The story around badBIOS, the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps, is fascinating and surprising. The capabilities of sophisticated attackers right now vastly outstrip the defenses of any computer user or company. The news that the NSA had broken into the networks of Google and Yahoo, unfortunately, wasn’t surprising given Google’s move to encrypt traffic between datacenters early in September.
Tag Archives: Google
Back to Firefox
After a good while (I can’t search my Twitter stream) on Chrome I’m switching back to Firefox as my primary browser, and actually uninstalled Chrome. Why? I was getting the “Oh snap” failure page all the time, even on Google’s own Youtube! The only support I was pointed to was this page, and when I followed the instructions there when I restarted Chrome everything was gone. The sentence “copy the relevant files from the “Backup User Data” folder to your new “User Data” folder.” is useless when you consider the folder has 50+ files to sort through and I wasn’t sure which one was causing my previous problems. So back to Firefox, and thanks to Xmarks all of my stuff is there. I’m also using this persona which is pretty sweet. The feature I missed most on Chrome was lame: the ability to click and hold a folder then release on a bookmark I wanted to open. On Chrome you have to click twice. It bugged me. Now back on Firefox I feel like the browser has a large head.
Google & China
Google is taking a new approach to China. This is a big deal, they’re basically implying the Chinese government has been hacking Google accounts to compromise human rights advocates. Interesting the note at the end where they say these decisions and investigations were entirely in the US, it’s almost like they’re trying to protect their employees there.
Google Analytics script
40% still use old Google Analytics script. Don’t forget to update to the newest Google Analytics script call. (And drop in WordPress.com Stats while you’re in there to get something quick and author-centric.)
Google Account Takeover
If Google is going to be at the center of our digital and online lives, they need to get a lot better about their support organization and how they handle account issues. Check out this story by Mark Ghosh for an example of what happens when things go wrong. What if you woke up tomorrow and your Gmail, Orkut, Docs, Reader, Google Checkout account was gone?
Cuil
I like Cuil. There’s just something very intuitive about the interface that fels comfortable to me, but I’m not sure how to articulate it. And it’s fast! Going to try it out as my default search engine for the next few days. Downside? Sometimes the images seem completely random, and I do see some spam in the index.
Feeds in Search Results
WordPress produces a bajillion different feeds for every post, category, search, basically anything you can imagine. For a long time now some of these have shown up in search results next to regular pages, which I imagine was very confusing for people clicking from a search result to a bunch of XML. No longer! From the Webmaster blog: Taking feeds out of our web search results.