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More details are surfacing about the security breach at Yahoo that led to approximately 450,000 account logins and passwords being revealed online in plain text, including the fact that thousands of accounts with other services — Gmail and Hotmail among them — may also be exposed.

So how can you tell if you’re among the hacked? Tech Crunch has pointed to the security source Securi, a web monitoring site, where users can verify whether they’re among the victims of the leak.

Click here to visit Securi and see if your own information was compromised.

Other details that have emerged since the news broke are the most popular passwords that showed up in the leak. Dana Lengkeek, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, said in a statement published in the New York Times that most of the passwords being used were no longer valid: she estimated that less than 5 percent of them were.

And if that’s true, it’s a good thing since many of them violate standard password advice not to use predictable words, like “password,” for example.

Security blogger Anders Nilsson did some number crunching to establish the most commonly used passwords that showed up from users and “123456″ was the most popular choice, with more than 1,600 people having used it. Other standbys that people have been long advised not to use but that still appeared were, you guessed it, “password” which was the second most common and “welcome.” There are also 172 people out there who are apparently still fond of “qwerty.”

When LinkedIn was hacked last month and had 6 million user passwords stolen, their most popular list was noticeably different and included words related to the nature of the site itself: “link” “job” and “work” were all among their top five. However, there was still some overlap with the Yahoo list in that “1234″ was the second most frequently used.

This incident reinforces what security researchers have been telling web users in recent months: Choose secure, unique passwords and don’t reuse the same password for multiple accounts.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

mappa_blog (Photo credit: francescopozzi)

Whether you blog for a hobby or blog for business/professional purposes…more likely than not one of your main goals is to get your word out there and draw as much traffic as you can to your posts. So if you are new to the blogosphere or maybe have found yourself in a bit of a blogging rut, be sure to check out the following basic types of blog ideas so that you can get to composing your most click-worthy posts yet:

• Round-up Posts –  This type of blog post is one of the most popular kinds found on the internet—and the good news is that they are some of the simplest to create! Round-up your content into a list that outlines, “The Top 10 Reasons…,” “The 7 Least Likely Places…,” or “The 100 Best of…”—you get the idea here, the possibilities are endless!

• Personal tales – Stories from your own personal vault are some of the best ways for you to reach your target audience. Your blog instantly becomes more interesting when you talk about real life events—people love posts to which they can relate. Sharing an experience or tale that can define a lesson or give a moral will be a great way for you to help others. And it doesn’t even have to be serious—have some fun and tell a humorous story to give your blog some personality!

• News, news, news – A proven method of effective blogging stems from news that is happening not yesterday, not two hours ago, but right this very second. So if there is a current event that you find especially entertaining or intriguing and your readers would want to know about it, then jump on the story fast! Put the story in your own words and you can even spin it so that it fits better with the content of your blog. Readers will appreciate your timely rehash of the latest happenings and will be more likely to visit in the future to stay informed about what’s going on in your niche.

• Reviews – Because consumers trust fellow consumers more than they trust the marketing tactics of huge corporations just trying to make a buck selling them something, cyber surfers are constantly searching blogs for reviews on things like music, movies, restaurants and much more. So try giving your readers an honest review of products or services that relate to your blog. Describe your own personal experiences that detail your likes, dislikes, pros, cons, comparisons to similar products/services and conclude your reviews with a final recommendation for your blog visitors.

• How-to – It’s a wonder how people got anything accomplished before the internet. Nowadays it seems that we can’t figure out how to do anything from buy a car to boil an egg without looking up the instructions on the web. Take advantage of the stupidity of the modern man by giving your blog readers easy to follow, step-by-step instructions on how to do something that would be of particular use to them.

• Controversy – Just as long as you devise your post in a way that doesn’t offend or spark an influx of hate mail to your Gmail account, if it’s scandalous, it’s always going to be a hit amongst your fan-base. Create blog posts around current controversial subjects while being sure to cover all the pertinent points and follow up with your own views on the matter. Sound off about it and ask questions that will generate comments and create a place for others to share their input as well.

