McAfee provides a nice add-on for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer called Site Advisor. I used to run McAfee Site Advisor v2.8 until recently. It identifies whether a site or a search result is safe to its knowledge or not and is one of the best add-ons to use in a cyber café.
Do not make the mistake of installing it or upgrading it now.
Firefox’s “Find Updates” in Tools –> Add-ons could not find the latest version 2.9 just like the Mozilla Add-ons website couldn’t recommend it because Site Advisor is not your normal .XPI add-on. One has to download and …read more

I started this month as the new damn PC guy and ended it by buying a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 in one of the Black Friday deals though I wish I had won a PC in a giveaway.
I had been opinionated about using push buttons and organizing program files, worried about the rising types of blog fraud and spam mail, conscious about the precautions to be taken in a cyber cafe and disposing e-waste responsibly, sad about the layoffs and the Mumbai attacks, and excited about the Ancient Rome 3D and the LIFE photo archive projects. I also began an ongoing …read more

In India, I visited many a cyber café which were in a sorry state both in terms of hardware and software, even those part of larger well-known cyber café chains. People visit these places usually for the Internet, and so it doesn’t matter whether the hardware and software are state-of-the-art or not as long as the web browser is functional.
Everybody, even those owning a PC may have to visit a cyber café some time or the other. Unlike a place like Starbucks with free wifi where you can plug in your PC into the network, a large number of cyber …read more