Yahoo! Get away from there - QUICKLY!

Although I am on vacation this is too important for quite a few of my customers. Here it goes:

If you have a Yahoo email address you need to read this! All others can relax - for now.

It has happened; this ZD-Net article has the details why for some of their users Yahoo has made it impossible to access their emails. Currently for "some users" only but what if this "test" proves successful for Yahoo? They will do it to all accounts! You can bet on that!

Why did these good people with a Yahoo email address get bloaked from accessing their emails? They used an Ad blocker because

1. they could not stand the many obnoxious ads and/or
2. they had heard about the many virus infected ads Yahoo has served in the past or
3. they just happen to be my customers.

My recommendation: Set up a Gmail account with Google. Be careful to give Google only the minimally required info about yourself.

Then set up your new Gmail account to automatically pull all mails from the Yahoo account. Google so far always has been far better at blocking malicious content from the Internet.

Let's hope that Yahoo's attempt to force feed advertisements fizzles out and becomes a big failure.

McAfee Siteadvisor Setup

McAfee seems to feel the heat, maybe generated by Microsoft Security Essentials?

McAfee’s IMHO very valuable Siteadisor service is increasingly being used to run with settings that help only McAfee and not the unsuspecting end user.

Here is a short tutorial on how I would set Siteadvisor’s options. This is based on the currently latest version of Siteadisor.

Click on the little vertical arrow to the right of the green (or grey) McAfee icon in the right bottom corner of the Firefox window. 








Then click on Options and in the General tab set “Add color-coded highlighting…” to Yes.

In the Secure Search tab Un-check the check box by “Add Secure Search to…”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I strongly suggest NOT to set Yahoo as the browser’s home page and NOT to use McAfee’s so called Secure Search as your browser’s default search engine.

Update July 18, 2010:

Just this moment I had to do remote support to help a customer who did not see the McAfee icon in the right bottom corner of the Firefox screen.

1.   The status bar was turned off. Naturally you can’t see something that is being displayed there if the status bar is turned off. You turn it on here:

2.   Almost every add-on in Firefox can be independently disabled or enabled. In this customer’s Firefox the McAfee Siteadvisor add-on was disabled. You can check and/or change that by clicking Tools, Add-ons. You get a window like this:
Highlight Extensions and find McAfee Siteadvisor. If the marked button reads Enable then it is disabled; click on Enable to do just that. You have to restart Firefox for the change to take effect.

End of Update July 18, 2010 

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

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Firefox Add-Ons

Firefox as a web browser tries to stay close to the web standards. Many of us like to have added functionality in the browser. This is achieved by adding little programs to the browser that supply these functions integrated into the browser. Such a little program is called an Add-On (or Extension).

Usually I install on all my customer’s machines three extensions:

1. Forecastfox shows the current weather conditions in the menu bar of the browser window.
   I instal this to discourage my customers from playing with WeatherBug and similar stuff because the latter are ad-ware or worse.
   Even a PC World article that was trying to absolve WB said literally "I'm not oblivious to WeatherBug's shortcomings. Previous versions have been resource hogs, and the freeware edition has a nasty habit of introducing unexpected pop-ups".
2. Adblock Plus suppresses all advertisements from known commercial advertisement servers.
   Ad blocking has become very important because way too many advertisements are carriers of malicious software.
3. WOT Web Of Trust marks Google and Yahoo search results with green, yellow and red circles to warn from visiting known dubious (yellow) or malicious (red) web sites.

You can easily check what Add-On is installed by clicking Tools, Add-ons, Extensions.

The Add-ons manager has a drop-down menu by the gear symbol; here you could manually check for updates. I usually just keep the check mark by "Update Add-ons Automatically". 

These Add-ons need to be kept up-to-date just as the browser itself.

After you install an update to Firefox or just because Firefox thinks “it’s about time to check again” you may see (when you start Firefox) a square window that is listing some add-ons and asking you whether to "Check now for updates" or "Cancel" the process. Please allow the checking for updates.

In this context a warning is required: Although generally extensions supply added useful functionality they can interfere with Firefox, sometimes even seriously interfere! If you want to experiment with extensions please at least refer to Mozilla's page about blocked add-ons and the page about slow performing add-ons.

Here is another article with much more detail about what else to update.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.