood-heated hot tub, throw together your own Slip 'n Slide, or even turn scrap pipe into a fun lawn game. You can also take just about anything and turn it into a backyard fire pit, including an old washing machine. And, when it's time to relax, you can kick back with a nice DIY hammock.

4. Enjoy Nature with some Hiking and Biking

While there's loads of fun to be had in your backyard, take advantage of the weather by spending some time with nature (after all, just five minutes a day can boost your self-esteem). We've featured a few services that will help you find the nearest hiking and biking trails in your area, and help you plan a geo-tagged route so you won't get lost. Of course, you could always just use the ever-reliable Google Earth, too. Photo by Jeff Wright.

3. Tend the Perfect Summer Bar

Whether you're just making fruity pitcher drinks or something a bit more fun-inducing, we've shared a ton of tips and drink recipes help you up the ante. From making better ice to stirring better cocktails, you'll be set to tend the perfect bar this summer. If you end up going a little too crazy and alcohol takes its toll on your brain and body, though, we've also got a plethora of hangover tips for you. We've covered more drink recipes and tips than can be listed on this one page, so be sure to check out our #drinks tag for more.

2. Brush Up on Your First Aid

All that outdoor fun is likely to lead to an injury or two this summer, so prepare yourself accordingly. Learn to recognize the signs of drowning, polish your CPR skills, and build a basic first aid kit for the road. You can also grab a few emergency manuals online to make sure you know what you're doing. It also helps to be aware of the myths surrounding first aid so you know what not to do.

1. Keep Yourself Cool During the Heat Waves

When the summer really gets chugging, it's likely to get pretty hot outside. Once it gets to uncomfortable heat levels, make sure you've given your air conditioner a checkup, or at least put together a DIY cooling system for your home. When you do go outside, make sure you stay cool when exercising and know your body's best cooling spots. There's no reason you can't still enjoy the great outdoors just because the sun's out in full force. Photo courtesy of Becca Schall.

We've covered a lot of tips for summer fun over the years, so be sure to check out our #summer and #outdoors tags for even more ways to make this summer the best on record. And, if you've got your own tips for having fun this season, be sure to share them with us in the comments.

RSS Is Dying Being Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried

Update: I have now written a follow up article here.

Also, here’s a French translation of the previous version of this artice, kindly done by zar / teckee.

RSS makes it possible for me to check 100s of sites a day. I only actually implicitly go and read two, everything else goes through the RSS reader. If I didn’t have RSS then I wouldn’t bother keeping an eye on that many sites in the first place. Because me and you—dear technical readers—don’t have to suffer that routine anymore, it’s not reason that everybody else should. Bringing all the news updates straight to the user every day is a great killer feature that vendors should be waving from the fronts of their home pages! Browser vendors talk about their software helping users get the most out of the great ’Web; right next to “browsing”, RSS should be the second most important feature of browsers!

Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything.

Google Chrome has no RSS reader. It doesn’t even try to render RSS, or even help the user with it in any way. It gives less of a crap than a French man smoking a cigarette in public.

Mozilla will deal the final blow that kills RSS off. In Firefox 4.0, there will be no RSS button on the toolbar by default (it has been moved to the bookmarks menu). Mozilla outright refuse to listen to their users on this matter.

The reason for this is that statistically, only 3%–7% of users use the RSS button on the toolbar. If not enough people use it already, then how many less people are going to use it if it’s not there by default? How many regular users customise their toolbar to add a button they barely use?

Mozilla’s mistake here is to associate low usage with user dis-interest. If people don’t use it, the feature must not be necessary…? To my mind if the feature is not being used it’s because it’s badly designed and needs a rethink. The majority of users are missing out on a wealth of information because it is currently too time consuming to be regular in their habits. If RSS were easier (or even automatic) to discover and use, it would save them hours browsing every day!

The problem is the interface, not the technology. Let’s face it, RSS sucks and browser vendors care about it almost as little as they do about CSS printing (hello 10+ year old bugs!)

