First Google Chrome kicked me out of Google services flashing red and refusing to add an exception for an invalid certificate. Next came Firefox which also downright refused to add an exception to the obviously invalid certificate. Is this another DNS problem, did somebody mess up the certificate or are am I (or they) experiencing a denial of service attack?
Secure Connection Failed Google
Google Business Card
I can’t help but laugh at all the attention being given to the business card on GeekSugar and iMod reinterpreting it as the business card being used by Google employees. Even though I think it’s very creative and could even be a great idea (except for when somebody else uses your keywords and outranks you), Google’s actual business card being used by employees is nothing as creative or exciting, I might even add it’s downright boring compared to the amount of creativity going into their other services (although they did give the word “Google” a textured feel by machine pressing the letters from behind, probably to help blind people identify the card as a Google business card)
Since business cards is not their trade, I’ll admit that they did a good job creating a functional, professional looking business card that will probably appeal to business owners and a little less to artist.
To all the Google Earth addicts, Google has just announced the release of Google Earth 5.0!
The new Google Earth allows you to go back in time and see the older archived satellite images instead of just the latest available satellite images. Another feature they’ve added is the ability to go on 3D tours and save your tours which can be shared with other people. Interested in wandering around on Mars? With some help from NASA, Google Earth will allow you to walk around on Mars and explore it by yourself. Oceans have also been revamped, instead of a low resolution ocean just sitting there, you can now dive into the ocean, view shipwrecks as well as view video footage provided by National Geographic and BBC.
Well, looks like internet service providers are going to make some extra money this year selling bandwidth.
In case you missed it, Google, in a glimpse (40 minutes approximately) of what seemed like eternity to most internet addicts, marked all search results, including google.com as malware.
Marissa Mayer explained in the Google Blog that the problem occurred due to a slash (‘/’) being added to the list of malware sites which propagated to all search results and that they get their list of malware sites from StopBadware.org who in turns explains that changes to their listing should not affect Google search results (in an attempt to distance themselves from the glitch which was obviously a human error on Google’s side and not StopBadware.org’s side)
If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.
What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.
Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.
Thanks for your understanding.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience
The Google Blog has since been updated to eliminate any confusion after StopBadware.org responded with:
Posted by Maxim Weinstein 16 hours ago
This morning, an apparent glitch at Google caused nearly every [update 11:44 am] search listing to carry the “Warning! This site may harm your computer” message. Users who attempted to click through the results saw the “interstitial” warning page that mentions the possibility of badware and refers people to StopBadware.org for more information. This led to a denial of service of our website, as millions of Google users attempted to visit our site for more information. We are working now to bring the site back up. We are also awaiting word from Google about what happened to cause the false warnings.
[Update 12:31] Google has posted an update on their official blog that erroneously states that Google gets its list of URLs from us. This is not accurate. Google generates its own list of badware URLs, and no data that we generate is supposed to affect the warnings in Google’s search listings. We are attempting to work with Google to clarify their statement.
[Update 12:41] Google is working on an updated statement. Meanwhile, to clarify some false press reports, it does not appear to be the case that Google has taken down the warnings for legitimately bad sites. We have spot checked a couple known bad sites, and Google is still flagging those sites as bad. i.e., the problem appears to be corrected on their end.
For more information about how the process works and the relative role that Google and StopBadware.org play, please see our Clearinghouse page or this question in our FAQ.
[Update 1:36] Google updated its statement to reflect that StopBadware does not provide Google’s badware data.
[Update 2:35] Hopefully this will be the last update, as Google has acknowledged the error, apologized to its customers, and fixed the problem. As many know, we have a strong relationship with Google, which is a sponsor and partner of StopBadware.org. The mistake in Google’s initial statement, indicating that we supply them with badware data, is a common misperception. We appreciate their follow up efforts in clarifying the relationship on their blog and with the media. Despite today’s glitch, we continue to support Google’s effort to proactively warn users of badware sites, and our experience is that they are committed to doing so as accurately and as fairly as possible.
