Monday, October 06, 2003

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Now that I think about it, I am surprised PopNot works as well as it does, that there are not more false positives. If I were running a site that relied on pop-up advertising, I would be very tempted to put enough functionality into pop-ups to discourage the use of pop-up stoppers on my site (you can always configure them to allow pop-ups from a given site). This would be a bit of a double-edged sword, since it could confuse users who do have pop-up stoppers, and make them hate your site. But it seems like it might be a chance worth taking, especially right now, when pop-up stoppers are not all that common (except maybe I've even wrong about that, because I think AOL 9 may do pop-up suppression?). All this assumes that there are sites that actually make a significant amount of money from pop-ups. 3:54:21 PM    comment []

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I use a pop-up stopper(PopNot)on my work laptop, and it functions pretty well. The only, small problem is, it causes occasional false postives. I click on a link, and nothing happens. Well, not quite nothing. The PopNot icon flashes, and makes a small sound. So an alert user, whose mental model includes the concept "If certain things don't work, consider whether it is because pop-ups are being suppressed", usually figures out what is going on (after clicking for the third time, anyway), and disables PopNot for that site or session. But that has kept me from installing PopNot at home, and driving my unsuspecting wife and kids crazy (and myself, as I field the tech support calls!). 3:43:51 PM    comment []

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Several years' worth of Enron email is freely searchable from the FERC site. This is all Enron email for all employees, not some selected subset spefically referring to matters under criminal investigation. So, any embarassing personal stuff is there for all to read. And searchable, which makes it much easier for those with prurient curiousity to exercise it. This is a particularly vivid illustration of why I make it a practice to try (albeit with occasional, small failings), to completely segregate personal email from work email! 12:48:41 PM    comment []