This is the first in a series of informational items to make life a little easier and more productive. Some days there is even a joke.
Today it is about a new plug-in for Internet Explorer and Fox Fire that identifies malicious sites. It is free from www.siteadvisor.com that was recently purchased by MacAfee. They use bots to download software from 700,000 sites to see if they are malicious. They have looked at even more sites for pishing and excessive popups. They have signed up at hundreds of thousands of sites and measured the number of e-mails they get. They have analyzed the links to and from these sites to see if they link to bad sites.
So, when you look for software to download and get thirty hits, some will have a red X next to them and others a green check. Which one will you download from?

Joke of the day:
A tourist walked into a pet shop near Microsoft's corporate headquarters and was looking at the animals on display. While he was there, another customer walked in and said to the shopkeeper, "I'll have a C monkey please." The shopkeeper nodded, went over to a cage at the side of the shop and took out a monkey. He fit a collar and leash, handed it to the customer, saying, "That'll be $5000." The customer paid and walked out with his monkey. Startled, the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said, "That was a very expensive monkey. Most of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why did it cost so much? The shopkeeper answered, "Ah, that monkey can program a computer in C -- very fast, tight code, no bugs, well worth the money." The tourist looked at the monkey in another cage. "That one's even more expensive! $10,000! What does it do?" "Oh, that one's a C++ monkey; it can manage object-oriented programming, Visual C++, even some Java. All the really useful stuff," said the shopkeeper. The tourist looked around for a little longer and saw a third monkey in a cage of its own. The price tag around its neck read $50,000. He gasped to the shopkeeper, "That one costs more than all the other put together! What on earth does it do?" The shopkeeper replied, "Well, I haven't actually seen it do anything, but it says it's a systems architect."