Free Friday is back! Today's Freebie is Photopea. It serves as a replacement for the quite expensive cloud-based Adobe Photoshop. (Doesn't replace the free and open source native program GIMP. I love GIMP.)

If you are a user of Photoshop, Photopea is super easy to use and it is full featured.

As a GIMP user, I had to do my usual tinkering around. But aside from the usual trips to the FAQs to figure out how to use some of the tools, it wasn't hard.

The tutorials are very good. There are only a few of them, but they are nice to have.

The FAQs are excellent. The FAQs are excellent because the Develops respond to questions. Seriously. They actually pay attention to the comments and respond. I know, right? There should be some kind of dev award for that.

Go ahead, give the free version a whirl. If you like it and want to get rid of the ads or just support the developer, you can upgrade to the paid version. The free version is great and the only tool you can't use is converting Sketch to PSD (no other program does that), which most people do not need.

Very, very cool online app! Click on the image to get to the app!

Huh. This is a big data breach. If I'm reading it correctly, it's data on 81,934,021 Americans in total. I'm not sure if that second data set is just part of the first.

Of course it was a data aggregation company. They use bots, crawlers and spiders to trawl the internet for information on people. Then they collate it. Then they sell it to sketch companies who use it to robo call our cell phones or send us spam. Or time shares. 😫

This is from the article:
"...56,934,021 US citizens, with information such as first name, last name, employers, job title, email, address, state, zip, phone number, and IP address"

...

"Another index of the same database contained more than 25 million records with more of a “Yellow Pages” details directory: name, company details, zip address, carrier route, latitude/longitude, census tract, phone number, web address, email, employees count, revenue numbers, NAICS codes, SIC codes, and etc."

I've been thinking a lot about how much information is online about all of us. There's a huge temptation to throw caution to the wind and just let it happen. Give various companies like Facebook, Google, Twitch, Yahoo or Twitter all the information they're grasping for despite all the warning bells in our heads.

It's sort of like being in the path of a speeding train and knowing that you will never get out of the way fast enough. It's kind of accepting the certainty of a death.

For us older folks, it's the death of privacy in a big way. We used to take it for granted that there was a major amount of time and work put into getting all of our information in one place. It usually involved trips to the library, the courthouse where we grew up and where we currently live.

We also depended on officials to guard our documents. The DMV didn't release our address and info all willy-nilly. Our home ownership documents were accessible, but you had to ask an actual person to get them for you. The same was true for marriage licenses. You could purchase an unlisted phone number. Relatives were yours to disclose or not.
Now? Look yourself up online. It's all there. The data aggregation companies are just collators. They just help other companies make the data work for them.

This is an intense topic and one that bothers me a lot. Click on the image to go to the article at the HackenProof blog.

I make mobile wallpapers as a hobby. Sometimes they are awesome and sometimes they turn out awful. When they turn out well, I'll share them! They will always be 720x1280, which is a common size for mobile phones.

Most people use Wikipedia. It's a staple of the internet and rightfully so - There is nowhere else you can go to find the depth and breadth of so many tv sh... Wait, I mean subjects. 
😉
Did you know that there is a lot more to Wiki than the 'pedia' part? Wikimedia Projects is full of amazing stuff as part of its mission for free knowledge for all. You can find books, courses, news, software, dictionaries, quotes, original translations, historical documents, instructional materials, a world-wide travel guide, a world of data and reusable media. There's also the Wiki that I get lost in - Wikispecies. Animals, plants and biology - Very cool.

Enjoy!