Information Research Weblog

I imagine that most readers of this Weblog will have heard of Google's acquisition of gapminder.com and its Trendalyzer software. Recently, in relation to this, I came across a reference to www.ted.com, where TED = Technology, Entertainment and Design, and to a video by Hans Rosling, a Professor of Public Health in Sweden with 20 years experience of health research in Africa. Rosling was the inspiration behind gapminder.com and the TED site has an incredible video of his performance at the annual TED conference in Monterey, California. I recommend it: for the subject matter, for the presentation and demonstration of the power of Trendalyzer, and for the surprise ending. Go take a look.

Take a look also at the other videos available - there are some outstanding presentations: I particularly liked that by Evelyn Glennie, the star percussionist, who has been deaf since she was 12 - wonderful stuff; but there are many more available, such as James Watson, Jimmy Wales, E.O. Wilson - and that's just in the "Ws"! I think I'm going to be viewing these videos for weeks ahead!

This from John Williams, author of a letter to the editor in the last issue of IR:

Good morning, Professor Wilson.

1.In case you missed it, the announcement of the sad and untimely death of Michie and McClaren can be found at either of these sites.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/09/car_crash/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6281348.stm

2. Regarding my Letter in the current issue of IR, I have happened to find an even longer term that the Patent Office took in granting a patent. This was William Friedman's application of 1933 for a Cryptographic System. No version of the patent was ever declined by PTO (unlike Mooers' experience). However, it was not granted until August 2000, 31 years after his death. The Assignee was the National Security Agency. The Patent Number is 6,097,812. It would make an interesting book to discover the top 25 information technology patents that took the longest to be granted, by the way.

3. My two colleagues on the Mooers project have returned from a session of research at the Smithsonian Archives and their Watson Davis collection. Davis was Mooers' father-in-law. A number of things turned up, however there is one that might interest you. This was a letter to Davis written by John Mauchly in 1947 with a blind copy to Mooers. Mauchly sought Davis' advice on how to keep the general public informed of progress in electronics and computer science. Davis ran Science Service at the time and was able to give Mauchly some direction by return letter.

However, it's serendipitous that there is evidence of a need for popularizing computer science from Mauchly at the same time as Mooers and his wife published Electronics: What Everyone Should Know (1947: Bobbs-Merrill). Mooers, in publishing this book, was following the example of his friend Robert Fairthorne who had published several titles in Longman's March of Time series of popularizations of science/technology in the 1930's and 40'. Fairthorne's topics were aeroplanes, wireless, and cinema and television, among others. The wireless introduction became a British Army field manual during World War II, I believe.

4. One of my colleagues on the Mooers project is Gwen Alexander. She has just been appointed Dean of the Library School at Emporia State University. If you are coming to the States in the future, please drop me an email. Gwen would enjoy hosting a lecture by you to her students at the School. I've spoken to her and you can consider this a standing invitation.

Finally, congratulations on being number six in the survey of library science/information management literature. When I wrote the cohort section of the introduction to our bibliography of information retrieval and data mining five years ago, I predicted that a cohort would form around you and Information Research. That has happened. Your status pleases me and the recognition is well deserved.

Best regards,

John

This from Slashdot:

"A judge has delayed his ruling on the eBay patent infringement case. eBay has been involved in a legal dispute over the use of its popular "Buy it Now" button, which allows consumers to skip the bidding and purchase items on eBay directly. The patent suit was filed six years ago by MercExchange L.L.C. In May of 2003, a jury ruled in MercExchange's favor finding that eBay did in fact infringe on the patent, but in 2005 the US Supreme Court ruled that MercExchange was not automatically entitled to a court order blocking the offending service, essentially handing a victory down to patent reform advocates. However, the ruling by the Supreme Court does not affect the final judgment of the court."

Does this mean that 'Search' button on this page, or 'Post Item', or any other button (which, presumably, may simply be a link - like 'Home' on this page, could be illegal on the grounds that someone patented the idea?

