— or at least, I can read your computer's mind.

The Internet Storm Center points out that with the default security settings in Internet Explorer (even on Windows XP with Service Pack 2), websites in the Internet security zone can read what's in your Windows clipboard. If you have been copying & pasting sensitive information — oh, for instance, you're working with a spreadsheet of credit card numbers — then websites that you visit while that information is on your clipboard can see it too, if they know where to look.

I wrote a little test to see if your clipboard is exposed. Internet Explorer has most likely categorized this web page as being in the Internet Zone, unless you have specifically added it to the Trusted Zone. 

If you found out that your clipboard data is indeed exposed, fear not. You can simply change your security settings to prevent it:

• See Microsoft Knowledge Base article #224993.


• Windows network admins can add a Group Policy. The setting can be found in the Group Policy editor under Computers | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Internet Explorer | Internet Control Panel | Security Page | Internet Zone | 'Allow paste operations via script'.


• Use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.

There's been a lot of fuss in the media lately about people "stealing" internet access from unsecured wireless networks. Personally, it wouldn't bother me to share some of my bandwidth when I'm not using it, but when I am using it, I'd like my traffic to get priority, since I'm the one paying for it.

Most broadband routers with any kind of security have the ability to restrict access to a list of known computers, identifying them by the MAC addresses encoded in their network adapters. How hard would it be to add a new rule to the router that allows unknown computers access to the network, but gives priority access to computers that are known? Quality-of-Service (QoS) features for giving priority access based on higher-layer  ;protocols such as Voice Over IP have been around for years.

Linksys, if you're listening, it's something to think about...

Aha.  I decided to revisit this tool to test XP SP2.  I did another search through Help to see if I could correct the performance issues I ran into last time, and this time I uncovered the following:

To turn on the pausing of background virtual machines

1. Open Virtual PC Console.
   
2. On the File menu, click Options.
   
3. Click Performance.
   
4. In the CPU Time list, click Pause virtual machines in inactive windows.

 Note

• To open Virtual PC Console, on the host operating system, click Start, point to All Programs or Programs, and then click Microsoft Virtual PC.

I'm going to give it a try....

1. Please make inclusion of mobile numbers in the directory an opt-in process rather than opt-out.


2. Please explain the opt-in choice clearly to consumers during the process for setting up a new phone number.


3. Please design your internal databases in a way that makes it easy to administer privacy choices. It seems counter-productive to have to run a second, 'Do-Not-Call', database, when you could simply record consumers' privacy preferences in the same place as their account information.


4. If you must apply a charge to consumers to defray the costs of administering their privacy preferences, then please, make it a one-time fee and not a monthly charge.