Archive for the ‘TechNews’ Category
| 19 Feb 2009 |
New Feature in Paypal – Where to go after login |
Yesterday afternoon i saw the notification message in My account page, that maintenance is performed on the paypal website. Today when i opened up paypal to check my balance and incoming payments i noticed that they added a new feature to the login screen, a dropdown box where you can select to go to Your account page or to Transaction history page.
This is the only new thing i could notice, most probably there were other updates as well. If you frequently use paypal you can notice that almost every 2-5 days maintenance is performed. I find this feature quite handy and saves me some time, especially when i need to check on my invoices and bills.
TIPS FOR PAYPAL USERS:
1) NEVER, and i mean NEVER click links in emails which look bogus to you. Browse manually to paypal.com and login. Find more info in paypal security center.
2) Make sure you are protected! A simple antivirus won’t do. I highly recommend you use an anti-keylogger every time you do transactions online or use paypal/your credit card. Heck use an anti keylogger every time you log in somewhere. You don’t have to fear viruses, you have to fear keyloggers!
I personally recommend AKlog NT+ which runs in background and doesn’t affect any processes. It is free to use and doesn’t bug you with annoying pop-up purchase messages. You can check more info on AKlog NT+ Help page.
3) Never log in to paypal from public workstations(pc’s at school/work/net cafes), because you don’t know anything about the security of those PCs.
4) If it’s possible use a virtual keyboard and type in your username and password using the mouse pointer.
5) last but not least remember that you can NEVER BE TOO SECURE. Take precautions and avoid difficulties.
| 5 Feb 2009 |
Upgrade to Firefox 3.0.6 |
Firefox 3.0.6 was released just a few hours ago. The new update includes a few security fixes(among which one has a critical value so its highly recommended to upgrade)
Other fixes include: stability fixes, ability improvement for scripted commands and lots of other bug fixes which are visible at the Bug List. Time to upgrade!
| 5 Feb 2009 |
Did you notice the new Gmail Navbar buttons? |
The Gmail team updated the old looking nav elements and gave them a fresh new look, this happened two days ago, meaning if you haven’t logged into your gmail account recently it’s time to check the fresh updates.
Along with the new nav, the Gmail Team added new shortcuts also:
“We’re also adding keyboard shortcuts: v for “Move to” and l (lowercase L) for “Labels.” Make sure you have keyboard shortcuts turned on to use these.”
These add-ons are great, but in my point of view Gmail has the huge lack of tabbing, i really like at yahoo mail that you can view lots of messages in tabs by this way letting you copy/paste and check stuff with a lot more ease.
Lets just hope that in the near future Google will come up with a solution for this issue also.
| 3 Feb 2009 |
GMail in Google Apps also got the new coat |
At the end of November last year i was talking about how the good ‘ol GMail got sexyfied by getting a new skin and a skin chooser section. Back then here’s what i was saying:
“Currently this addon was implemented only in Gmal and not into Google Apps also, but the time when Gmail from G Apps will be updated is really close.”
You know what they say, it’s better late than never. The really close for the GMail team meant 2 months, i noticed the change about 4 days ago. Basically the Apps Gmail was tuned up and has all the new great addons as the regular Gmail.
| 27 Jan 2009 |
Conficker.worm the most devastating of its kind in the past 5 years |
Even though McAfee set conficker.worm as having a low risk for both corporate and home users F Secure team warns us that the worm has already infected 8.9 million PCs world wide. ” The number of Downadup infections are skyrocketing based on our calculations. From an estimated 2.4 million infected machines to over 8.9 million during the last four days. That’s just amazing.”
I wonder if they see it amazing in the perspective of the worm creators, or they mean amazing by knowing that it’s the most devastating worm in the past 5 years?(this was a retorical question)
This worm exploits the MS08-067 Microsoft Windows Server Service vulnerability.
Once it infects a computer it will go on infecting other computers in the network. The best thing a user can do in order ot prevent infection is to install latest microsoft updates(i got to be really drunk in order to install service pack 3), and to have a decent antivirus to secure your PC(i recommend Kasperksy). The good thing is that microsoft released a patch which covers the security hole(no service pack 3 updating!).
In case you got infected the best thing is to head over to Kaspersk’s support section and download the Kidokiller application which will get ridd of the worm. Download and install instructions are available on the official support page.
Looking back to the past a little in January 2003 the SQL slammer worm was so devastating that it infected almost all of its 75,000 victims in less than 10 minutes exploiting a buffer overflow in Microsoft’s flagship SQL Server and Desktop Engine database products. Anyway, the thing is that on 25th Jan 2003 using the infected computers it launched a DDOS attack on some of the internet hosts, and by this way it dramatically slowed internet traffic for about 10 hours.
| 25 Nov 2008 |
Youtube goes widescreen! |
Youtube staff announced yesterday that they changed the player’s size to widescreen(16:9 ratio instead of 4:3). This is a very smart move of the youtube team, but this caught lots of users off-guard.
The old videos appear in the center of the new player. Along with the new sized player the upload page has also been upgraded and it allows you to Upload 10 videos at a time in any video format having up to 1GB in size.
We are very aware that the youtube time limit can be easily bypassed and i have a feeling that we will see lots of movies on the new youtube.
The user opinions regarding the new player vary, but the most visible conclusion that i could draw is that users would prefer the possibility to choose between 4:3 and 16:9 players, because the classic sized videos look like crap in the new player.
How this affects bloggers
The switch to the new player also affects bloggers who are using plugins(like me) to embed videos from video sharing websites. This means that if we will resize the width and height in the options panel it will affect all the videos in our posts.