Software patents really were the biggest nonsense perpetrated by the US Patent Office and are completely unnecessary: a program can be copyrighted, and copying of the entire programme or any significant part of it would be an infringement of copyright. Patenting simple interface features is crazy!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is interviewed in this clip and defines the Semantic Web as 'the data web', suggesting that the emerging Semantic Web standards are all about enabling sites to be created that pull data in from various data bases to create new associations of data. It may be that 'data web' is a better term than 'semantic web', since the Web is already 'semantic' (see previous message), otherwise we wouldn't understand a word of what is there :-)

In an earlier post I mentioned TiddlyWiki and my applications of it here and there. News about TiddlyWiki is best gathered by becoming a member of the relevant Google Group: one is for users in general and is mainly used for announcements and questions and answers - post a question and you'll usually get a very quick response from someone in the Group; the other is for those with the necessary technical skills to develop applications on TiddlyWiki or to contribute plug-ins and modifications.

Scanning both of these groups can be useful if you get into using TiddlyWiki: for example, a recent post drew my attention to Dave Gifford's Notes wiki, which is a nicely customised version for note taking with an excellent means of generating lists from the tags: you can get a version for yourself, if you right click on this link and then "Save link as...". That wiki advertised Dave's BibblyWiki - a version for creating and displaying bibliographic records of books and articles - again, get a copy by right clicking on this link and going through the same process. There's also a version in Spanish

The Developers' Group brought my attention to a number of things: a version of the basic TiddlyWiki in Brazilian Portuguese, and another in Portuguese Portuguese, and a very clever bookmarklet, which replaces the built-in search module of TW with YourSearch - not easy to describe what happens as a result but it means that you can search any TW with YourSearch. Of course, you need Firefox as your browser, although we are told that it may work in Opera and Safari

There's a lot of chatter on the Net about the latest Pew Internet study, which categorises IT users according to their relationship with the technology, from the Ominvores, who constitute 8% of the population of the USA, and who 'have the most information gadgets and services, which they use voraciously to participate in cyberspace and express themselves online and do a range of Web 2.0 activities such as blogging or managing their own Web pages.', to those who are Off the Network, and who have 'neither cell phones nor internet connectivity tend to be older adults who are content with old media', who constitute 15% of the population

c|net news has a nice pie chart of the data.

Rather more than 30 years ago I produced what was then called a 'programmed text' on chain indexing - apparently (at least according to a Google search) it still appears on some reading lists. The programmed text, in effect, implemented on paper the notion of hypertext.

I've occasionally thought of updating it, but not seriously until TiddlyWiki appeared on the scene. Now, as a result of a couple of days' work in retyping the text of the book, 'An introduction to chain indexing' is reborn as a true hypertext.

One of the benefits of using TiddlyWiki for this purpose is that the user can simply download a copy to his or her own hard disc (or portable medium of any kind) and use the text whether connected to the Internet or not, since everything needed to manipulate the text is actually built into the Web page.

I'll be interested to hear from anyone who uses the text or teaches the concept.

For those who thinking of moving up a class in wireless routers, here's a horror story about the gear. (Thanks to Bill Drew and the LITA discussion list.)

Quite by chance, I came across one of the most impressive pieces of 'Web-ware' I've seen to date. It is a stand-alone, browser-based, javascript-run personal wiki, which you can put on a Website, or simply use on your own PC to collect recipes, book details, extracts from papers to help you prepare a paper, organize your Ph.D. thesis notes, or whatever. Naturally, I couldn't help using it and you'll see the result (which took about a day's work to construct) in inforesearchwiki. This is, in effect, a database of the abstracts to papers published in volume 12 of Information Research, with a subject index constructed from the 'tags' (or index terms as we old school information scientists prefer) associated with each abstract.

TiddlyWiki has an enthusiastic world-wide communitity, doing all kinds of things with it and producing a variety of style sheets and plug-ins. As more than one user has said, it is a 'mind-blowing' piece of gear.

According to The Association of College and Research Libraries, Information Literacy's website: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/acrlinfolit/informationliteracy.htm, it provides such a vast of valuable information for librarians, students, and researchers. The layout of the information is clearly organized for first time users and frequent users. The website provides users with the overview, standards & guidelines, resources & ideas, professional activity, and news. When I attending college for my undergraduate degree, it would have been benefical if I knew about this particular website...it probably would have made my research steps much easier.

For those few remaining who believe that governments learn from the past, the current Private Eye has a fascinating account of the IT disaster (currently costing £12.4 billion!) in the National Health Service. Unfortunately, you'll have to buy the magazine to read it - but it is a good £1.50 worth!

