Here’s your public service announcement for the day: How to disable Java in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Unless you have a particular reason that you have to have it in your browser — and I really hope you don’t — please, get Java out of your browser. It’s a horrible security risk.

Firefox is going to get private windows — but not until next year unless you’re into nightly builds.

Whaaaaaaa? CNET’s downloader installs malware? Download.com was one of the last places I trusted for software download….

I know you’ve seen the 2012 top searches for the Web search engines, but how about the top searches for Bittorrent search engines?

Speaking of torrents — Google removed 50 million “pirate” search results in 2012. “Google doesn’t report yearly figures, but we added up all the weekly reports and found that in 2012 Google was asked to remove 51,395,353 links to infringing webpages. Nearly all of these webpages are no longer showing up in Google’s search results.”

Nice one from TheNextWeb — 13 Web Apps to start 2013 off right. I had heard of some of these, but not all.

Whoopsie: Google’s malware is detecting Twitpic as malware? TwitPic says “NUH-UH!”

Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for the pointer to Google Maps Streetview Player. Put in a beginning and and ending location and and you get a “movie” of the Google Maps images en route to your destination. Cool.

Interesting article from Fast Company on Cureus, a new crowdsourced medical journal.

Cyndi of Cyndi’s List, Cyndi Howells, has filed suit (Dick Eastman’s writeup) against Barry J Ewell of MyGenShare.com for violation of copyright. You can read the court filing here. Lawyers are expensive and lawsuits are time-consuming and exhausting. I do not know all the evidence in the suit but I have known Cyndi for a long time, and I do not believe that she would do such a thing frivolously. I hope very much that this is resolved to the best outcome for her and that she is able to continue maintaining Cyndi’s List as it is a tremendous resource for genealogy research. Good morning, Internet, and best wishes for a fabulous 2013.