» Smart Phones, Web Design, Google or whatever
Archive for March, 2010
Gmail, China and Security
Mar 25th
Gmail has beefed up account security a little recently, possibly in part due to the recent China hacking and phishing attacks and intrusions. Now, detecting suspicious account activity has gotten a little simpler.
You may remember Gmail’s 2008 Remote Sign Out and Info post where they announced the then new remote sign out and info feature which allowed you to see from what IP, and at what time your past several logins occurred in your Gmail account. You can access the Activity on This Account info window when logged into Gmail by scrolling to the bottom and clicking the Details link you can see in the screenshot below.
Now, if Gmail notices logins from different locations and figures you aren’t likely to have accessed your account from those locations, you will see a notice when you login next.
For example, you aren’t likely to be able to access your account from Canada and Mexico within 15 minutes of one another.
Now, if it looks like something unusual is going on with your account, we’ll also alert you by posting a warning message saying, “Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…” along with the geographic region that we can best associate with the access.
- Google’s Pavni Diwanji, Engineering Director
The Activity on This Account info window has been changed to reflect new information now available to you as a result of this latest security change. Here’s what it looks like now.
Now you can more easily detect if your account has been accessed without your permission or knowledge more easily. If you think your account has been compromised you should change your password, and it won’t hurt to check your Google Account settings to make sure that your secondary email address has not been changed – or in the case you don’t have one making sure that one has not been added. I’d guess that in the future it will only get easier to determine if someone has been tampering with your Gmail account.
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Google and China, New Approach No Censoring
Mar 22nd
Today, 3/22/2010, Google stopped censoring Chinese search results as a result of continued hacking/phishing attacks and intrusions against Google and other companies as also noted in their earlier post from January, 2010 – A New Approach to China.
The search engine & web applications giant has redirected visits at Google.cn (Google China) to Google.hk (Google Hong Kong). Google has tried it the Chinese government’s way, now they are taking their new approach. Google says:
So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.
- A new approach to China: an update (Google Blog)
Concerning the increased traffic at Google Hong Kong, Google says:
Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.
- A new approach to China: an update (Google Blog)
Smart Rescheduler in Google Calendar
Mar 22nd
GCalendar Smart Rescheduler
Google has added another new feature in Google Calendar labs called Smart Rescheduler. If you are a heavy user of Google Calendar and schedule your meetings with others who also use GCalendar than this nifty feature might be right up your alley.
Instead of spending time researching everyone’s schedule manually Google says this new feature will:
apply some of Google’s search experience to the problem of scheduling… Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times… You’ll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting…
Sound worth a try? Go ahead and turn on Smart Rescheduler now!
GCalendar Gets 3 New Labs Features
Mar 18th
Google Calendar got 3 new features via labs recently, as mentioned in their 3 new Calendar Labs post from 3/10/2010. The new features are Event Flair, Gentle Reminders and Automatically declining events.
Event Flair lets you assign an icon to events. At-a-glance you can see which events are more important than others, or other things limited only by your mind. Gentle Reminders pops up less obtrusive reminders of your meetings, Automatically declining events and lets you automatically decline things at times like Vacation, or other times when they would conflict with your schedule.
Buzz off! Outta my inbox!
Mar 18th
One Google product I’ve not gotten into, nor even shown any interest in is Google Buzz. Because I can drag-n-drop my labels to hide them, I hid the new Buzz label the first day I noticed it. Considering Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Plaxo and other social timesuckers, errr social networks last thing I needed was another.
In their “Better Buzz Controls” post Google posted this:
“When you participate in a conversation in Google Buzz, we bring that post to your inbox to make it easy to keep up with the discussion. But we’ve heard loud and clear that buzz in your inbox can get noisy — we feel it too…“
Redirecting Dynamic URL to Static using .htaccess
Mar 11th
I (finally) found some documentation today on how to redirect a dynamic URL to a static URL. For example changing www.example.com/page.php?article=22 to www.example.com/apples-and-oranges.php
This is your .htaccess file entry to do the above redirection, of course the RewriteEngine on command is only needed once before the first redirect… This will work for ONE variable pair
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^article=22$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ http://www.example.com/apples-and-oranges.php? [R=301,L]
Now if you need to redirect a dynamic URL with more than one name/value pair like this:
www.example.com/page.php?widget=cellphone22&color=red
You will need to use the following code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} [&]?widget=cellphone22[&]?
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ www.example.com/cellphone22.php? [R=301,L]
In this last example, &color=22 is ignored.
Resources for this post:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3365089.htm
http://www.seoverflow.com/blog/seo/setting-up-301-redirects-for-dynamic-urls/