In 1997 Tony Collins published "Crash: ten easy ways to avoid a computer disaster", which was republished a year later with a different subtitle and a 'year 2000 update'. In this book, Collins itemised the causes of computer disasters and it seems that pretty well every cause is found the the current debacle over the National Health Service. Overweaning ambition on the part of a health minister, personal pride on the part of the project manager, credulity of practically everyone in believing what the consultancies and software houses told them, etc., etc.

The only conclusion one can reach, given that Collins's record of computer disasters has been around for the past 10 years is that ministers and their adivising civil servants can't read.

Finally, as this announcement tells us, Gmail will now accept applications directly, rather than being restricted to invitations from existing users.

Open sign-up for Gmail

No more waiting for an invitation: You can now sign up for your own Gmail account. Sign-ups are open worldwide in more than 40 languages. Now everyone can get the benefits of Gmail: fast and accurate search, a ton of free storage, chatting within Gmail, and access from your mobile phone. You can still invite your friends, but now you can also just tell them to visit the Gmail homepage. Don't miss the 4-part Gmail Theatre video, featuring our engineers and a cast of puppets, now playing on YouTube.
http://www.gmail.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YUugB4IUl4

The website http://www.libraries.psu.edu/ebsl/searchstrategies.htm provides the reader with great tips and ideas when searching for specific information. After reading the information on the website, it actually made my new searches easier with more articles that pertained to my topics. In the first section under Vocabulary Section, it discusses how one should keep a research log. Keeping a research log will save a lot of time by just jotting down little steps for each search. This is very important when you are trying to do a research paper.

I see that the BBC's technology news

has an item today on 'social tagging' - i.e., 'indexing' :-)

In the article entitled, "Public Services in Special Collections" by Florence Turcotte it explains how some research libraries are trying to bring in K-12 students into the "real research world." I think it would be very cool for a k-12 student to have field trips to famous public & research libraries especially in New York City. I also believe the children will be amazed at the architecture of the building let alone the information inside. If students were more exposed to the "real research world" as they grew older they will appreciate the nature of research. When I was in high school my firends dreaded going to the public library to research information. They dreaded the fact because I never learned how to research information correctly. Luckily, I worked at my local public library since I was about 14 years old...so I was taught by the reference librarian (friend/co-worker. My experiences with researching information in high school was a breeze. It was just a matter of when I was going to sit down and read, digest and spit out information on my computer.

I see that with Firefox 2.0 only recently released, Mozilla already has an advance version of Firefox 3.0 out - it's called "Gran Paradiso Alpha 1", presumably a reference to the Italian national park of the same name :-) But who can tell where they get these names from? The pilot of version 2.0 was "Bon Echo" - which is a provincial park in Ontario. Perhaps the development team has a thing about parks?

I have some grouses with Firefox 2.0 - the location of its new tab button is not as convenient as the one in Maxthon (where it appears at the end of the existing tabs - very convenient), and its pdf download can still be messy. In fact its downloads are a disaster - everything I simply want to view has to be downloaded and saved somewhere - VERY messy.

If you are really, really into browser development, there's also a Firefox 3 wiki.

I'm really torn, but currently I'm using Maxthon more than I'm using Firefox.

Free Conversant has a feature that enables me to prevent a long message from being posted on the e-mail list. I hope I've managed to implement it - if so, you will not have received a message about the hits on papers in Information Research. If you would like to see the message, go to http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/798

In the UK, Internet service providers advertise 'up to 8Mb' broadband - a bit of advertising weasel wording (with small print get out clauses) that hasn't been thoroughly stomped on yet.

What 'up to 8MB' really means is that you will never get anywhere near 8MB speeds - in fact, on average, across all providers you'll be lucky to get half of that and most of the time you'll get less than half. The broadband speed tester Nuria has data on a number of suppliers:

	Provider	Maximum	Average kb/s
1	Telewest Blueyonder 10 Mb elite	10240	5250
2	Telewest Blueyonder 4Mb complete	4096	2842
3	BT Broadband Option 4	8192	2420
4	Tiscali Broadband Max	8192	2307
5	BT Broadband Option 3	8192	2170
6	BT Broadband Option 1	8192	1982
7	BT Broadband Option 2	8192	1970
8	Plusnet Broadband Premier	8192	1931
9	Tiscali 2 Mb unlimited	2048	1438
10	Tiscali 1 Mb unlimited	1024	679

From this, it is pretty evident that consumers would be sensible to resist the Siren call of 8Mb and opt for a 4Mb cable connection - they won't get 4Mb, but at least they will be getting better speeds than most of us who have the 'up to 8Mb' connection!

