Broadband Advisor

If you click Start, type cookies, and press ENTER, Vista tries to do what XP did: Take you to your Cookies folder, located at C:\Users\your logon\cookies. Except that the Cookies folder isn't there. What is there is a pointer that tells Vista where the real cookies folder can be found. Since Vista doesn't believe you should be privy to this information, it tells you it's not accessible.

Do-it-all suites are the name of the security game these days. Sure, you can gather free programs that cover the bases much as a suite would, but who wants to bother with finding out which apps work together and which ones might leave you pulling your hair out?

The internet of today scarcely seems the same entity as the web of just a couple of years ago. Ground-breaking tools for blogging, commenting, embedding video, sharing and championing content via sites such as Digg have turned the web upside down.

In the world of comic books, every bad guy is an evil genius. On the Web, hackers, spammers, and phishers may be evil, but they're not required to be geniuses. They can make a healthy living just by exploiting known security holes that many users haven't bothered to patch. Or by relying on the propensity of millions of people to do things they've been told over and over not to do.

There are many aspects to web security. You can hardly move for apps that automate online protection and safeguard your identity, for instance. But one area that gets less attention is IP-address tracing.

Are you worried about malware and spyware plaguing your system? I have a cool, free tool that gives you an extra layer of defense when you're Web surfing. I also have two free utilities that can lock up and hide your sensitive folders and keep them from prying eyes. Plus, for readers who didn't like my earlier tip for disabling the Insert key, I offer a nifty program to watch your Insert, Caps Lock, and Num Lock keys.

Howard Schmidt was reluctant to hop on the social networking bandwagon - a byproduct, he says, of the paranoia he internalises as a security professional. Eventually, though, Schmidt - the one-time cybersecurity adviser to President Bush and itinerant CISO turned consultant - decided the positives outweighed the negatives. He joined not just one social network but three: Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace.

Browse the mobile Web in safety

True or false, the information people find about you on the Web can have a big impact on your life. Here are five techniques to make sure that what people read about you is good (or at least true).