Oh god.

That’s the first thing I said upon installing the Google Chrome extension, “Ozone,” because there’s simply no way around it: This extension is search to the extreme, period.

What do I mean by that?

Suppose you want to search for the name, “Nathan Edwards,” across a whole host of sites. Perhaps you’re interested in all the articles he’s written, or maybe you want to pull him up on Facebook or Wikipedia, or maybe even—god forbid—he’s acted in a movie you really like. Or maybe you sent him a Gmail that you need to look up. Or maybe you want to research his life on Linkedin.

Sounds like quite a task, eh?  Good thing that Ozone can do it all... at the same time!

Lordy. It's hard to spend but a week surfing the Internet without seeing a group of people getting caught up in a situation that they've volunteered themselves into. And it would be remiss of me to go a single sentence further without mentioning the latest elephant in the room--Facebook.

I can't log into Facebook without seeing a growing number of my friends joining those silly little, "Facebook is opening up my entire life and I wish it was like it was back in 2005" groups/fan pages/whatever we're calling them now. But Dave's Comrades aren't the only ones joining in on the fun--tech pundits Jason Calacanis and Peter Rojas, amongst others, are nuking their accounts in protest as well!  It's a Facebook meltdown!

Unlike the open-source world, where the concept of "something for nothing" is pretty widely understood and accepted--even by those that just download away and never contribute a single iota of code or absent thought to an application's development--the general Internet populace seems pretty peeved at an otherwise free service's attempts to branch out its offerings. This, in turn, leads to a stronger advertising platform and/or additional service expansions, but mainly the former. Facebook ain't charity, after all--the company has human overhead and server costs, to name a few, and it's not as if every status update magically conjures up a shiny nickel for Mark Zuckerberg.

You can put all the security measures you want on your portable PC, but odds are good that unless you're running some heavy encryption across your entire hard drive--I cry for your system's performance--an industrious cracker is going to find some way into your files should he or she have physical access to your laptop.  And it's not like it's that hard to steal a laptop: you pick it up, you run away, you bust your way into the operating system.  Done and done.

That's where a little application called LaptopLock comes into play.  This download is more like a half-and-half, in that it combines the services of a Web app and a downloadable application into one awesome package. Let's paint a scenario: You lose your laptop.  You're terrified that someone has actually taken your laptop and, worse, your laptop contains all of your personal information in a little file called "Nathan's Important Information" right on your desktop.  What?  You were doing your taxes; It's not unheard of.

This story would usually end a few hours later after you've managed to cancel all of your credit cards and cried buckets of tears at the thought of someone stealing your identity, provided said thief hasn't already used your debit card information to go on a personal shopping spree.  Now, had you installed LaptopLock beforehand, the roles would be reversed: You'd be sitting easy and the thief would be freaking out at his or her missed opportunity.