What does this symbol mean? How many regular users could name this symbol? None, I’d wager. If they know that this symbol means “RSS”, then what does “RSS” mean; how many users can explain that? Users are already adverse to clicking things they don’t understand so what do they think this symbol will do to their computer when it is not obvious a) what it is, and what it stands for, or b) what happens when it’s clicked? Will a dialogue box open? Will it ask questions? Will it print something? Will it ask for a name and password?

This symbol gives absolutely zero clue as to why it is present, what functionality it represents and how the user is supposed to use it.

The browser RSS button is the worst piece of UI since 2004.

This is a serious problem because a regular user understands Facebook and Twitter better than they understand RSS, and when browser vendors push RSS so far to the sidelines, companies will respond by replacing RSS with Twitter and Facebook accounts.

If RSS isn’t saved now, if browser vendors don’t realise the potential of RSS to save users a whole bunch of time and make the web better for them, then the alternative is that I will have to have a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or some such corporate-controlled identity, where I have to “Like” or “Follow” every website’s partner account that I’m interested in, and then have to deal with the privacy violations and problems related with corporate-owned identity owning a list of every website I’m interested in (and wanting to monetise that list), and they, and every website I’m interested in, knowing every other website I’m interested in following, and then I have to log in and check this corporate owned identity every day in order to find out what’s new on other websites, whilst I’m advertised to, because they are only interested in making the biggest and the best walled garden that I can’t leave.

If RSS dies, we lose the ability to read in private

• We lose the ability for one website we read to not know what other websites we read

• We lose the ability for a website operator to be in control of what he advertise to his users, rather than having no control over the aggregator’s “value add”. If Facebook, Twitter and Google are the ones making the money on adverts attached to another website’s content, then where does that leave the website owner to pay for producing the content?

• We lose the ability for websites to push updates to us on their own terms and infrastructure, rather than through closed APIs and flavour-of-the-month platforms. A website should be free to operate on the web without the requirement of additional unwanted accounts that need to be updated and managed and adhered to. If every website on the web has to have a Facebook account in order to exist in practical terms, the web is dead—competition is dead

  Every website should not look like a NASCAR advert for every sharing service in existence. One RSS button should do everything

• We lose the ability for us to aggregate, mash-up and interpret news without having to go through a closed API that may change on a whim, or disagree with our particular usage

• We lose a common standard by which content can be aggregated. A developer should not have to be fluent in Twitter, Facebook and a million different private APIs just to aggregate content from different websites you read

You should be writing to Mozilla, Google, Microsoft and all browser vendors to demand a first-class RSS experience baked in to your browser so well your grandmother could use it.

RSS Is the Browser’s Responsibility

More than one person has already said that I’m somehow hypocritical because my website doesn’t have RSS, it does have RSS! (here) You are probably not seeing it because of the very problem I’m talking about! Browser vendors are hiding RSS auto-discovery to the point nobody is aware it exists. I don’t have an RSS button in my HTML because it’s in the <head> and it’s up to the browser to do the best thing based on the user interface, operating system and device.

There isn’t enough screen space on mobiles for every website to use their own RSS button. Relying on the web author to present RSS is not going scale. Too many different websites, too many different designs, too many different platforms, browsers and devices. It is far better if browser vendors do what is most appropriate to the browser’s user interface, that the website itself can’t see, can’t change.

There appears to be a distinct lack of imagination going on with RSS. RSS does not have to be RSS shaped and look like RSS and do RSS things.

Why can’t, when you visit a blog article, the browser reads the comments RSS, and when you next come back to that article, it can tell you that there have been new comments since, and highlight them on the page?

Why do we go through the same daily routine of checking certain sites over and over again? Can’t our computers be more intelligent here? Isn’t the purpose of the computer / browser to save us time!? Why doesn’t the browser, when you open it, tell you how many new items there are, on what sites you commonly visit, without you having ever configured this?