Mark Weikel is a guest post author who shares with us his blogging tips. In addition, Mark also blogs for gay dating sites where he offers advice to singles for successful online dating.

Just several weeks after Google’s controversial privacy policy changes went into effect on March 1, the company has

Image via CrunchBase

announced the arrival of a new feature called Account Activity.

According to a March 28 blog post by product manager Andreas Tuerk, this new offering will send you a monthly password-protected report laying out information such as log-in, email, and web search activity — essentially a collection of user dataGoogle has stored and is now sharing across many of its services, a move thatconcerned some consumer groups and users.

According to The Verge, the new feature works with both regular Gmail accounts and Google Apps users with custom domain names.

Signing up for the Account Activity beta will allow you to easily track how you’ve been using your Google account. For example, you can view devices and locations where you’ve logged in, what browsers and/or platforms you’ve used to do so and what authentication changes may have been made to your account.

In addition, you’ll be able to see the places you’ve visited and tracked through Google Latitude; stats and trends in the emails you’ve sent and received; and the types of searches you’ve conducted, along with your top queries.

LOOK:

Active YouTube users who have linked to their Google accounts can view how many videos they’ve uploaded in a month, which of them was most popular, and a list of viewers’ locations.

LOOK:

What do you think of Google’s new Account Activity feature? Let us know in the comments!

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Related articles

• Google’s New Account Activity Feature Shows Your Shocking Addiction To Google Services (techcrunch.com)

Unroll.me, which started as a simple hack for unsubscribing to emails, is the startup behind this improvement, and it’s launching a redesigned product on Monday. For the first time, users can compile the newsletters they do want to receive into a one-email-per-day digest.

Here’s how it works: After you grant Unroll.me access to your inbox (only gmail, MSN, Yahoo and AOL are compatible for now), it searches for the newsletters you receive on a regular basis. A 2003 law that requires newsletters to include certain language makes this easier for the startup to spot them.

Through the Unroll.me dashboard, you can then opt out of each newsletter it detects with a single click (for sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, Unroll.me directs you to the appropriate settings page). You can also add any of them to a daily digest newsletter with one click. That’s it.

Eventually the site hopes to make money by building an index of newsletters. It could help newsletters acquire new subscribers by suggesting them to users who subscribe to similar ones, and it would charge them for the service. Unroll.me is currently offering newsletter recommendations to users, but none of them are sponsored.

Despite the lack of income, the service is free to use — but there is a catch. After unsubscribing from four lists through Unroll.me, you need to tweet, post or email friends about the service before you can continue purging your inbox.

Considering the benefits of the service, however, a social plug is a small price to pay.

Unroll.me is still in private beta, but the first 5,000 Mashable users who sign up at this link can skip the line.

Source :- http://mashable.com

Related articles

• Clean Your Inbox of Newsletters With One Click (themarketingguy.wordpress.com)

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Rapportive, a startup that makes a Gmail add-on that displays social media info about contacts as you email them, confirmed on Wednesday that it had been purchased by LinkedIn.

Rahul Vohra, CEO of Rapportive, confirmed the acquisition on the company’s blog. “In business, partnership is dating — and we went on a lot of dates with LinkedIn. Slowly, but surely, we fell in love,” Vohra wrote. Vohra wrote that despite the new ownership, Rapportive will continue building its product. “At LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people.”

The confirmation comes after a report earlier this month from All Things D pegged the purchase price in the “low teens” of millions of dollars. Vohra did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

Rapportive is a sidebar for Gmail that displays information from relevant email contacts’ social media accounts, including LinkedIn, as you open and compose emails. It also lets you add those email contacts as friends on social networks without leaving your inbox.

