I got hacked

You might have noticed that I did not blog a few days and that even my blog was 2 days offline.

The reason was easy. My gmail account got hacked and I am happy that I have in my gmail account just a few contacts. If my apple .me account would have been hacked, then over 3,000 email addresses would have been compromised.
I even did not know that my account was hacked till somebody emailed and asking me if my blog is deleted. I went to the blog and it was gone. When I tried to log into my google account I got an error message.
Shortly after google did send me to my alternative email address an email saying that my account got compromised. I had to go to google website input my cell phone number to get a code and then reset my password but my blog did not show up. I got totally nervous. One year blogging gone and no backup. I am now thinking to move my blog to my own server and have a good backup. Anyway I went to blogger.com to find any clues how I can get my blog back, but as usual Google has no good service and no way for me to find the answer I was looking for and no phone number I can call. Lucky wise two hours after I changed my password my blog was back to life.
All contacts I have in gmail got send an email from the system which compromised my gmail account.




I don't know if this was a normal google attack and I was one of the victims or if it was a direct attack against me, since I wrote two weeks ago about the paypal email phishing from Russia/China.

Now everything is back to normal but I had to change all my passwords to be on the save side.


- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

What is going on with Facebook?

Facebook is the world biggest social network with over 800 million users (550 million active). And of course I have a Facebook account as well.

Mostly I am posting into my wall using either the Facebook iPhone app or other 3rd party apps. I seldom use the Facebook website.
This morning I went into facebook through Safari after weeks not using the internet browser. Because a friend of mine did send a message.
When I clicked on messages link I got a popup about new features in Facebook I had only two choices "next" and "skip". The only way to get the modal window away is to choose one of these. With skip all was fine till I tried to go to messages again, the modal window came again. When clicking on next another popup opened talking about the person Facebook email name@Facebook.com. I had choice to skip or to create this email address. Skip started the process from the beginning again with first modal window.
The only way to get these alert boxes away was to accept the Facebook email address.
I did not want to have a Facebook email, now I have one and I will see how much spam I will get. It is now easy for spammers. The email addresses are your username@Facebook.com. Very easy to send spam to millions of people. Facebook was the last place were I did not get spam. This might be soon over.

Maybe it was a Safari issue or poor executing the information windows. Or it was under purpose from Facebook. I don't know. And unfortunately I forgot to make a screenshot till it was too late.

I was really upset that the only option I had was to create a Facebook email address. Where is my choice?

I can understand that facebook would like that everybody has a Facebook email address and that people are starting to use it. It could eventually kill gmail, if FB starts to build their email function out and make it more compelling.

Please let me know if you had a similar experience and maybe some screenshots.



- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Who needs a Facebook email?

According to TechCrunch, Facebook will offer email service, starting on Monday. Rumors of a Facebook e-mail service first surfaced in February. At the time, it was suggested that your Facebook vanity URL might be automatically assigned to you as your @facebook.com e-mail address.



As far I know, to be a member at Facebook you need to to have an email address, why another one?

I had in my life maybe 50 different email addresses the only one which only twice changed, is my very private one (i changed it when I got married and took my wife's name and changed it back when i got divorced). Email addresses are like phone numbers you don't want to change them only if you must, otherwise it is such hassle to inform everybody.

Then there are the email addresses we use for things we know we will get spam, these accounts we don't care and change a couple of time. And then we might have an email address for things our spouse should not know about or for flirting etc.

I don't want to have a vanity url email address at facebook, otherwise I will get emails from 500 million people. I don't want to use a Facebook email for spam otherwise my Facebook page get full of spam.

I don't want to use a Facebook email for cheating or flirting otherwise the recipient would instantly find out who I am and who my friends are and if I lie or not.

The rumors are saying that these email comes with a full blown online email client. I think this is the better news. There is still space in the universe for another web based email service. But should it be facebook? Google had big times issues with gmail and user privacy. First when they launched and searched all emails to serve better personalized ads, and then when they had buzz and assuming that people are friends only because they had many emails going forward and back.

Facebook has much more info about their users and everybody who seriously thinks this would not influence the email service must be mistaken.

And don't forget every new big feature from Facebook did violate privacy and needed to be corrected as soon it got public.

The service will be free but not free of advertisement, perfect personalized ads in the client. Pretty sure many privacy concerns are just a few steps away.

Supposedly the email service allows imap and pop which allows the user to connect the email to offline clients like outlook. Yippie computer crashes after 3 hours because everybody gets from everybody emails.

Facebook would have from one day to another the biggest email network, if everybody would get from the beginning an email addresses.

But i think only hard core Facebook fans and bloggers who are testing the service would want to have a Facebook email.

The only way that Facebook could be successful with the service, is the email service is much more optimized for social (what ever it means) and is at least as good as Google Gmail.

Let us see what will be announced and if it is email then be sure you can soon email me to my Facebook account till I know if it is a good service or not.

Looking back, it is interesting how Facebook tries to fight against google, they are not only fighting about products and services but they even steel employees from
Google. It is so bad that google gave everybody a 10% raise and a $1000 Christmas bonus.

