Given the recent rash of hacks, let’s talk a little about staying safe this holiday. You probably don’t need this guide, so pass it on to someone who does, like your brother-in-law, dad, or parole officer. Online safety and security is no laughing matter and this holiday thousands of us will wake up to empty bank accounts and zeroed PayPal balances if we’re not careful

There’s been no shortage of outrage over the TSA’s “naked” body scanners, which have been compared to virtual strip searches. For those of you who want to protect your private parts from being ogled by TSA employees, crowdsourced online retail site Betabrand is now offering a scanner-proof undergarment, aptly called “Privates.” The brainchild of Stephen Russell, the founder and chairman of surveillance search engine and facial recognition company, 3VR Security ; Privates essentially distorts the shapes seen in airport body scanners. The garment fuzzes out a traveler’s privates using body scanner resistant materials

Serial tech entrepreneur and investor, Elon Musk, and SolarCity— providers of solar power system and energy efficiency design, financing, installation and related services— donated a solar power generating system to the Hurricane Katrina- and BP Oil Spill-effected community of Coden, Alabama the company announced today. The system consists of solar panel arrays attached to a battery back-up system that will allow the South Bay Communities Alliance (SBCA) Hurricane Response Center to produce its own power, reduce its cost of operations and maintain power in the event of an outage.

eBay is setting records in terms of mobile sales this holiday season, announcing that yesterday was the marketplace’s biggest shopping day ever via mobile phones in terms of gross merchandise value (also known as GMV, the total sales dollar value for merchandise sold through eBay). eBay mobile GMV grew by 127 percent to $5 million in the U.S

It seems that whenever there’s a discussion around mobile location services, Google Latitude is treated as an also-ran. Foursquare and Facebook Places have been getting most of the buzz, and there’s also plenty of news around SCVNGR and Gowalla. Latitude, which launched in February 2009, rarely make headlines.

Lately, Google has been showing off Android phones with NFC chips in them that can power mobile payments. The newest Android, the Nexus S , is the first to ship with an NFC (near field communications) chip, and the technology could be the key to getting into mobile payments.

[Editor's note: Zynga launched CityVille on Facebook at the beginning of the month, an ambitious move to help the company grow beyond FarmVille and other older hits. We'll examine what's making it a hit in the article below, but the larger point it seems to show is this: after a slow year for many of the larger developers, massive and fast growth is still possible on Facebook's platform.] If CityVille were an actual city, it would now be the world’s second largest. Zynga’s newest game edged over 22 million monthly active users this morning, just eleven days after launching

The biggest difference between the Internet scenes in Silicon Valley and China this year?

As more and more consumers use their phones for both business and product search and purchasing, mobile ad formats for retailers are becoming a more compelling way to connect with these users.

Tim Ferriss is one of the world’s leading transcenders of limitations. Best known as the author of the 2007 monstrously successful self-help guide The 4-Hour Workweek , a #1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller that has accumulated over 1000 reviews on Amazon , the Princeton-educated and globe-trotting Ferriss is also a legendary bodybuilder, life hacker and re-inventor of the physical self. According to Ferriss, modern man is driven by two great fears: 1) Too much email