The big question here is, 'Why does Ofcom - the communications regulator - allow them to get away with it?'

New developments in the Pipex battle. I've been contacted by the company after writing to the CEO (who, needless to say, lacked the courtesy to give even a token response himself) by someone who claims that my experience is only typical of broadband users generally! This is an outright lie: I've used the ADSLGuide.com pages to compare all of the providers in the UK - and Pipex turns out to be one of the worst. IDNet, Ke-Connect, Supanet, Twang and Zen Internet are the top performers as far as speed is concerned - regularly achieving 75% of their advertised speeds.

I also used the line checking services of a couple of these providers and they note that I can get up to 2Mb/s at present, with the prospect of 'up to 8Mb/s' in the future. (That 'up to' is really weasel wording on the part of companies!)

A further check on the status of British Telecom's exchanges (upon which all these providers rely) tells me that my loca exchange, is still undergoing upgrade, and is not expected to be finished until 2nd December. Now - if I can discover this, I think I can claim that Pipex Homecall has been mis-selling its services, since they would evidently know that the full service would not be available - I'll be asking them for a rebate for the couple of months of slow speeds.

I recently made the most stupid decision to swith ISP from Pipex, with a 2MB connection to Pipex Homecall with, supposedly, an 8MB connection. Actually, British Telecom told me that the line was capable of 6.5MB rather than 8, but, still, I expected an improvement.

Silly me! The service in now actually slower than the previous 2MB connection - this morning, for example, it was running at about 1MB, and that was an improvement over the 0.5MB and 0.7MB of previous days.

I had expected that Pipex Homecall would be using the Pipex servers that had always given me good service, but I learn that the service is actually provided by Tiscali, which has one of the worst records for customer service in the UK - there was not mention that Pipex would not be the provider when I took up the offer.

In fact, broadband in the UK is in a complete mess - even the cable company NTL, which offers 10MB, can't actually do better than about half that speed most of the time and I don't think there is a single 8MB provider in the country that is matching its advertised speeeds.

There's a clear message here - if your 2MB provider is doing a reasonable job, don't think of switching to an offered 8MB - it's a fiction. I'm not pursuing formal complaints through Ofcom, the communications regulator - as are many more: perhaps we'll have some influence on the outcome.

1. Google

The Guardian newspaper has an interesting article about Google getting into the political lobby business. With all of the threats to 'net neutrality' and related issues, this is probably not before time!

2. Firefox

Version 2.0 is due to be released at 17.00 Pacific Standard Time today - 00.00 GMT. According to the BBC News report:

The first version of Firefox was released in November 2004 and since then has steadily been chipping away at the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

Now it is believed to enjoy a 12-15% market share of the net browsing market globally. But, said Mike Schroepfer, vice-president of engineering at Mozilla, in some nations the share is far higher.

Mr Schroepfer said that there were about 12 big improvements in Firefox 2.0 along with thousands of minor tweaks and bug fixes.

Big changes include a phishing finder that alerts people when they stray on to a site that tries to trick them into handing over login details for a bank or other valuable service.

Another change was a spell checker that keeps an eye on every bit of text typed in almost any Firefox browser box be it in a web-based e-mail program or an add-on that lets people post blog updates directly.

Firefox 2.0 also has an improved session restoration system that will let users resurrect tabbed webpages they accidentally closed or will re-start a net session at the point before a crash.

Other changes include improvements to the web feed, search engine and add-ons manager.

So Internet Explorer Version 7.0 is finally out, but, according to a couple of reviews I've seen, still playing catch-up with Firefox and, when Firefox 2.0 is out (coming shortly), presumably IE 8.0 will have to get under development. The most complete review so far appears to that on PC World's Website. The crazy thing for IE users is that browsers using the IE engine have been providing some of the new features for some time - see Maxthon, for example - so the died in the wool IE user needed have waited all this time for something better. And, of course, Opera is still going strong and had most of the features that IE is finally bringing on stream some time before Firefox.

Just for interest, readers of Information Research over the past month have been using the browsers like this:

IE	79.81%
Firefox	15.70%
Safari	1.81%
Opera	1.07%
The rest	1.61

That's still a massive lead for IE and the picture in the rest of the Internet user world is usually portrayed as IE having about 93% of the total.