You cannot do that with a web app like Google Reader. It cannot look at your whole browsing history like the browser can. It cannot tie together your bookmarks and RSS. It cannot make decisions for you based on what other sites on the web you visit often enough. Only the browser knows everything about you, and tries to prevent one website knowing what other websites you’ve been on. Only the browser is central and trust-worthy enough to be aggregating your information without fears of beaming it to advertisers. Only the browser can join the dots and empower the user, rather than entrap them.

When Mozilla release Firefox 4, then RSS auto-discovery moves out of sight from the most popular modern browsers. IE9 will add HTML5 (allowing IE users to see my site for the first time), but follow suit in removing the RSS button from view. I will be forced to add RSS hyperlinks to my HTML, which clutters up my website and links to a dumb page that doesn’t do anything helpful, or just doesn’t display at all. It confuses users, it wastes space and worse—it’s a really stupid way to be handling such incredible time-saving technology that should be part of every users’s daily interaction with their browser.

What Can Be Done

I’m open to fair representation, and actually quite honoured to have Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler defend Firefox on my forum:

How about spending the same energy you did on this rant coming up with a better design for RSS features and submitting it to the browser vendors who accept feature requests?

Asa Dotzler

This, I always knew would be the open retort, which is why I had staved off from writing this article until this point where I was finally too sick and tired to hold it back. I owe it to myself to put forward some good suggestions and will make it my aim to do so in due time.

Your post suggests over and over rss auto-discovery is being killed when it isn’t. You no more today have to add an RSS button to your page than you did a year ago. The UI for RSS has actually improved with a menu item that makes it clear what RSS is “subscribe”.

RSS never had a button in the toolbar. It had an icon in the addressbar. Now it has a full menu item in the bookmarks menu with a clear description of what it is “subscribe.” something it lacked before and which makes it far more discoverable than the little orange chicklett in the addressbar.

Your rant is misplaced. Mozilla, with the creation of live bookmarks and the first high-profile placement of the rss icon has done more to promote RSS than any other piece of desktop software. The UI, as it was — a tiny orange button in the addressbar wasn’t helping users use the feature so it was removed. Better UI, a menu item with a real description of what RSS does, “subscribe” replaced it. That’s a positive step, not a negative one. Though it may be encountered by fewer users, it will make much more sense to those who do encounter it.

Live bookmarks, the best RSS feature implementation I've seen to date in a web browser, is still there. Auto-discovery and a “subscribe” menu item is there. Mozilla has improved the design of RSS and you’re ranting as if they’ve killed it.

Asa Dotzler

My only response to this at this time is simply that what exists in current browsers isn’t enough. E-mail was once inaccessible to regular folks, now it’s an essential part of their day. I believe that RSS can also be every bit as important as a tool for browser intelligence to make the web easier and more user-centric.

Thank you to everybody who has spread this article about, it got a very large amount of attention and I hope some good has come of it. I have written a follow up to this article, here.

Discuss this in the forum

With Christmas just a few days away, I don’t think anybody’s in the spirit for a serious read. Holiday season is in the air and it’s all going to be fun and games from here on. There is no dearth of activities that can be cooked up to keep the family busy during Christmas. Thinking up gift ideas is just one part of the Christmas story. Shopping is of course another. More importantly, Christmas is also a great time to reconnect and bond with the entire family.

And families usually revolve around kids. We can give you some ideas on thinking up gift ideas for them. But you alone can give them the greatest gifts of all – time and love. It’s quite easy actually to have some togetherness when parents and kids love the world of computers. Free online Christmas games are just one starting point.

So, in the name of Yuletide, let’s hunt out some cool online Christmas games that you can play for free.

Elf Clubhouse

The Elf Clubhouse is where the elves come to rest and play. You can also join them. Northpole.com is a child friendly site designed on the theme of Santa’s village. Games are just one part of the fun story. The Elf’s Game Chest is full of cool Christmas online games you can play for free. It’s a nice mix ‘n match of educational games and puzzles. You can play the relatively easy ones like Trim the Tree or Counting Money. But if you really want to keep your child engaged, give him the Rubik’s Cube.

