I’ve noticed in the past the slyness with which Yahoo tries to have you install its applications on your browser.

I remember the first time that I was caught out, asked whether I wanted not to install Ask Jeeves. “Why not?”, I thought. “It could be useful.” So I didn’t uncheck the box.

When I started up Firefox, I realised that there had been a problem. Where there once was a Google search box, there was now Ask Jeeves. Indeed, I’m not the only one to get caught out. I used to work in an office where we would sometimes swap workstations, and somebody had inadvenently seen to it that a few of the machines were bedecked with pointless Yahoo paraphernalia. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the rights to remove programs at work. (more…)

About, oh, six years ago, I set up a Yahoo! email account. I already had one, now inactive, but it had something of a jokey name. I was living in France in that summer of 2002 and was scheduled to be heading home soon. I made the decision to have an email address that featured my name rather than a gimmick, and so came into being my principal email addy.

I don’t recall ever having had a problem with it until earlier this week. For a period of a couple of days I couldn’t log in. Every attempt to do so would take me from the log-in screen to the, erm, log-in screen again.

Seemingly as soon as the problem reached the point when I was using GooglePower~! to try resolving it, it sorted itself out.

With one slight problem.

Now, every time I go to check my email, this is what greets me:

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