The startup’s website says its plugin looks up more than 20 million contacts every month — which, considering how many emails can come to one account, doesn’t necessarily give much insight into the size of its user base. It competes with other personal relationship management products such as Smartr and Mingly

Source :- http://mashable.com

Related articles

• LinkedIn acquires Gmail plugin, Rapportive (agbeat.com)

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Google users were delighted recently by the discovery of a new Search trick, ”do a barrel roll”. Here’s how it works: Type the command “do a barrel roll” into Google’s search bar and watch the Search interface perform a 360-degree somersault before your eyes. And this isn’t the only goodie to be found within Google’s vast web of Internet properties.

Google engineers are surprisingly committed to injecting otherwise ho-hum internet searches with a bit of whimsy.Their iconic logo alone has been updated over 1,000 times to celebrate holidays, birthdays and historical events. Some of these so-called Google Doodles have featured complex animated videos, such as the epic birthday tribute to Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, while others offered hilarious interactive surprises, like the playful Muppet animations on Jim Henson’s birthday.

There are also goodies to be found in other products like Google Maps, Google Earth, YouTube and Gmail.

• Do A Barrel Roll - Wanna feel like you’re flying a fighter jet while you look for things on the internet? Type “do a barrel roll” into the Google search bar and watch the whole page roll over.

• What Is The Loneliest Number? - You shouldn’t be afraid to ask Google the hard questions. Query “What is the loneliest number” and Google’s calculator will tell you that it is “1″. The calculator returns the same answer when you query “the answer to life, the universe, and everything,” as well as “the number of horns on a unicorn.”

• Askew - Get Google a little tipsy when you search ”askew”.

• Google Gravity - Tired of Google being so weightless all the time? Bring it down to Earth by entering “Google gravity” and clicking “I’m Feeling Lucky”. Once the search bar, buttons and logo have collapsed into a heap at the bottom of the page, you can toss them around the page by clicking, dragging and releasing them.

• Recursion - You know when you’re in a bathroom with lots of mirrors and you look into one and see your reflection repeated into infinity? That’s called recursion. According to Merriam-Webster, the word means “a procedure that can repeat itself indefinitely.” If you Google with the word “recursion,”Google will suggest the following at the top of its list of search results: “Did you mean: recursion.” If you click Google’s suggestion, a new page will load, but “Did you mean: recursion” will remain at the at the top of the results list. (With the time and inclination, you could go on and on like this forever.)

• Where Is Chuck Norris? - Google saves you from a roundhouse kick to the face by coming up empty when you attempt an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search for “Where is Chuck Norris?” Instead users are taken to www.NoChuckNorris.com, which displays text that reads, “Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.” The page also gives users an option to search “pages from Chuck’s Beard.”

• Once In A Blue Moon - The Google Calculator also returns more complicated answers. Query “baker’s dozen” and the calculator returns “13.” Searching “once in a blue moon” yields a comically small number (seen above).

• Google Pig Latin - Otay eesay Oogle’sgay omepagehay anslatedtray intoway Igpay Atinlay, ypetay “ooglegay igpay atinlay” intoway Ooglegay andway ithay “I’mway Eelingfay Uckylay”.

  You can also customize your Google search to display text in a number of languages, such French, German and Japanese, as well as Latin, Pirate and Klingon.

  

• Tilt –  Get Google a little tipsy when you search Tilt.

Related articles

• Make google do amazing things (shankee.com)
• Google tricks (baibhavsingh.wordpress.com)

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The revamped Gmail for desktop is slowly rolling out to users, and like its Google Reader and Gmail app for iOS cousins,

it has a few problems.

Aside from aesthetic complaints about the fields of empty white space, the new Gmail has some functional problems, too: Some things are distracting; some are annoying; and some just don’t make sense.

Below are complaints about the new Gmail. 

• Icons Without Labels - In the old Gmail, there were five basic options above each email message: “Archive,” “Spam,” “Delete,” “Move To” or “Label.” Messages in the new Gmail have the same options, except they’ve been replaced by icons. Unless you have memorized the order and function of the buttons above Gmail messages, you have to mouse over each icon to find out what each one of them does. Each time I see those buttons, I think: “There’s no words on it!”

