Is my laptop listening to me?

Have I been bugged by my laptop?  Who knows.  Yesterday the Chrome Browser by Google was accused of flipping on the internal mike and sending all the audio to Google.  I don't use Chrome, but if Chrome can do it others will do it too.  I dug into the wordy but vague instructions for my HP Pavilion no-model-number laptop.  You can go to Control Panel, find an applet "Sound" and disable the internal microphone.  At least in software.  Who knows what Windows bug will allow hostile code to turn the mike on again?  The internal mike is hidden under a groovy looking perforated panel above the keyboard.  I don't quite fear audio snoopers enough to take the laptop apart and risk breaking something.  I did bother to put a piece of tape over the internal camera lens. 

Market place winners and losers

Loser: Windows.  Only 56% of the hits on my blog were from Windows machines.  Used to be Windows had 90+% market share.  Runner up Linux!  29%.  Hard to believe.  Linux works good but the multiple suppliers haven't convinced the market that all Linux programs will run on all flavors of Linux.  The rest of the hits were  from various cell phone OS like Android.

Winner:  Firefox.  Top browser, 57% of hits here. Beat out Chrome. Internet Exploder way down at 11%.  This after some net buzz about how Firefox was all washed up. 

Firefox and Internet Explorer tie.

The two rival browsers are neck and neck with 31 % of page views here.  Chrome is coming on strong with 20 %.   Windows is still the dominant operating system, followed by Linux (12%) and Macintosh at 6%.