Christmas Cannon

The Flash cannon game is just one of the cool and easy online Christmas games you can play on this site. All you have to do is to use your space bar to fire a canon that delivers presents around the town. The Chimney Challenge is another Christmas game you can try and hit back at the tax accountants. But do miss Santa as he also pops out from the chimneys.

CBeebies

The BBC site for pre-school kids has a special Christmas section full of fun activities. Choose from the lineup of 15 games. You can start with a simple deck up of the Christmas Tree or the more musical The Big Coconut Adventure. If collecting coconuts doesn’t quite reflect the Xmas theme, check out Christmas Higgledy House.

Santa Snowball Shoot

We stay British on the British Council site. Here you have to help the little elf shootout the fake Santa with snowballs. The only thing to be careful of is that you don’t hit Rudolph the reindeer when he too runs in front of the fake Santa. The idea is to gain points and uncover the merry word at the top. Christmas Presents is a language game where you have to read clues and discover ten hidden words in the grid. All games on this site are arranged around the task of teaching a child the basics of the English language.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

The game is a bit dated, but it’s the fun that matters. The game is based on the movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s pretty faced paced so you have to be quick with your mouse click as Jack ‘The Pumpkin King’ Skellington has to drop gifts for Christmas. Can you help him do it?

Overtime

Overtime is a flash game I found that asks you to be a bit more ‘involved’. The game displays an ad while the game loads but that’s it. The basic idea of the game is to save Christmas by picking up an order for Santa, get it packaged and catch Santa before he traipses off.

The Nutcracker

This online Christmas game is just one of the online games hosted on this site. Freeaddictinggames.com has a large collection of Christmas games collected from different corners of the web. You have to perform a rescue act as the Nutcracker by fighting other game characters.

Santa Racers

Surprisingly, I found this flash Christmas game incredibly difficult to play as I just couldn’t turn the sleigh around. The game is a racing game where you have to race against the computer and help Santa get fit for the festive season. The game developers have another Santa based game – Sloshed Santa which is also a bit tricky with the arrow keys.

Santa Games

This is a virtual Santa Claus workshop for kids and parents who have lots of activities to choose from and that include lots of free Christmas games. So enter. Use the advent calendar to countdown the days to Xmas and play a random game a day. There are lots to choose from like the always reliable and fun Brick Game and the Tetris Game.  But I went for the Gifts and Spiders game.

Xtreme Xmas Shopping

During the festive season, shopping turns into a contact sport. You have to go on a shopping sprint and try to buy all the goodies before somebody grabs them all before you. The game is played across three levels and could be popular with the gender that loves shopping.

The better known Flash game hosting sites like Miniclip and Kongregate also have online Christmas games which you can try out if you run out of games to play. I don’t think you will, because as Christmas comes near, the web too becomes a bag of goodies. Tell us if you know any cool online Christmas game you like to play with your family.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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The Social Network, the movie about the murky origins of Facebook and its primary creator, Mark Zuckerberg, has been out for just over a week now. Just after its release, David Carr wrote a piece for The New York Times looking at how the "Film Version of Zuckerberg Divides Generations".

YouGov BrandIndex, a company that measures consumer perception, is now offering numbers to back up the perceived generational divide.

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"When you talk to people afterward, it was as if they were seeing two different films," Scott Rudin, one of the film's producers, told Carr. "The older audiences see Zuckerberg as a tragic figure who comes out of the film with less of himself than when he went in, while young people see him as completely enhanced, a rock star, who did what he needed to do to protect the thing that he had created."

Looking at the numbers from YouGov, the generational divide seems evident.

YouGov asks respondents to rate their impression of a brand on a scale of -100 to 100. During the time leading up to the movie's release, the 18-34 demographic had a brand impression of Facebook that dipped as low as 23.5 on Sept. 22, but nearly doubled to 51.5 on Oct. 6. The movie was released on Oct. 2. For the 35-49 demographic, the company identified "plenty of zig zagging", but notes that the 50-plus demographic saw a "decisive negative impact".

