For when you need a temporary email address...

A lot of sites these days offer perks for users who sign up for an account, and that frequently requires a verified email address. If you don’t feel like sharing your email address with everyone on the Internet who asks for it, you’ll need to use a site like 10 Minute Email, which makes it incredibly easy to create a temporary email address you can use to bypass verification.  The email is exactly what is says, temporary and only 10 minutes.  Just enough time to access that site that you do not want to give your real email address to.

A web site that will sketch your car accident.

If you ever have an accident, it would be great if you could provide a professional looking sketch of the scene for your auto insurance.  We see the People's Court, where two sides will go up to the drawing board and diagram what happened.  Now you can do that for your own accident for free.  Try Accident Sketch.  Accident Sketch provides a simple, one-stop resource to file claim paperwork and photos, but its coolest feature is the eponymous Accident Sketch feature. The surprisingly robust Flash app has a ton of options, meaning your days of rough sketches on the back of a folded up napkin are a thing of the past.

Check the security of your web browser

Simple and fast way to see if your web browser, or more specifically, your browser plug-ins, are secure.  Try Qualys Browser Check.  Once on the site, it will prompt you to install a plug-in for whichever browser you are using when you access the site.  Once the plug-in is installed, it will perform a check on all your plug-ins and alert you to which are outdated (hence, a security problem).  More impressive is that it will link you to the most updated version of that plug-in.  A must have site to keep your browser secure.

Microsoft's crusade to kill IE6

We haven't seen a pursuit like this since Bin Laden was alive.  Microsoft has dedicated a new website with the specific goal of killing the use of Internet Explorer 6 worldwide.  Currently at 7.1% (an astounding 23% of chinese Internet users still use it), Microsoft has the goal of reducing usage of IE6 to under 1% and hopefully to extinction.  The site is fun with advice on how to get your friends off of IE6 and statistical numbers for IE6 usage in other countries.  The United States is under 1% usage, so good for us!

Finally, your carrier cares if your smartphone is stolen!

Five U.S. mobile phone carriers will launch databases allowing customers to report stolen phones and prevent them from being reactivated, in a wide-ranging effort also supported by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and police chiefs to attack a growing problem of smartphone thefts.

A database for stolen phones on GSM networks will launch by Oct. 31, and U.S. carriers will launch a common database for LTE smartphones by Nov. 30, 2013, mobile trade group CTIA announced Tuesday. Carriers AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, Sprint Nextel and Nex-Tech Wireless, which have more than 90 percent of the mobile customers in the U.S., have committed to the mobile phone theft prevention program.  A simple question.  What took so long?

The XP countdown has begun...

Microsoft yesterday kicked off what it called a "two-year countdown" to the death of Windows XP, its longest-lived operating system.  Windows XP and the business productivity suite Office 2003 both exit all support on April 8, 2014, a company spokeswoman said in a Monday blog post.

On that date, Microsoft will stop shipping security updates for XP and Office 2003.

When Microsoft pulls XP's plug, it will have maintained the OS for 12 years and 5 months, or about two-and-a-half years longer than its usual practice and a year longer than the previous record holder, Windows NT, which was supported for 11 years and 5 months