Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Following a is a list of cool stuff I didn't have time to write individual posts about.

Random Web stuff

MyOpenID - If you don't know what OpenID is, think of it this way, one sign in authentication process for every website that supports it. Drupal 6 has it, Yahoo has it, lots of places have it - learn more about OpenID and get your own.

Tagurself - enter a feed link or a url and it generates a tag cloud for you.

TeamViewer - excellent remote desktop sharing software - and its free!

Microsoft SharedView - remote connection - sharing applications - great for training people how to do things remotely.

Firefox has several security settings you can use to keep your computer safe. There are also hundreds of extensions that you can add to give you further privacy & security. Lisa Hoover has written a great article on a few of these extensions. For example a good way to protect your computer is to prevent the browser from using JavaScript at Web sites without permission, the NoScript extension makes every site that uses JavaScript ask your permission before running it. It can render some JavaScript-heavy sites unreadable but provides a whitelist of acceptable sites that you can add to speed up your surfing experience.

At Jethro the extensions we always install on any new pc are, Plain old favourites, Session Manager, Tab Browser Preferences and Delicious.

Lena has been working for Jethro for one and a half years now. For the past several months she has been writing technical articles for me about stuff I find on the web. In case you were wondering who the Lena was that submits posts on this site, this is a short explanation.

How we work together is I tag web pages in delicious constantly. There is a rss feed link of the latest items on the right hand side as well as easy access to the major categories. When I want to report a specific page or the details of something we use here, I add a special tag for Lena. She then reviews those items and writes an article for me on here. She does these in bulk and queues them up for me. I can then edit them and release them at my leisure (Read - when I don't have time to write one myself!)

Its happened. Labours new minister for the idiots - I mean Internet, has advised that they will be supporting mandatory ISP filtering - supposedly to protect children from pornography. Download their "plan for cyber safety". The plan starts of talking about the need to educate and a combined approach by parents and teachers - sounds good. How do they plan to do this? By providing a mandatory clean feed. What the heck is that?

Lachlan Heyward from the Herald Sun writes:

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said everything possible had to be done to shield children from violent and pornographic online material.

"We have always argued more needs to be done to protect children," he said.