The second Pew Internet and American Life report on the future of the Internet is out, and attracting interest. Be careful, however, in accepting the ideas. It is based, in part, on whether or not the respondents accepted the offered 'scenarios' of the future and those scenarios seem to have been rather carelessly constructed. Below are the scenarios that achieved more than 50% agreement.

A global, low-cost network thrives: By 2020, worldwide network interoperability will be perfected, allowing smooth data flow, authentication and billing; mobile wireless communications will be available to anyone anywhere on the globe at an extremely low cost——56%

Mmm. Does that mean that the commercial companies are going to turn into charities? Given the merger and acquisition tendency, I'd expect the 'low cost' to be something of a mirage! 2020 may be just a little too early for this, unless the net becomes a public utility paid for out of taxation, world-wide. That would be the sensible thing to do to ensure coverage and take-up, otherwise it is going to be slow and spasmodic.

Virtual reality is a drain for some: By the year 2020, virtual reality on the internet will come to allow more productivity from most people in technologically-savvy communities than working in the "real world". But the attractive nature of virtual reality worlds will also lead to serious addiction problems for many, as we lose people to alternate realities——56%

Sounds confused to me. Where is this 'virtual reality' that can allow actual physical products to be produced? Real services, external to the Web, to be delivered? The scenario confuses two applications of virtual reality: one in which work is done, which is likely to be only as addictive as work is in the 'real world'; and one in which play is done. It's in the latter that addiction is likely—in fact it's already here.

The internet opens worldwide access to success: In the current best-seller The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman writes that the latest world revolution is found in the fact that the power of the internet makes it possible for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. By 2020, this free flow of information will completely blur current national boundaries as they are replaced by city-states, corporation-based cultural groupings and/or other geographically diverse and reconfigured human organizations tied together by global networks——52%

I have difficulty with the concept of 'access to success'. Success is not something to be 'accessed' and used; it's something to be achieved. This is woolly thinking on the part of the scenario writers. What if an alternative scenario had been posed: The capacity of the Internet to allow communication and interaction is likely to increase feelings of national identity and strengthen the opposition to globalisation. National communities, bound together through the Internet, will establish services that bypass the global corporations and foster strong local suppliers.

Some Luddites/refuseniks will commit terror acts: By 2020, the people left behind (many by their own choice) by accelerating information and communications technologies will form a new cultural group of technology refuseniks who self-segregate from "modern" society. Some will live mostly "off the grid" simply to seek peace and a cure for information overload while others will commit acts of terror or violence in protest against technology——58%

Oh heaven, what a mish-mash of ideas! No wonder it has the biggest proportion of agreement - it's almost impossible to figure out what one is supposed to be disagreeing with. Where, exactly, are these people going to be 'left behind'? We still need bus drivers, shop assistants, welders, plumbers, etc., etc., etc. Just because some of them may not be totally wrapped up in the Net, they are going to be 'left behind'?! What nonsense. And these plumbers, bricklayers, electricians are going to be motivated to form 'a new cultural group' - I must have a word with my builder about that and see what he thinks. Millions of people (in fact the majority of people in the world) already live 'off the grid' and get on with their lives and work without worrying about being in this condition.

I may be giving the impression that I am not entirely sold on the ideas on this report, but do read it! Critically! The more critically, the better: because people are going to be quoting this stuff as what is actually going to happen.

Of interest to US readers of this Weblog and anyone travelling in and around the USA, is the guide to wi-fi connections in US airports. Available from TravelPost.com, it claims to provide, the most complete listing of wireless Internet access, service providers, airport coverage areas and Internet subscription pricing plans available. With TravelPost.com's guide to airport wifi, travelers can easily determine which airports offer wireless Internet access and which airports offer free wireless high speed Internet access.

That's 141 airports from Akron-Canton, where the wi-fi is free to Wilmington, where it is also free, via Atlanta-Hartsfield, where it costs $9.95 a day, Chicago O'Hare ($6.95 a day) and New York, JFK, where it is also free. There's also a handy link beside each entry to a local hotel list.

This week's Guardian technology supplement has a short article by long-time commentator, Jack Schofield, on the recent AOL security lapse that enabled the identification of people using its search engine (provided by Google). Jack raises the issue of using privacy software and services to hide one's identity and provides some links. The most useful of these, at least as far as I could determine is the Electronic Privacy Information Centre which is a page of links to 'Snoop Proof Email', 'Anonymous Remailers' and a variety of other tools. This is a good spot if you want to 'snoop proof' yourself.

