Stamp Column Archives

Glassine Surfer June 2004

Likewise, the Google Toobar is a brand loyalty device and one that isn't costing me any money. Google will search for whatever you type in the toolbar. The toolbar search just saves you the step of going to the Google URL, but in addition it can stop pop-up ads, highlight search text, search in news or groups, and autocomplete forms.

Google Toolbar
http://toolbar.google.com/

Naturally, where Google goes, can Yahoo! be far behind? The Yahoo! Toolbar will do what Google's does but at the Yahoo! site. Since Google was first, I have to think of this as a knockoff, though Yahoo's integrated bookmark menu, which works just like IE's, is nifty. The allure for the Yahoo bookmark menu is that you can access your account's bookmarks when you're connecting by satellite with your laptop from the Yukon. And Yahoo! has mail.

Yahoo Companion
http://companion.yahoo.com/

Did I say Yahoo! had mail? Well, by the time you read this, Google will have rolled out it's GMail system, another escalation in the battle for your clicks.
I'm sure that new wrinkle will show up in the Google toolbar soon.

GMail
https://gmail.google.com

Naturally, all toolbars are not created equal. Yahoo, Google, and eBay wear white hats, while many other sales outfits are renting white covers for their black hats. If you're out surfing and you get a pop-up notice about installing a toolbar from a company with a vaguely familiar but unheard of name, don't do it.
Many spyware marketers grab a hold of a browser's settings with a toolbar installation.

GMail was supposed to display those topic-sensitive Google ads, that the company sells, when the message was opened, but this marketing ploy has underscored the issue of privacy. The Big G was planning to scan e-mails for related ad topics, and raises the issue of who's reading your mail. We'll have to see how it comes out.

Last month I got a e-mail reminding me of sterling quality of the "All the Web" search engine. The letter writer mentioned that he found the results for "stamp collecting" more useful than Google's. I'd have to agree with that, but in the interim ATW was bought out by Yahoo!. Then soon afterward ATW's search results were scrapped in favor of Yahoo's homegrown list, which look to be more e-commerce friendly than useful.

Security in a Word

The passwords you use online are usually your first and last line of defense between hackers and creeps, and unfortunately few of us are any good at formulating good secure passwords.

Good passwords are supposed to use both lowercase and capital letters in combination with numbers and special characters. They shouldn't be based on any of your personal information, like your birth date or street address, and they shouldn't include any word found in a dictionary.

Then after you've chosen your password, you should have a way to remember it, and only use it for one online service, never for anything else. It's at about this point that I figure my new password will not only foil 99.7% of the script kiddies and eastern European mobs but will keep me guessing for hours when I try to get back online.