Coming from someone in that younger demographic, I have to say, I left the movie feeling inspired. The movie came off as the story of someone that pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, defied authority and won. On the way into the movie, however, an older man (definitely of the 35-plus demographic) commented on how the movie made him leery of ever using the site again.

I guess we were just generationally divided.

Opera Mobile Emulator is a must-have testing tool if you’re designing a website. Whether you develop using Linux, OS X or Windows you can test how your site will function on a mobile device quickly and easily.

Designing websites for desktops is hard enough. Between Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and the infamous Internet Explorer web developers have always had their hands full. You need to ensure users of each browser can use your site. With the advent of widespread smart phones, though, the problem is even more complicated. You need to ensure your site looks and functions well on mobile platforms.

Opera Mobile Emulator gives you a way to do just that. This desktop program mimics Opera’s mobile version perfectly, allowing you to test a given site quickly and easily. It’s also pretty fun to use as a mini-browser, if you’re looking for something like that, so even non-developers can have some fun with this one.

There are a number of mobile browsers out there; Opera Mobile is just one of them. If you want to use it on your cell phone, I suggest you read more about downloading Opera Mobile. If you want to give this program a spin on your desktop or laptop, though, keep reading.

Getting Opera Mobile

Getting Opera Mobile isn’t all that difficult; just head over to the Opera developer page to find out all the information you need to. You’ll find downloads for Windows, Mac and Linux there.

Linux users having trouble installing the Mobile Emulator, rejoice! There’s a portable version that can run on every Linux distro over at PortableLinuxApps, a site we’ve profiled in the past. Check it out if you don’t want to bother dealing with installation.

Using The Program

Fire up the program and you’ll be presented with your most-visited sites. Start using the program and you’ll quickly realize that this interface is not meant for the desktop; it’s very much a phone design. That’s obvious enough.

You can change a few settings, but not many:

Tabs aren’t visible on screen; rather, they are a button-press away:

As you can tell, this program is very much identical to the phone version of Opera Mobile. If you really want to see what it’s about I suggest you read about the mobile version of Opera.

What It’s For

As mentioned before, this program is perfect for testing whether your website works well on mobile browsers. While it’s specifically meant to show you how your site will look on Opera Mobile, it can also give you a general idea of how your site will look on all such devices. My site JustinPot.com, for example, sports a fairly unique interface. It’s kind of weird, I know, but I like it for some reason. How does it work on a mobile browser?

My experience was not a good one. Looks like I’ll be in the market for a new Wordpress theme within the next couple of weeks, or at least a good mobile plugin.

MakeUseOf does have a mobile version, however, and it works really well in Opera Mobile. Good to know.

Alternative Uses

Not really a web designer? You still might be able to have fun with this one. Mobile sites tend to be less cluttered than their desktop equivalents, so this browser could be a good choice for distraction-free reading. It’s also worth trying this browser out if you’re considering getting a smart phone; it’s a pretty good way to explore how the web will look on it.

Whatever you use Opera Mobile Emulator for, you have to agree that it’s cool of the Opera team to offer it. I enjoyed playing with it, and learned a bit about my own website in the process. You can too, so check it out!

As always let us know what you think in the comments below. Also feel free to ask for help, should you need it.

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Launchlist is intended to help and encourage web designers and developers to check their work before exposing it to the world at large.

The process is simple – Enter your name and email and the same for a recipient, your project details and website URL, and then proceed through the list of provided fields. If a question is irrelevant, you can tick N/A and it will be disregarded. You can even add your own custom fields at the bottom of the checklist if required.

Once submitted, you and your recipient/s will receive a report of your checklist with a summary for your records. Launchlist is and always will be free to use.