I was woken at 4.20 this morning (not my best time of day!) to participate in the ISIC Conference in Sydney, Australia, over Skype. The folk at Univ. of Technology Sydney had set things up so that I could hear the action there and they could hear me. If we'd both had Web cameras, of course, we'd also have been able to see each other.

The reason for this is that David Allen was giving my paper in my absence and I was 'virtually' there to answer questions and, later, to participate a little in a discussion on the future. All went smoothly for a couple of hours - it seems that I was fully audible at the other end and I could certainly hear everything I needed to hear.

And the telecomms cost - zero of course.

I have been using Internet Explorer 7, Beta 2 for the past few days and find it a huge improvement on version 6.0 - this one could be a real Firefox killer. IE7 appears to be totally stable on my laptop in this Beta version, although we may have to wait a month or two for the final version. The new features include stuff that is old hat so far as Firefox users are concerned - tabbed browsing, for example, but the whole interface has been re-engineered to provide more screen space for Web pages. The new positions for some of the old icons takes a little getting used to and the old menu of File, Edit, View, etc. is optional rather than mandatory - I've been keeping it there as an interim measure until I figure out how to do things without it.

There are some things that IE7 does better than Firefox in terms of tabbed browsing - for one, there's a 'new tab' button beside the last tab in the row and a 'close tab' X on each tab - both of these features make it much easier to use tabs than in Firefox. Another feature (which can be provided for Firefox by an extension) is a new 'Quick Tabs' button, which brings up a page consisting of clickable images of. all pages currently open. With many tabs open, this is a Godsend.

Information Week has a feature comparing the two browsers, which concludes:

On a straight, feature-for-feature comparison, IE7 stacks up well against Firefox. If its improved security model lives up to its design specs, malware distributors will find it much more difficult to make a dishonest living, and the tabbed browsing features in the new release should make it much easier to deal with multiple pages.

The biggest hurdle that Internet Explorer has to overcome, however, is one that doesn't fit on any features chart. Its tattered reputation -- especially when it comes to security -- has created an indelible negative impression among the technically savvy users who've enthusiastically adopted Firefox so far. Even if the final release of IE7 improves mightily over the current beta, building that new and improved reputation will be an uphill climb.

That seems to me to be overstating things for Firefox - it's market share has never really it made it to a breakthrough position - the latest statistics show IE with 84.85% and Firefox with 4.23%. The key term in the second quotation of the paragraph is 'technically savvy', and, as the statistics show, the majority of Internet users are not technically savvy - they want something that 'works out of the box' and can't be bothered with themes and extensions, especially when those themes and extensions fail to work from version to version. My guess is that, when IE7 is finally released, Firefox's small market share will nosedive. It won't help that one of the key features of version 2.0, Places, will not now happen.

I've been a fan and advocate of Firefox since it was Phoenix, but I think that Microsoft has finally got its act together on this one.

There's an interesting new report on municipal wi-fi available. Nothing much in the way of analysis, simply answers to questions from people involved in municipal wireless in the USA. There are, however, some interesting points.

Is the love affair with FireFox beginning to die? ZDNet carries a column about the browser headed Firefox is slow and buggy (but I'm hooked anyway) and there's a lot subsequent correspondence from people who experience the same kinds of problems, especially FireFox crashing. Which makes one wonder why these people continue to say... 'But I'm sticking with it'. I've pretty well given up on FireFox after numerous attempts to get my favourite extensions to work with version 1.5 - all to no avail, and enquiries on the Mozillazine discussion lists brought no solution. So I switched to Maxthon - not perfect, but what is? Maxthon runs on the IE engine, but you can switch to using the Gecko engine if you wish. I find fewer problems in loading certain files (e.g., .pdf files) and the pop-up blocker really blocks, rather than simply tucking the pop-up window behind the 'live' window. If you like to play with skins - there's plenty for Maxthon. And, of course, it will load pretty well all pages - not good for Web standards, but...

The New York Times has an interesting article on Internet connection theft: one neighbour stealing connection from another, or even camping outside an apartment block to connect to an unprotected link. Personally, I seem to be surrounded by a wi-fi vacuum, almost; the local church has a wi-fi network but it's invisible from my study - and it is secured anyway.