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We’ve recently received 2 emails seemingly from Bank of America and Paypal. The contents of the email is quite well crafted to resemble an authentic message. Upon closer inspection the sender is actually from new-service@yahoo.com. Both emails are posted below with the links sanitized. You can see it’s actually quite convincing and less technical users could be deceived if they’re careless.

Gmail actually moved the Paypal email to ‘Spam’ while the Bank of America email managed to slip past the system.

Noticed something different when we arrived at Flickr for our daily dose of interestingness. The home page has been completely revamped! At first we thought it was our eyes playing tricks, but looking through google’s cache (indexed 12 June) shows that Flickr has indeed gotten a major makeover. Oddly, the revamp was not mentioned at all on their blog which last posted the introduction of 7 new languages to Flickr (French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese.)

New home page

Old home page

Flickr now sports a much cleaner interface. Instead of the old layout which catered to 800×600 resolution, it is now limited to a minimum of 1024×768 resolution. The set of rotating images at the homepage has been added to. Gone are the weird quotes that accompanies each image. Options to “Share & stay in touch”, “Upload & organize” and “Make stuff!” are made available besides the ole’ “Explore Flickr” (renamed “Explore…”). Each of the options actually links to the particular section of their tour.

Basically, the information presented is a lot more readable and accessible, compared with the old interface. Nothing else on Flickr seems to change though.

Flickr homepage
Google cache of Flickr

Didn’t take long for Safari to take the headlines again. Yesterday, Safari generated a fair amount of press by releasing a Windows beta version. For better or for worse, this brought about the close scrutiny of many people. Naysayers were quick to respond, telling that even Mac users don’t use Safari.

To make matters worse, security experts tested and subsequently released information of its vulnerabilities - for both OSX and Windows beta. Porting to Windows represent a double edged sword, you’ll get a slice of the market share while security exploiters will pay more attention as well. Were it not for the decision to port Safari to Windows, we believe that Safari would’ve remain relatively more secure (in the ’security by obscurity’ sense).

Sources:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=283
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9728500-7.html
http://larholm.com/2007/06/12/safari-for-windows-0day-exploit-in-2-hours/
http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2007/06/niiiice.html

Now everyone can see PLUS traffic condition before setting out for work. PLUS has recently introduced this service which shows you live feeds from their many traffic cameras. The feeds (static images) are updated every few seconds and the viewable locations are as follows

Central
DAMANSARA
SG. BULOH
BKT LANJAN
SUBANG IC
FHR2
SHAM ALAM IC
SHAH ALAM KM 0.50
EBOR
USJ

We knew it was coming, and it came - Google buys over Feedburner. Almost everyone is delighted with the deal: Google, Feedburner, advertisers and publishers. You can read the announcement by Feedburner and the short post by Google on this matter.

So what does this mean for Feedburner users?
from the acquisition FAQ

Q. What does this mean for FeedBurner’s partners, advertisers, and users?
A: We are excited to continue offering FeedBurner’s exceptional tools to content creators throughout the world, and our teams will work together to improve the experiences of feed users, advertisers, and publishers. Users can continue to sign up for FeedBurner’s services and take advantage of their feed tools and features immediately, and advertisers can continue to leverage FeedBurner’s media network to achieve their marketing objectives.

Today, Google hosted a developer day for 5,000 developers worldwide at San Jose convention center. The highly anticipated Google Gears - an open source browser plugin which enables the creation of offline web applications via Javascript - was unveiled.

From gears.google.com
Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

Come June 1st 2007, many Google AdSense publishers’ account will be disabled. Specifically, those that are of ‘Made For AdSense’ (MFA) or ‘arbitrage publisher’ nature. This news follows numerous reports of publishers receiving notices from Google regarding the disabling of their account, citing the reason as their use of AdSense is an unsuitable business model. The ‘unsuitable business model’ being generally understood as MFA sites.

So a little background story here for the uninitiated. Arbitrage is defined as “The simultaneous purchase and sale of similar commodities to take advantage of price discrepancies between markets”.

Share, reuse, and remix — and win!
Share your original or derivative creative works and win cash prizes! Winning entries will also be featured on the Creative Commons Malaysia web portal and the first Creative Commons anniversary celebration in July. Besides cash prizes, winners are also eligible to win the People’s Choice awards which are based on online voting.

Online news sites have been ablaze with rumors of Microsoft’s intention to acquire Yahoo! (henceforth referred to as Yahoo without the exclamation). It seems that Yahoo has been approached again by Microsoft to enter into acquisition talks. This follows numerous inconclusive talks in the past between the two parties. Microsoft is rather desperate this time, offering up to a (reportedly) sum of $50 billion for the deal to go forward.

Experts have been hinting otherwise, as the takeover and integration process would be a massive task.Imagine all the overlapping services that have to be streamlined. This is not made easier by the fact that Yahoo and Microsoft have been actively copying each other since forever.

The move didn’t came out as a surprise, given the latest purchase of major online advertising company DoubleClick by Google which might have slightly offset Microsoft’s world domination plan. A more plausible explanation would be a joint partnership on search and advertising in order to fight evenly with Google. Google currently leads search and advertising market followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. Microsoft’s struggle against Google has been pretty futile so a partner in crime might help out a bit.

After the dust settled, we now know that the latest episode of talks ended up inconclusive again. Too bad, I was looking forward to the result of this unholy union.

(from TechCrunch)

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