• Advertisement Between Message And Mystery Buttons- In between the “No Words On It” buttons and your email message, you can now expect to see an advertisement every time you open a piece of mail. Google has squeezed in a little ad bar between message and function buttons for maximum commercial exposure, and while this may help their bottom line, the pesky little thing is always distracting and seemingly out-of-place.This advertising bar also lives above your inbox. It’s a worthless gray cloud raining down skin cream discounts on your each and every message. Annoying.

• New Reply Field, Cursor-Less - The reply field on Gmail messages used to be super intuitive, with a text cursor appearing where you could click to enter text. Now, it stays as a pointer when you mouse over. It’s a small but annoying change that always leaves me concerned I’ve pushed an incorrect button whenever I’m replying, replying all or forwarding any message. Bring back the text cursor, Gmail!

• No Chat And Labels At The Same Time- When setting your Gmail into the new “Comfortable” mode, you’ve got to make an unfortunate compromise between chat and labels: You can either see your chat list, or you can see your labels. Wanna see both? Too bad.Now, you can move your chat list over to the right sidebar (which always made me uncomfortable) or you can change the spacing setting in your Gmail to “Compact” or “Cozy” (both of which give me a crick in my neck just thinking about). But if you want a view of your email labels and your online G-buddies, you’re out of luck for the time being. Why? Well…

• Disappearing Chat Bar- Pop quiz: Can you name the seven primary email folders in Gmail without looking?(Time’s up: Those would be Inbox, Buzz (R.I.P.), Important, Chats, Sent Mail, Drafts, All Mail, and Spam. How’d you do?)
  Anywho, whenever you put your cursor over any of those seven primary email folders in the new Gmail, the chat list disappears whether you want it to or not. If there’s an easy way to lock the chat sidebar so that it’s always visible, I’m not seeing it.

Related articles

• A New Look for Gmail (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
• Gmail’s New Look, Now Available (mt-soft.com.ar)

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On October 19 in Hong Kong, Google took the wraps off Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich), the biggest update to the company’s popular mobile operating system since the tablet-optimized Android 3.0 (aka “Honeycomb”) debuted in early 2011.

The Ice Cream Sandwich release brings a new focus on ease-of-use and aesthetics. While Android 3.0 focused solely on large-screen mobile devices, Android 4.0 improves many of those features and scales them down for use on mobile phones, too. “We tried to create a palette and a language and a sense of being that’s clean and modern and graphic, but isn’t a straightjacket.” Matias Duarte, who head Android’s user experience team, told This Is My Next. “We’ve taken what Honeycomb has done and pumped up the snooty design quotient, and we’ve toned down the geeky nerd quotient. We’ve made it a lot more accessible. But we haven’t taken it in a new direction.”

See the biggest new features Google’s Android 4.0 has to offer (below), then check out Samung’s Galaxy Nexus, the first device built specifically for Ice Cream Sandwich.

• More Camera Features - What’s different about camera functions in Android 4.0? A whole lot, starting with Instagram-esque photo-editing tools and deeper integration with social networks. TechCrunch is gaga over the improvements, lauding the “image stabilization, improved autofocus, and integration with other apps for sending photos or instant upload to Google+. Oh, and who could forget built-in face detection, panorama and time lapse modes, and on-the-fly photo retouching and enhancements.” Like Apple’s new iOS 5, Android users will also be able to access the camera right from the lock screen.

• Sleeker Look - Ice Cream Sandwich’s totally revamped interface places even more emphasis on Google’s search bar and aims at making Android more user-friendly. Among the new features are a new typeface called “Roboto” with more rounded letters, as well as scrollable and re-sizable widgets. The snazzy UI also places more of an emphasis on finger gestures.

• New Security Feature - Android 4.0 users can rest easy, knowing that their devices will feature the nifty Face Unlock, which scans the user’s face before unlocking the gadget.

