Office Spy Software by Microsoft

Microsoft is filing a software patent which able to spy or monitor employees. This reminds me a movie called “AntiTrust” which I watch in 2001. In the movie, the employer (the CEO in the movie really looks similar to Bill Gates) has software to spy on their employers. It can track every single detail what the employees do. At that point at time, I don’t think this kind of technology would come to reality because I thought it is somehow against human rights and privacy.

Now, this technology has been patented by Microsoft. According to the news, this technology can measure heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Wow! As long as you sit in front of your personal computer or workstation, your boss can track you down every single detail to review your performance.

Patent is just an idea. Whether it can be implemented and become useful in reality is still unknown. Few questions that I have are, will it be too much for office workers? What about freedom? Will the employee perform better or the other way round? Can I cheat and misuse the system? How accurate is this system? In my opinion, the idea is brilliant but not for office workers. It probably makes more sense for those critical job’s workers such as astronauts or operators in a factory.

Read the full article news here from TimesOnline.

Safe Browsing Feature in Google Desktop

I don’t aware of this feature in Google Desktop until one day it warns me about a potential harmful website. I thought all the way Google Desktop is doing indexing only. See the screen shot below:

At first, I thought this is something to do with the Google search engine. Eventually after a few times of this warning, I only realized it is something to do with the Google Desktop. It looks like the Google Desktop detects those sites based on the information from StopBadware.org. Badware could be some sorts of spyware, adware, viruses or Trojan horse programs

The website is http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums. You can try click it and see whether your browser can catch this or not. However, the website doesn't seems like have potential thread but to be safe, I didn't continue browsing in that website.

I think “Safe Browsing” is turned on by default. If not, you can perform the following instructions:

1. Go to preference page.
2. Click the “Other” tab at the top.
3. Tick the “Enable Safe Browsing” check box.
4. Click “Save Preferences” to apply the change.

Turn on the “Safe Browsing” feature in Google Desktop for better security. One thing good about this "Safe Browsing" it applies to any browsers (e.g. IE or Firefox).

Related Posts:

• My Google Desktop Settings
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• Best Free Anti-Spyware Software
  

Save File to Specify Folder in Firefox

All the while I thought Firefox has a bug that doesn’t allow user to save file to a specify folder when we download a file from internet. It always forces us to save the file the default folder (e.g. My Download). So I ignored it at the first place and waited for the fix with the later releases but I was wrong. It is not a bug, it is the Firefox default setting. When you click “Save File” it automatically save it the default download folder.

This is the default behavior – save file to default folder (I’m not sure why this is default but I don’t think it is really convenient). So what I did is I manually move the file in the download folder (default folder) to the specify folder where I want to save the file to. This is really stupid for what I did. Anyway you don’t need to.

If you want Firefox to save your file in a folder that you want, perform the following instructions:

1. Click Tools menu -> Options. The Options dialog box appears.
2. Under the Download, select “Ask me where to save files”.
3. Click OK.

From now on, Firefox will ask you where you want to save your file every time you download a file. I no longer need to manually copy files to the folder I want to save to.