Source: http://launchlist.net/

Broken Social Scene know all about heartbreak-- they've spent most of the last decade crafting songs about it with almost unparalleled zeal. Their story is filled with scurrilous encounters, backstabbings, and break-ups on par with most 70s arena-rockers, and as a result, they've crashed and rebuilt countless times. Forgiveness Rock Record is built on those experiences, which lends the album a sense of gravity not heard from the band since the release of their epochal 2002 breakout, You Forgot It in People. Tortoise/Sea and Cake drummer and post-rock mastermind John McEntire produces.

At Facebook's f8 conference, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was removing restrictions on user data retention within Facebook applications. Previously, the company had a policy where developers couldn't "store and cache any data for more than 24 hours," Zuckerberg said while speaking to the audience of Facebook developers crowded into the San Francisco Design Center on Wednesday. "We're going to go ahead and...get rid of that policy," he said. The audience cheered.

But should Facebook end users cheer this news, too?

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The Change is for Developers, "No Effect" on End Users?

For developers, the removal of this technical limitation is great news. Apps had to constantly connect to Facebook's servers in order to refresh their data. Application load speeds were also affected as the apps would have to do this server pinging process upon first launch. Now the data the apps need will already be there - a change that may even result in noticeable performance gains for the end users of the applications.

Yes, Facebook Apps Have Your Data

The new policy, however, brings to light something that your average Facebook user may not have ever known at all: Facebook applications access your personal data.

We've looked at this issue before (see: "What Facebook Quizzes Know About You") after the ACLU put together an awareness campaign surrounding the privacy issues of Facebook applications. Using a sample app, the ACLU's Facebook Quiz, many everyday Facebook users were shocked to find that applications (like quizzes) could access almost everything on a user profile, including hometown, groups you belong to, events attended, favorite books, and more. What's worse is that your profile information becomes available to developers when your friends take the same quiz.

Why the Policy Change is Riskier Than It Appears

On its own, the new data retention policy doesn't change how developers can use the data they store. In fact, for some developers, it won't change much of anything at all - many simply ignored Facebook's rules about data retention in the past. Even with the change, it's just business as usual for those developers and their apps.

That said, the indefinite storage now permitted is concerning for a few reasons. As security engineer Joey Tyson points out on his blog, a site where he has detailed numerous hacks and security holes for Facebook, Google and more, the change makes Facebook apps "far more valuable targets for attackers."

A popular application's database could be filled with literally millions of users' personal details (Facebook now touts 400 million users and Facebook's most popular app, Farmville, for instance, boasts over 81 million users). If such a database was targeted for attack, the payload for hackers could be incredible.

In addition, Tyson explains, opportunities for behavioral targeting and visitor tracking are increased since developers can now maintain complete archives of profile information.

It's also worth noting, as tech blog VentureBeat points out, it's impossible for Facebook to know about how application developers are using the data they collect. If a developer chooses to use that data in ways that are misleading, malicious or that break the company's terms of agreement, Facebook may not be aware. With 500,000 supported applications, Facebook just doesn't have the resources to police the apps they house.

How to Remove Facebook Applications

To the end user, these changes may sound overwhelming and even scary. But there is something very easy everyone can do to minimize their risk and that's delete the Facebook applications you no longer use.

The process of doing so is incredibly simple.

After signing into Facebook, do the following:

1. Click on "Account" at the top-right of the screen.
2. Click "Application Settings"
3. Change the "Show" drop-down box to "Authorized." This will show all the applications you've ever given permission to.
4. In the resulting list, click the "X" button on the far right next to each app you want to remove to delete it.
5. On the pop-up box that appears, click "Remove" then click "Okay" on the next box confirming the app was deleted.

Repeat this process to remove all the apps you no longer use on a regular basis.

Doing this won't eliminate risk entirely - nothing can do that - but it's a good first step in reducing risk. However, as long as you have a Facebook account, your data won't be private. If true privacy is really a concern for you, it may be time to find that account delete button instead. (Hint: it's under "Account Settings.")

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