Introducing a new password manager application called LastPass. LastPass is completely web-based and has a browser plugin that is very simple to install into Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox and makes it easy to log in to all of these sites.  You can also access these by logging in to your account on Lastpass.com if you are out somewhere and don’t want to install the plugin to the browser.

So how much does it cost for this service?  The great news is that it is free!  So, what do you do to use it?  You just need to create an account on www.lastpass.com and download and install the browser plugin on your computer.  Then, as you are logging into any site, you will see a prompt at the top of the browser that asks you if you would like to store this site’s login information.  You can even create groups by specifying a group name when creating the new site login entry.

I have used other products that are purely software based and, while these are also good products, they always require you to add software to the machine.  With Lastpass.com you have the option of not installing anything or simply installing the plugin which gives you access to all of your accounts right from the browser menu.

I highly recommend that you consider using this solution if you regularly have to log in to secure sites like Banks and Financial investment sites.  You can use the built-in function to change your password and let Lastpass.com generate a complex password for you and then store it under that account.  Very complex passwords ensure much greater security and, in this world of highly adept hackers, we need to use complex passwords all the more.

Click here for a video Lastpass.com has created to provide some basic instructions on this product.

5.  Open Source – Firefox is developed by the Open Source community.  It’s free to download.  You can see the source-code.  You can even contribute by helping to write some of the software if you want to.  You can submit ideas to the development community to improve or expand the functionality, and see the results relatively quickly.

4.  Innovation – Firefox was the first to introduce tabbed browsing, integrated search engines, and popup blockers.  Most of these features were added to IE, but Firefox had been doing it for a long time.

3.  Extensions – The architecture of Firefox allows developers to create add-ons to Firefox to add new functionality and features to the browser.  For example, there are plug-ins that will block advertisements on web pages, open IE within a Firefox tab, or make instant updates to your social networking sites.

2.  Speed – It’s difficult to compare browser speed side-by-side.  But moving around in Firefox seems to be much faster.  Opening a new tab with CTRL-T instantly allows you to type in a new web page.  Doing the same in IE shows a noticeable delay of several seconds.  Little things like this make Firefox appear much faster than IE.

1.  Security – Some might say it’s not fair to claim that Firefox is more secure than Internet Explorer.  After all, it has just as many security bugs and patches as IE.  But the difference with Firefox is that the source code is freely available, so the global development community can fix those bugs extremely fast.  Also, Firefox automatically checks for and installs updates for itself automatically.  And because Firefox is standards-based, it does not run ActiveX controls which are proprietary to Microsoft and have a history of security problems.

Tom Weast | Infrastructure Services Consultant

20 years ago in March a man by the name Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web through a document titled “Information Management: a Proposal”. He was then working at CERN, the EU’s physic consortium, which also happens to be the first website ever created. Go visit Cern’s website to see how they are celebrating. - http://www.cern.ch