Cookies - It only takes one site to cause problems

This is the first frame of the video produced by Stephen Cobb. Please visit the blog post directly by clicking below, on his blog post title.

As marketing firms figure out more ways to use cookies to learn about how web surfing habits and possibly make it difficult for you to get any work done during the day, it is highly recommended to consider ways to block or remove cookies regularly.
There are settings in every browser that let you block different types of cookies and remove all cookies upon closing the browser. Unfortunately, these settings have to be adjusted manually.
A great example of how cookies jump on your machine is in the video at the eset security blog post by Stephen Cobb called "Cookie stuffing, cookie jackers, rip-off Victoria's Secret giftcard seekers"

His blog post also describes the modern jargon of what some of these cookie terms mean:

Cookie stuffing is an abuse of affiliate marketing cookies intended to mark a visit to a website that an affiliate has initiated, and for which that affiliate will get paid if the consumer performs pre-defined tasks, like requesting more information. The cookie stuffer acts as an affiliate and places cookies on a consumer's computer even if the consumer has not been brought to the site by the stuffer, later getting paid for consumer actions.
Click-jacking can be narrowly defined as deceiving a user into clicking on things they did not intend to click on, or clicks which lead to pages or actions other than those the user expected when clicking. This is part of the broader category of fraud known as click-fraud.

Stephen put together this great 4 minute video to show how using the Internet (in this example Google Image search) for researching free giftcards and coupons can lead the unsuspected shopper to a web site that will quickly fill a machine with web cookies. These cookies will monitor and track your web surfing habits.  If you adjust your browser to remove all cookies when you close your browser, this can help. But it may be the most prudent policy to not look at websites that you do not know, have never heard about or can't recognize, regardless of the supposed deal behind the 'research', like a housing auction that offers $100 homes.

Note: this is NOT the fault of Google. In fact, Google tries to recognize and shut down these sites as much as possible, but they are created at a very fast rate with always newer methods to avoid Google's detection. Making Google completely responsible for this is like blaming on a Road Commission for allowing convicts with a car to use a road once they robbed a bank.

Mozilla Firefox has a wonderful plugin or Addon gallery that allows anyone to have additionally functionality to surfing the web. Often this is used for notifiers for Twitter, Blog Subscriptions, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Mail or GMail Inbox. 

There are security specific Addon's for Firefox that help protect people from exposing their login information when logging into bank sites, social media or webmail like https-everywhere (see more details here).
Google's Chrome browser also has something called Extensions that do the same thing as Mozilla Addons, but for Chrome.

Internet Explorer has been trying to offer these technologies in their newer browsers, but have been lacking in their overall security features. Recently Microsoft introduced InPrivate Filtering which is a type of protection against known bad websites. It allows you to build your own lists of sites that you want to block or allow when using Internet Explorer. This was a great leap in security for Microsoft browsers and as of today, if you use Internet Explorer 7 or 8, you can download pre-built lists (like the one offered by John Delizo) tthat can be imported directly into the browser under Tools -  Manage Addons.
Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer 9, and with it has changed the technology to block or allow web sites. They are trying to get closer to the design of Mozilla's famous blocking Addon called AdBlock Plus. If your machine is running windows XP Professional, this does not apply. For all machines Windows Vista or Windows 7 (or Windows 8) , you can no longer use Internet Explorer 8 InPrivate filtering to import block lists, but you can use a method more similar to Firefox called TPL lists. TPL lists are well described in the website PrivacyChoice. They also include a great FAQ about their list and the overall technologies.
(Credit: thanks for lifehacker for the image!)

Intuit Quickbooks Online Moving to HTML5 features

For clients who have moved to the Intuit Quickbooks Online edition, they have just announced an upgrade to their system to allow for better performance. Because they are upgrading the features to help performance, you WILL want to clear your browser cookies and cache and then login to Quickbooks online edition again.  Please take note of their recent blog post instructions:

Small heads up for Firefox or Chrome users

As we roll out changes to QuickBooks Online in the future, we may use some new HTML5 features like IndexedDB, History, AppCache, WebStorage, GeoLocation etc. Few of them will make browsers like Firefox or Chrome ask for extra permissions. It’s your choice to accept or ignore them and in either case your regular usage of QuickBooks Online will be unaffected. However accepting / allowing such features may just help enhance your browsing experience. Such notifications only come up once, till you eventually clear your browser’s cache / cookies / site preferences, which causes a reset. So you can always reset your browser preferences any time in case you want to change your choice.
In Firefox 10 on the mac you will see the permission request notification as shown in the image below. Other versions on other platforms might look a bit different visually.

For Chrome users, you can just grab the Chrome Web Store app if you haven’t already done so. This will automatically add the necessary permissions (without the app, the notifications may come as a yellow bar on top). After installing that app, in the future you may notice the QuickBooks Online app shortcut greyed out on your Chrome’s New Tab page as shown below and Chrome should prompt for you to accept some permissions. Accept or just click on the greyed out app and re-enable it, bringing it’s color back.