Old Newbie Info

While I’ve been working to get everything set just so, you’ll find a lot of links to old work. That is a tedious and troubling chore for me. Not that it is merely dashing off simple summaries and verifying links, but that I am forced to look back over work done years ago. With the review, I see small things (and large) that I would like to have done differently. I haven’t found any glaring errors — those I would have removed. I have found things which appear to be foolish today, but at the time were not.

A good example is seeing a background program’s icon in my systray for Gator, once a reliable password manager, but today widely regarded as spyware. Once upon time, it had a component called Shopping Companion which was a delivery system for special offers or coupons geared to your surfing practices. An advertiser’s dream come true — you look at printers it suggests a bargain at an ink cartridge supplier. Where is the evil in that? The thing could be turned off easily or simply ignored. When the company who controlled Gator changed hands, they went into marketing their ads more aggressively and that feature could no longer be turned off and the removal of Gator became a less than straight forward matter.

I don’t recall ever recommending Gator and I’ve long since abandoned using it, but still that friendly icon appears in my demonstrations.