Bob is correct. The issue you are expressing concern about is keyloggers. They piggyback unto a user's system normally on some trite item for example free smiley faces or free fonts. Once embedded they can note and transmit any key stroke a user makes. As far as credit card safety: I have had my Chase Visas hijacked three times. This will be old news to longtime members, I have two Chase Visa accounts, not cards but rather accounts. I carry one account in my wallet, and the other is used only on the Internet and never leaves the house. Three years ago both were hijacked within 10 days. Fortunately everything was cleaned up in ten days. Just several months ago the one in my wallet was hijacked. I hadn't used it in months. This time Chase contacted me and the issue was resolved in four days. Based on the both circumstances and the readiness of Chase to resolve in a timely manner without question, I believe Chase got cracked by hackers both times. So if I am correct, if card issuers can't protect themselves how are we suppose to? Finally, it is my regular recommendation never to store specific financial information on a user's system. No account numbers, user names or passwords. The little time it takes to type this information in pays off in much added security. DA

Got this one off one of my favorite blogs. I was surfing cafepress last week, looking for notecards. In my other window, one tab over, I had another website open with banner ads, no relation to cafepress. My 'cart' contents and an ad for cafepress were on the other window's ads. Talk about sharing info. There ain't no such thing as internet privacy, especially on GW, where IP addies are easily available! Oh and facebook? Don't get me started. You may think you have privacy with a fake name, but they are collecting info about you through all your interactions with others who have your email! grrrr... "I've been nagging you and nagging you some more about the Internet and how it isn't the safest place in the universe if you value your privacy. Many of you insist on putting private thoughts and experiences on MySpace and Facebook and then are horrified when there is some negative blowback in your lives, like from a boss or friend or family member reading some stuff you wish they hadn't. Well, it gets worse. Dozens of websites have been secretly harvesting lists of places their users previously visited online. That includes everything from news articles to bank sites to pornography. The information, according to the Associated Press, is valuable for con artists to learn more about their targets and send them personalized attacks. It also allows e-commerce companies to adjust ads or prices, for instance, if the site knows you've just come from a competitor who is offering a lower price. This technique is called "history sniffing," and is a result of the way browsers interact with websites and record where they've been. It only takes a few lines of programming code to pull it off. Current versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers still allow this, as do older versions of Chrome and Safari. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego found 46 sites, ranging from smutty to staid, that tried to pry loose their visitors browsing histories using this technique. Nearly half of the 46 sites, including financial research site Morningstar.com and news site Newsmax.com used an ad-targeting company Interclick which says its code was responsible for the tracking. Again, according to the Associated Press, the source for this whole announcement, Morningstar, said it ended its relationship with Interclick when it found out about the program and Newsmax said it didn't know history sniffing had been used on its users until the AP called. Internet companies are obsessed with tracking users' behavior so they can target their ads better. The Federal Trade Commission is proposing rules that would limit an advertiser's ability to track Internet users to show them advertisements. History sniffing is essentially a side-by-side comparison of Web pages you've already visited with Web pages that a particular site wants to see if you've visited. If there is a match, users would never know but the site administrators would learn a lot about you. For instance, according to AP, a popular porn site was checking its visitors' history to see if they'd visited 23 other pornography sites, and the code used on the Morningstar and Newsmax.com sites looked for matches against 48 specific Web pages, all related to Ford automobiles. Sites can carry on this kind of inspection at the rate of 20,000 Internet addresses per second. Remember all this when you next sign on to the Net."

This may send this thread into a whole other topic, but (and this is just my opinion!) I think oral sex is much more common now than ever before. Not to say it hasn't been done forever, but I think there's a trend for kids to want to say they're virgins when they're married, and they don't think of oral sex as losing their virginity...thus there's much more attention paid to that area with a razor/wax/whatever. It's getting more "face time" (HAHA!). When I talk to my kids about sex, they say that's what "most kids" are doing, oral sex, not intercourse. Just a theory. For the record, I think it's much more common for a guy to "manscape" than ever before. In my circle of friends, the women generally prefer to groom themselves with a "landing stip." I'm in my mid-forties.

Safari 5.1? That would have been released in roughly 2011. Snow Leopard would have been about right but frankly I'm not sure that Safari 5.1 came with Snow Leopard nor do I know if you can update to a specific release of Safari (other than the latest/greatest that's compatible with that version of OS X). Might be something to inquire about first. The upgrade should be pretty easy and straight forward, I don't recall any problems when I went from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Apple ID would likely be whatever he uses to log into iTunes. User name in the form of an email address and a password. If he doesn't have one, he could create one. I think it's mostly for iTunes access and not necessarily essential for the operating system to run. Frankly Safari seems like a very odd choice for a supported browser. At version 5 it was a pretty lousy browser even compared to Internet Explorer at the time. There isn't a current Windows version and I'm not sure that Apple even provides older versions for Windows. So if you buy a new Windows machine, you can't use the court's computer system? Are we sure we're understanding this correctly? I've seen some companies that will only support a certain browser or require at least a certain version to keep down the cost of site development and technical support/training. That doesn't mean other browsers won't work but if you have problem you won't get any technical support.