A clever solution would be to use one more plugin on top of the one that your using to embed the new widescreen videos.
Daniel McOrmond has a guide on how to embed the new widescreen videos
| 20 Nov 2008 |
Gmail got sexyfied! |
Yet an other reason why you should switch to Gmail!
About 3 hours ago i checked my email, went out with my girlfriend and now when i got back i had a huge surpise! A brand new default theme for Gmail with a tooltip showing that i can select from a variety of themes. I rushed to the Gmail blog and found the post about the latest addon: Spice up your inbox with colors and themes.
Now, this my friend is a pwnage addon! I’ve been waiting for this for such a long time! I can finally get some darker colors( i don’t really like bright colors, becuase after a while they are unpleasant for the eye).
Currently this addon was implemented only in Gmal and not into Google Apps also, but the time when Gmail from G Apps will be updated is really close.
What’s next?
If we’re lucky the Gmail Dev team will make it possible to create custom themes and use or share them with other gmail users. Now this would be an other really cool feature, because gmail would be taken to the next level in the personalisation matter.
| 10 Nov 2008 |
The Alexa ranking system is wacked! |
Quick note: wacked = messed up.
Back in the days people said “Alexa ranking isn’t very accurate”, shortly after that line became: “You can’t rely on Alexa ranking”, and now we can easily say that “Most definitely you can’t rely on the Alexa ranking”, which in the near future might become “Alexa ranking is unsiginficant”.
I’ve been noticing this for quite a long time now, especially in the past month when i kept a closer look on the Alexa ranking of serveral websites(including my own) and noticed that the rankings are so inaccurate that its almost like they are from a science fiction movie.
The thing that i noticed at my own blog is that alexa shows a huge drop in the rank, even though the traffic to my blog is increasing day-by-day. I’ve looked up stuff on google and found that many people recommend us to put an alexa traffic widget on our website to increase our ranking. Even if this is true, and the widget does increase the alexa ranking of a website why on earth would I ruin my design by adding that widget?
Previously i mentioned that i kept a closer look on several websites. I have a website which is in development and receives about 100uniques/day which generate ~ 200page views and it has a rank of about 140,000 and the graph shows that the ranking will be better. No alexa widget, no alexa rank increasing bots, no nothing. Well call me stupid, but at my blog i have 2000-5000 pageviews/day and it shows a huge traffic drop.
To be honest i don’t give 2 cents about Alexa rank, but its not what i think, it’s what others think: that Alexa rank is indeed important and they should consider it. Yeah right!
| 7 Nov 2008 |
Yahoo totally messed things up |
Damn! I’m really happy that I didn’t write this post yesterday, because today i would have had to correct it.
Jerry Yang the CEO of Yahoo! spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit where he stated that “the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo”. To be more precise this meant that Yahoo is really desperate. Back in the days when Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo for 44.6 Billion $(US Dollars) the negotiations failed because the 2 parts couldn’t get to a price agreement, also we don’t have to forget that Yahoo struggled from all of its powers to escape Microsoft this resulting a Search Ad Deal with Google and Steve Ballmer(Microsoft’s CEO) dropping Microsoft’s offer.
Google dropped the Search Ad Deal and Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer cleary specified that Microsoft is no longer interested in Yahoo. From the 3 companies Yahoo had the most to loose and Google the most to gain.
What’s next? Yahoo sinks even more or will it get back on its feet? This is a dilemma for lots and lots of people around the world.
| 12 Oct 2008 |
iWebTool took the great fall within 1 year |
iWebTool, the great seo tools website is going dooown!, well the boat almost sank, but the captain still has a chance of jumping on a boat and saving some of the valuable items. There’s a quote that says:“The greater the fall, the higher the ascension”.
This doesn’t really apply for iWebtool which back in the days in a very very short time became one of the very popular websites on the web. I think my version of the quote applies for iWebTool: – the higher the ascension the greater the fall (see graph below).
Lets take a closer look at the facts:
Almost a Year ago:
Lots of their tools are broken, they got fixed and got broken again(i blogged about this almost a year ago ->
Some of the Iwebtool Tools broken….AGAIN.
Lets see where we stand now:
As you can see on the image the tool can’t connect to any of the Google datacenters -> The tool is BROKEN
2) Iwebtool Pagerank prediction
Yep…Pagerank prediction is also BROKEN
Alexa ranking display works, Pagerank display doesn’t.
Same as at rank checker and pr checker. The visual pagerank tool shows PR 0 for all links.
it seems that this tool works only for large sites like Adobe or Google, for any smaller sites it will say: “Total Backlinks: 0″.
What led to the huge traffic drop?
Greed
If you ask me, it was iwebtool’s greed which led to it. They became money-hungry and filled the website with ads.
I don’t get this, weren’t the sponsored links enough just like at the old version of the site?
Also, they introduced gold membership which allows unlimited usage of the tools.
Without the Gold membership you may do 5 queries/hour, after which you will get a sexy LIMIT EXCEEDED Error message.
Yeah right…the limit was added to get more cash. If they would have wanted to stop bots they could have just added captcha.
Removal of the embed feature
This was the main feature which made iwebtool so popular from the start: the possibility to embed the tools on your website.This gained extra traffic for webmasters and extra traffic and exposion for iwebtool.
Well, that feature is gone now, and if you want to use their tools you have to do it from their website, with the 5 queries/hour limit of course.
Conclusion
Seeing the facts above, it’s now obvious why iwebtool took the great fall. Iwebtool is falling, and similar websites are growing each day and getting a constant flow of revenue.
