Cold climates pose a serious issue with photographers. However, knowing how to do a few things can completely turn your experience around. Here are a few precautions you should take when heading out in the cold to take some photographs!

Exercise Patience

To avoid condensation and fogging up your lens, it’s best to wait awhile whenever you step into any extreme temperature situation. Take this scenario for example: You're out in the snow and you return to the warm interiors of your wooded home. Instead of going click, click, click the moment you enter your home, it's best to let your camera warm up to the new climate. The best way to do that is to not only leave your camera cap on, but also leave it in the camera bag for awhile. That will not only help your camera adjust to the changed temperature, but it will also greatly decrease the possibility of the lens fogging up and condensing.

Juice It Up

Just as the sensor is important to a camera, the batteries are crucial for your digital photography experience. Therefore, it’s important to carry a few spare batteries wherever you go. Batteries are likely to lose charge faster in colder climates. One way of overcoming that hurdle is to carry spare batteries in your shirt, pants pocket or any place where they're close to your body. The warmer the battery, the better it will perform. Also, don’t panic if your camera says your battery is out of juice. You can make it work again if you warm it up in your hand or put it in your pocket for awhile. If you do it right, you can probably get a few dozen more pictures without any trouble.

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Take Care of Your Hands

Chilly conditions can hurt your hands, so you really need to take good care of them when you're out shooting. Without a steady hand, you risk the chance of bad composition. Even worse, you could develop frost bite in sub-freezing temperatures. Therefore, good, thin, warm gloves that not only keep your hands warm, but also help you operate your camera are a must buy.

Soak It Up

Both rain and snow can damage your camera and ruin your final images. Therefore, it's best to carry a soft, water absorbent cloth to dry off your camera whenever you're out on your photo expeditions. Happy shooting!

The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.

"While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children," U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said at a press conference on Thursday. "Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level."

Joining Cornyn was Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said such a measure would let "law enforcement stay ahead of the criminals."

Two bills have been introduced so far–S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Each of the companion bills is titled "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or Internet Safety Act.

Each contains the same language: "A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."

Translated, the Internet Safety Act applies not just to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and so on–but also to the tens of millions of homes with Wi-Fi access points or wired routers that use the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary addresses. (That method is called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP.)

"Everyone has to keep such information," says Albert Gidari, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm in Seattle who specializes in this area of electronic privacy law.

The legal definition of electronic communication service is "any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications." The U.S. Justice Department's position is that any service "that provides others with means of communicating electronically" qualifies.

That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too.

Under the Internet Safety Act, all of those would have to keep logs for at least two years. It "covers every employer that uses DHCP for its network," Gidari said. "It covers Aircell on airplanes–those little pico cells will have to store a lot of data for those in-the-air Internet users."

In the Bush administration, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had called for a very similar proposal, saying that subscriber information and network data should be logged for two years.

Until Gonzales' remarks in 2006, the Bush administration had generally opposed laws requiring data retention, saying it had "serious reservations" about them. But after the European Parliament approved such a requirement for Internet, telephone and VoIP providers, top administration officials began talking about the practice more favorably.

After Gonzales left the Justice Department, the political will for data retention legislation seemed to ebb for a time, but then FBI Director Robert Mueller resumed lobbying efforts last spring.

This tends to be a bipartisan sentiment: Attorney General Eric Holder, a Democrat, said in 1999 that "certain data must be retained by ISPs for reasonable periods of time so that it can be accessible to law enforcement." Rep. John Conyers, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that FBI proposals for data retention legislation "would be most welcome."

Smith, who sponsored the House version of the Internet Safety Act, had previously introduced a one-year requirement as part of a law-and-order agenda in 2007.

A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."

Because Internet addresses remain a relatively scarce commodity, ISPs tend to allocate them to customers from a pool based on whether a computer is in use at the time. (Two standard techniques used are the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet.)

In addition, Internet providers are required by another federal law to report child pornography sightings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is in turn charged with forwarding that report to the appropriate police agency.

The Internet Safety Act is broader than just data retention. Other portions add criminal penalties to other child pornography-related offenses, increase penalties for sexual exploitation of minors, and give the FBI an extra $30 million for the "Innocent Images National Initiative."

By Dennis O'Reilly McAfee's SiteAdvisor security service leaves some Web developers scratching their heads over inconsistencies in its green-yellow-red ratings. The company's promises of more-frequent reviews of its site classifications are welcomed by site owners struggling to win SiteAdvisor's approval.

The Feb. 19 Top Story by editorial director Brian Livingston described McAfee's attempts to ensure that the security ratings generated by the company's SiteAdvisor service are up-to-date. That column followed the previous week's Top Story by Mark Joseph Edwards, which reported that SiteAdvisor's ratings could be as much as one year old.

Eric Legge wrote in to tell us of his efforts to have his site retested after it was assigned a yellow rating by SiteAdvisor:

• "SiteAdvisor is talking rubbish about dealing with complaints promptly. I complained by e-mail and by letter to the [McAfee] CEO about every page on my site having a yellow rating in October 2008. I also requested that my site be revisited after I had removed the [offending] link, which I removed only because I have probably been losing visitors for years because of this lousy service.

  "My entire site [PC Buyer Beware] still has a yellow rating for a link to this page, which SiteAdviser has given a green rating! [The page contains] a valid fix for the Smitfraud virus.

  "You only have to search the Web to find a number of site owners who have had their sites' existence threatened by SiteAdvisor errors. Thanks for taking this 'service' to task."
  

So many people street value of cialis asked us about SiteAdvisor alternatives that we're planning a technical review of the accuracy of SiteAdvisor, Web of Trust, and other site-rating services. This complex task will take a while to finish, but we hope to offer our recommendations sometime within the next few weeks. At this point, it's not clear how bad the situation is and which services are really the most correct.

SiteAdvisor plug-in may not be easy to remove

Our report on SiteAdvisor caused many readers to uninstall the plug-in for their browsers. Unfortunately, getting the program off your system may require some extra effort, as reader Chris Coddington discovered:

• "In the recent article on SiteAdvisor's retesting policy, I and most others certainly read between the lines and know what to expect if [we] continue to use the 'service.' I suspect that many users — including myself — are uninstalling SiteAdvisor. If we can't trust the [service's] red warnings, we can't trust the green warnings, either.

  "Now the only problem is how to uninstall the beast! It certainly can't be found [by clicking] Start, All Programs, and I don't have any other McAfee software on my system. It sounds like they are hiding it someplace. It's getting to sound almost like another virus to worry about!"
  

SiteAdvisor can be removed via standard Control Panel applets: Add or Remove Programs in XP and Programs and Features in Vista. In XP, another way to get to Add or Remove Programs is to click Start, Run; type appwiz.cpl; and press Enter. An alternative way to open Programs and Features in Vista is to press the Windows key, type appwiz.cpl, and press Enter.

Larry Croy offers another suggestion for secure browsing:

• "Just a heads-up for another free alternative to SiteAdvisor. I have been using the Finjan SecureBrowsing software [more info] for several years with no problems. They have both IE and Firefox versions."
  

As I mentioned above, we'll be taking a closer look at Web security programs in a future article. Stay tuned!