• Data Management - A data management tool will help the user understand the amount of data their favorite apps use. This tool will also let the user set data limits for herself, and it will send warnings to notify the user when her data use approaches those limits.

• Revamped Browser - Not only will it look sleeker on handsets, Android’s native browser will now place more emphasis on tabs and offline productivity. “Users can keep up to 16 tabs open, view a live preview of each and quickly switch between them,” explains By Genius Report. “Tabs can be closed by flicking them off of the screen much like webOS or RIM’s tablet OS. Google also automatically syncs bookmarks to your Android browser from Chrome, and users can save pages for offline reading.”

• More Robust Gmail - Gmail users, rejoice! Here’s what’s new with Google’s celebrated email app, according to TechCrunch: “Gmail now supports two-line previews, and sports a new context-sensitive action bar at the bottom of the screen. Gesture support allows you to swipe left and right between emails.” Boy Genius Report notes that Gmail will support offline search, too.

• Improved Voice Dictation - Though it’s no Siri, Google has upgraded its hands-free speech recognition feature, which lets users dictate text, send messages, open media files and more. Per PCWorld: “ICS voice command software now has a hands free feature that lets you activate voice actions just by speaking to your phone instead of pressing a button.”
  “play music, search the web, and dictate notes, SMS and email messages.”

• NFC Sharing - Google touts the security of its Android Beam wireless transfer system, which lets users share content between devices equipped with Near-Field Communication (aka NFC) technology. Engadget explains how the system will work:
  Much like HP’s ill-fated Touch-to-share functionality, it will let you simply tap two NFC-enabled devices together to share a piece of information. That will work with a range of apps and services in Android, including YouTube videos, contact information, maps, web pages” and more. While you can transfer content from apps, you can’t transfer the apps themselves, but Engadget notes that Android Beam “links to apps in the Android Market.

• Virtual Buttons - Designed with an eye toward button-free Android handsets, version 4.0 of Google’s operating system relies more on finger gestures and integrates navigation buttons and music controls into the user interface. The feature could lead to a new generation of sleeker devices with fewer hardware buttons.
  But will these virtual buttons get in user’s way? TechCrunch says no: “[T]hey smartly disappear when viewing video or in widescreen mode.”
• Notifications Upgrade - ”The notification window is now slightly translucent with a glowing dot when you pull it downward,”according to This Is My Next. “Notifications can be swiped away one at a time, mirroring webOS 3.0 behavior. You can access your notifications on the lock screen if you’re not using a passcode, and you can jump quickly to your settings through the window shade.”

• Universal Android OS - Version 4.0 will work on any Android device, be it tablet or smartphone. “Ice Cream Sandwich is the OS that’s supposed to put a damper on all that fragmentation talk,” writes VentureBeat. “[T]he 2.X OS for phones and the 3.X OS for tablets will give way to the 4.X OS for all Android devices.”

• Social Integration - ICS bakes deeper social integration into many apps. Perhaps the most social is the “People” app. BGR writes that this new app “pulls in contact information and photos from social networks for your whole address book. Whenever a contact updates his or her info, it is also automatically updated on your phone.”

• When Will It Be Available? - Though Ice Cream Sandwich officially launched on October 19, many Android phones won’t run the new software immediately. The Galaxy Nexus will ship in November with Ice Cream Sandwich preloaded. But when will it be available for other devices? And for which? Google’s Gabe Cohen offered Engadget some insight into Google’s plans for the OS. “Currently in the process for releasing Ice Cream Sandwich for Nexus S,” he said, adding that all devices running Android 2.3 (aka “Gingerbread”) should “theoretically” be able to run Android 4.0. However, he didn’t share a timeline.
  Pocket Lint obtained confirmation that ICS will be coming to the newly announced Motorola DROID RAZR “at the start of 2012.”
  HTC phones may not be ICS-ready for some time, though. According to an HTC statement, posted by Engadget, the manufacturer is “currently reviewing its features and functionality to determine [its] upgrade plans.”