On the other hand google and Apple are fighting for mobile and browser market.
And then google is trying to get a hold on PC Os a small try to fight with MS. All this could be a problem for Google and the right time for Facebook. Google is too much concentrated to comet with others than with their own business.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

How much should companies trust cloud services?

"Reporting from San Francisco — Google Inc. fired a software engineer for snooping on its users' private information, the Internet search giant confirmed Wednesday."
Source NYTimes September 16th

The 27-year-old employee, David Barksdale, allegedly accessed information about four teenagers he met through a Seattle technology group, according to gossip website Gawker, which reported the incident Tuesday.

A similar reported incident that did not involve minors also resulted in the dismissal of an engineer, said a Google employee who was not authorized to speak about the topic.

These are two incidents in a short time of period at google. Even if google does encrypt the stored emails, it is alarming how google engineers (and maybe lower level employees) can access gmail accounts and read these information, even if only the top managers can do this.

Google is pushing for google apps and their service to be used from companies. Start ups as well big companies are starting to use google mail, google docs etc like Valeo (automotive with 30.000 employees) or Rentokil (pest control, 35.000 employees).

I love the idea of google apps, it is a cheaper alternative to Microsoft bundles (MS Office, Sharepoint, MS Project), but i see at the same time big risks.

What happens when a company is using google apps and might be dangerous competition to Google, or might be on the Google buying list?

How do we know Google is not taking advantage of the ability to access the stored data?

How do we know that Google has not a key to access all of this?

Hold on, is this not a risk everywhere? Let us take ATT as an example, could not a certain group of employee access all phone bills? Maybe access stored voicemails? Yes they might could, but it would be still far less deep and detailed company information to begin with.

ATT and other companies don't have the expertise like Google in search. Google has the most brilliant engineers in search technology, they surely can come up with search algorithm to puzzle all pieces together to get a clear picture of a company.

I am a big fan of cloud computing but I would think twice which part i would take into the cloud, or what software i would use for my company as a SaaS solution.

Any data which is company critical and describes the most value besides employees should stay in the company. If a cloud is necessary for these applications than a cloud controlled by my company not 3rd party.

Would a retailer use Amazon for hosting their complete customer base and day by day financials in the cloud and using Amazon services for this? I don't think it would be a good idea. I trust Google and I trust Amazon as companies, but i can't trust thousands of people working with them.

I am really surprised that the two privacy incidents at Google was not big in the news. I had expected much more noise about this, especially the privacy breach came at an awkward time for Google. Federal regulators and lawmakers are weighing whether to make Internet privacy rules more stringent — a move opposed by Google and other Internet companies that argue the industry can regulate itself.

Here just two of many other privacy issues concerning Google:
Google is also under scrutiny in the U.S. and overseas for collecting personal data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks through its Street View service that takes panoramic pictures from vehicles. Google also raised the hackles of privacy watchdogs when it rolled out a social networking service called Buzz that is used in conjunction with users' Gmail accounts.


- Posted using My iPad

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Google makes gmail smarter

Don't we all hate our mailbox. Tons of emails in spam and almost as much in inbox which are not marked as spam. Hard to know which ones we should read first. Hardly to tell which is important or which one is not so much interesting.

NY times is reporting that Google has a solution for this. Google has a lot experience in writing algorithm for spam filters and optimized their code and to overcome email overload in the last 10 years. Google is applying same algorithm base for their new inbox function.



Google is trying to come to the rescue with a new Gmail feature announced Tuesday called Priority Inbox, which monitors your messages and tries to organize your inbox based on a number of criteria, like how often you correspond with a particular sender.

Google explains that the first thing Priority Inbox does is split your inbox into three sections: “important and unread,” “starred” and “everything else.”

“Important” messages are judged to be the most significant, and sit at the top of your Gmail window. Next is the “starred” area, the messages you say are important. Finally, “everything else” includes those messages that can probably be dealt with later, or completely ignored — the ones that aren’t quite spam, but don’t need to clutter up your screen or your brain right now.

A spokesman from Google said Gmail looks for terms and people that you categorize as important, or not, and decides whether those messages make it into your priority inbox accordingly.

The system also looks for the people you interact with on a daily basis, pushing their messages higher up the ladder. Finally the new inbox looks to see if a new e-mail was sent “directly to you, or if it is sent to other people too.”

A mobile version of the new function is not yet available but if it works well it will come soon.

The new feature will begin appearing in beta mode on Tuesday and will be available as an option for Gmail users as it rolls out across the service. Users will begin seeing an alert allowing them to switch to Priority Inbox.



There are other services with similar approaches to the inbox problem, including Sanebox, which prioritizes Gmail’s inbox with new folders, and Xobni, which works with Microsoft’s Outlook software.

This tool could be very helpful. I spend more time on moving my emails around and deleting them than actually reading them. And many times I forgot to go to a cool party because I missed to read the invitation. Of course this model works only well when it can learn from the user. You still have to make (at least at the beginning) the decision which mail is important and which not to help the system to learn.




- Posted using My iPad

Location:W Laurel St,Tampa,United States