A PR nightmare looking at the amount of flaming comments on StopBadware.org, eish!
When you take a look at the following screenshot of an email recieved and take a closer look at the links inside the email, it looks like a regular email with normal links inside it.
Now observe what their sneaky onclick URL rewrite function does … (it’s only visible for a few milliseconds)
Everytime you click on a URL in Gmail, it’s tracked!
The interesting thing about Google Chrome is, they never show this redirection link which makes me wonder, is this type of tracking functionality built into Chrome or are they simply using Chrome to cover their tracks? The fact that it autoupdates means it is sending information back and forth to Google the whole time, what is stopping them from sending tracking information back and forth?
Think it is time to analyze exactly what is being sent back and forth between Chrome and Google, Google tracking my links is already a violation of privacy!
I was about to skip the Google Chrome age as I thought it was just another browser trying to take a cut out of the browser pie, Firefox was already a good enough browser … how wrong I was!
Discovered a blog entry on Google Chrome and after reading it, immediately decided to give it a shot … actually it was the comic strip that made me install it:
So far I’m loving it, since it’s a multithreaded browser, WEB2 pages load in parallel making it extremely responsive (WEB1 also loads faster as images and multimedia content loads in parallel), a proper garbage collection system making its memory management system one of the best I’ve seen so far, Firefox used to crash my PC when I leave GMail open over night, otherwise my PC just became horribly slow with Firefox’s memory usage going into excess of 3GB (Internet Explorer is a lot worse, not even going to mention it here)
They’ve made it geek friendly by adding a feature where you can monitor its memory usage per page, per plugin, to access this page, just go to “about:memory“, it’ll show memory usage of Google Chrome as well as any other browser you have open. JavaScript / AJAX is extremely stable in Google Chrome, guess their V8 virtual machine they’ve developed for JavaScript is doing a good job.
I can go on all day about Google Chrome, do yourself a favour, read the comics and install it.
Just hoping they’ll hurry up with the native Linux version, sign up here for updates on the Linux version of Google Chrome.
PS, does this thing have a spellcheck?
I’ve just noticed a new tab in my GMail settings section, it’s a tab called labs where Google is adding experimental features to GMail.
So far I have:
Quick Links Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more – definitely a feature I’ll be using, it’s almost like a build in digg for Gmail.
Superstars Adds additional star icons. After enabling this feature, you can choose which icons you wish to use in the “General” Settings page – finally, the boring yellow stars was starting to limit me.
Pictures in chat See your friends’ profile pictures when you chat with them – will give it a shot, actually prefer the minimalistic version of the chat box.
Fixed width font Adds an option to the reply dropdown menu that lets you view a message in fixed width font – this will be great for viewing emails containing ascii art.
Mouse gestures Use your mouse to navigate with gestures. Hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view. Works best on Windows – never been a fan of mouse gestures.
Signature tweaks Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the “–” line that appears before signatures. Can’t use this and the “Random signature” Labs feature at the same time – finally!!!
Random signature Rotates among random quotations for your email signature. Can’t use this and the “Signature tweaks” Labs feature at the same time – no thanks, I prefer my signatures static, boring and clean.
Custom date formats Adds options to the general settings page allowing the date and time format to be changed independent of language. For example, you can use a 24-hour clock (14:57) or show dates with the day first (31/12/07) – at last, this feature is welcome anytime!!!
Muzzle Conserves screen real estate by hiding your friends’ status messages – might turn it on to turn of annoying status messages.
Old Snakey Kick it old school with Old Snakey! Enable keyboard shortcuts and hit ‘&’ from the main page to play a game of snake-procrastination just became a lot easier.
Email Addict Lets you take a break from email and chat by blocking the screen for fifteen minutes and making you invisible in chat – hopefully I’ll get some work done with this feature, haha.
Hide Unread Counts Hides the unread counts for inbox, labels, etc – that’s what I use filters for, if I want email to automatically be marked as read, I’ll rather set it up in a filter.
Let me know if you find any new features, I’ll probably turn most of them on just to test drive drive it and leave the useful features on after beta testing all the existing features.