Related articles

• Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich now official (engadget.com)
• Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich: Brilliant Thievery? (informationweek.com)

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Google has launched a campaign promoting online safety, in association with the UK’s Citizen’s Advice Bureau.

The campaign, which will include adverts in newspapers, on public transport and online, is being run with the hope of encouraging internet users to take more care over their online activities – including using more secure passwords, and remembering to log out of websites when they have finished using them.

Awareness campaigns about online safety like this are important, as it’s clear that most internet users are pretty clueless about how to best secure their computers and surf safely online.

This isn’t because the public is disinterested in protecting themselves, but due to the fact that many people simply don’t know where to turn, or how to translate complicated buzzwords, geek talk and terminology into simple easy-to-understand English.

So, campaigns like Google’s “Good to Know” one are a *good* thing, as they translate sometimes complicated safety advice into simple terms.

Google, of course, has an interest in people not turning their backs on the internet – it wants users to feel safer online, as that will ultimately increase the popularity of the internet and help Google grow.

To their credit, Google provides a number of technologies to help users defend their accounts from being hacked – but only a minority of users seem know about them. If you haven’t already done so, check out my advice on how to stop your Gmail account being hacked, for instance.

It’s notable that part of the “Good to Know” campaign appears designed to reassure internet users about the data that Google collects about them to provide its services.

The critical thing, however, will be what I call my “Aunty Hilda test”. If the only people who hear about this advertising campaign are people who are already techie geeks or people who work in information security then it will have failed.

If, however, my Aunty Hilda hears about the campaign – and genuinely learns something about how to protect herself online – then it truly will have succeeded.

With cybercrime and internet fraud on the increase – it’s never been more important to raise awareness and give people simple instructions on how to be safer on the net.

You can find out more about the “Good to Know” campaign atwww.google.co.uk/goodtoknow.

Related articles

• Google teams up with the Citizens Advice Bureau to promote online safety (thenextweb.com)
• Google teams up with Citizens Advice Bureau (telegraph.co.uk)

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Police in Thailand have arrested a university student who is said to have admitted hacking into the Prime Minister’s Twitter account and posting messages accusing her of incompetence.

22-year-old Aekawit Thongdeeworakul, a fourth year architecture student at Chulalongkorn University, could face up to two years in prison if found guilty of illegally accessing computer systems without authorisation.

Thailand’s Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, had her Twitter account hacked last weekend – and her followers saw a stream of messages criticising her leadership.

The hacker’s final tweet read:

"If she can't even protect her own Twitter account, how can she protect the country?"

In bizarre scenes, Thongdeeworakul appeared before reporters at a hastily convened news conference in Bangkok, alongside ICT Minister Anudith Nakornthap.

The minister told members of the press that the alleged hacker believed his actions were innocent “as he didn’t realise it would be a big deal.”

According to the ICT minister, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra had her Gmail account hacked on September 30th by unknown people, and her password was disseminated across the computer underground.

From the sound of things, Ms Shinawatra was not following my advice onhow to stop your Gmail account being hacked.

Thongdeeworakul is said to have subsequently used the information to gain access to the prime minister’s Twitter account. The IP address used to access the account ultimately lead investigators back to Thongdeeworakul.

The architecture student remained silent at the press conference, shrouded by a baseball cap and dark sunglasses.

Remember folks – just because you can access someone else’s email, Facebook or Twitter account without the owner’s persmission doesn’t ever mean it’s an acceptable thing to do. In fact, it’s breaking the law and could lead to you getting in a lot of trouble.

Related articles

• Thai student Aekawit Thongdeeworakul arrested over alleged hacking of prime minister’s Twitter account (100gf.wordpress.com)
• Thai prime minister Twitter hack suspect charged (go.theregister.com)
• Arrest in Thai PM Twitter hacking (bbc.co.uk)
• Student ‘confesses’ to hacking Thai PM’s Twitter account (tphnewsfromtheworld.wordpress.com)