This is an eye-opening detail of an easily-avoidable disaster than resulted when Mark Ghosh fell prey to a phishing scam targeting users of Google’s Orkut social network. I’m completely baffled that Google has abandoned this project so completely as to allow this kind of security hole, without offering any means of correcting it. (Hat tip to GFMorris):
I remember the when Delicious first came out. I thought, Finally, a solution for keeping track of the countless odds and ends I find on the internet. I could just post a link (from whatever computer I was using at the time), tag it, and come back to it whenever I needed. It worked beautifully — for a while.
A few things happened that ultimately led me to stop using the service: First, I got so zealous at bookmarking pages that my links, even when well-organized, simply became too numerous to sift through. Second, the site’s popularity boomed, and their servers struggled to keep up. Sure, I could post a link with one click, and not think about how long it took to perform my request, but when I needed to hunt down a link by sifting through pages of other links, all while each page loaded agonizingly slow, it was just too much to hassle with1.
The most significant reason I stopped using Delicious, though, was that I didn’t really know what I was doing. (more…)
I generally don’t check my email much on the weekends, but yesterday Courtney mentioned she had forwarded me something, so I pulled it up. And I had an Inbox full of emails from Facebook! So-and-so has added me as a friend, so-and-so wants me to check out their profile, etc.
At face value there wasn’t anything wrong with this — these were all legitimate friends — except I don’t have a Facebook account. I’m quite adamant about not signing up for one, actually.
Well, OK, I guess I should fess up: I have some vague memory of creating one years ago because I wanted to see a photo a friend had sent me a link to, or something along those lines. So in reality, I probably do have an account, and it is likely what these friends found, but I have no idea what the login name is (though I could make a good stab at the password, since I use the same throw-away password for any page I don’t care about).
I just installed FF3 yesterday on my work machine, and already I’m hooked. In fact, just a couple hours in the old version 2 have me pining to get it installed here at home.
I love that it actually sends your login information before asking whether or not it should remember your password. I hate it when I would click “yes” only to discover it was an incorrect password, now saved and auto-completing every time I visit a favorite page. Brilliant work.
Ubuntu 7.04 (“Feisty Fawn”) was released last week, and somehow the news of this was enough to push me over the edge. A couple friends (one from real life and one from a forum I frequent) have been beating the drum at me for some time now, so I decided to march to it for a while and see what I think.
So far, I am very impressed. I had stayed away from Linux for years, primarily because I didn’t have nor want to spend the time it would take to tweak everything into submission enough to actually have a complete system for daily use. But I see now that things have definitely improved since the “early days.” (more…)