Breaking Windows

News from Ars:

The Gmail CAPTCHA has been cracked—albeit not easily—raising new concerns about spammers' ability to abuse Google's e-mail services. Websense Security Labs pointed out the security breach late last week, noting that spammers have a lot to gain by being able to use bots to automatically sign up for new accounts.

So, they have cracked the GMail CAPTCHA, with a 20% success rate. What is the world coming to?

It's nothing new that YouTube is and has been giving the axe to countless videos in the past few months, but it never affected me until now. I try and watch one of the newly uploaded episodes of Mystery Science Thater 3000, YouTube being the only place I can ever find them - and poof, it's been removed by the site. I try another and it's been removed by the user. Argh. I would have hoped this particular show would have been an exception, since it's known for putting the phrase "Keep circulating the tapes!" in its closing credits.

(Side note - Fans of the show might be interested in Mike Nelson's current project, RiffTrax)

(Side side note - Ken scolds me sometimes by miscategorizing my posts, but since there is no "rant" category and YouTube is now owned by Google...)

I really don't know why they don't add a checkbox in the search/filter box for searching for unread emails. This is the uber geeky way to do it, and frankly I should not have to search this way.

In the field "Has the words" put "is:unread" (without quotes of course) and hit Search. Since I am a Labels whore, I now have Labels setup for unread mail by Label.

GMail rocks, it would just rock a lot more if it was more user friendly. I should not have to search the GMail Google Group to find out how to search for unread email.

While I am at it, I should be able to create a Filter based on a Label.

Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.

Come on, you just gotta laugh at this folks. It is a Google story on Yahoo! News? Wha? That is just priceless. You can find it using Google News, but its just better reading it on Y! News.

They did it because their competition was doing the same thing, and they want in on the action too. Duh!

I am not sure I would have called it "The Prejudice Map" but it is a neat experiment.

Did you know that GMail will map any address using Google Maps? Any address in a GMail email will be listed in the right-hand column ready to be clicked. I don't know when they added this, but like every other new addition to GMail, it rocks.

There is only one problem with this feature: it does not work on the Mac. It is Windows only. I have no idea why. Cool feature though.

Google Talk was the talking point this week. It was long speculated about a possible web browser and an instant messaging client from the world’s most popular search engine after they showed interest in directly competing with Microsoft’s MSN and Yahoo! in various similar fields.

Google Talk is out. At first try it looks like a nice chat client. But does the world need yet another chat client? Will Google take Jabber to the mainstream? Google is taking over the world. When will we see the Google Web browser?

So where is the Mac client? At least they used Jabber so that Mac chat clients such as iChat and Adium can connect to their service. They even have detailed instructions for other IM clients, with screen shots to help you connect to the Google chat servers.

I don't know why this is not on the Google home page. But its not. You actually have to go to the Google Labs page to find it. But the new Personalized Homepage feature is really great. It is now my homepage, and I must admit, I am not a person to set my homepage in my browser. There are a bunch of news feeds you can have, plus add your favorite bookmarks, Gmail, Google News, Google Maps, weather, even add any RSS feed you want.

This is a nice shot at Yahoo! For the record, Yahoo! pissed me off when they canceled my Yahoo! email but still lets me use its other services (like other parts of its PIM, just not the email, among the other Yahoo! services. Screw you Yahoo!, Google does everything better.

As is the case with any pay-per-click (PPC) advertising service, Google AdSense is vulnerable to click inflation, where the per-click values of ads go down thanks to excessive clicking. What is different this time is that it is not greedy webmasters clicking ads on their own site but rather the advertisers themselves.

Online advertising is bad enough without the advertisers screwing with the formula.

GOOGLE FIGHT! I can almost see a few kids in a school yard arguing about whether Paris Hilton or George Bush would have more items turn up. And just for the record, Ken beats me simply because his name is more common. It has nothing to do with level of coolness. Of course, you all knew that already.

Google finally emailed me to invite me to GMail. I obviously do not need one any more! But as I signed up for this in April, this is an automated email. This invite goes to the first person to click and sing up. Just please change the emergency email address ;)

Most of the gains in users by Google's free Gmail Web-based e-mail service have come at the expense of Microsoft's Hotmail, an e-mail switching service said Wednesday.

Back when I did not have a constant supply of 50 invites, I was doling out a very large percentage of invites to people who wanted to rid themselves from Hotmail. What does this say for your product, Microsoft?

Joel Webber analyzed the DHTML behind the new Google Maps. It's nice to see a clean XHTML + CSS approach with absolute positioning and "console game" style, tile-based scrolling. Instead of using XMLHttp requests like in Google Suggest, there's a hidden Iframe which fires the parent's "load" function.

Joel's overview is a bit technical, but it and the over 100 comments to his post have some great info in them. Its pretty cool to understand how Google Maps works, or at least begin to understand. The coding behind it all seems pretty involved, I wonder if it will ever support KHTML/WebKit?

I have 4 invites to give away. If you want one email me at kenneth.edwards at gmail dot com.

We have a Gogglewhack. We have "The One."

It is somthing I have recently discovered. It is a game you can play using the google search engine.

If you enter any two random words into google, providing that both words appear on the dictionary.com website, (the word refference site that google uses) and google returns with only 1 result then you have a google whack! I found one on your site.

The words "jamborees dodecahedron" returned one result on Breaking Windows I then found your email on the site so thought I would let you know in case it was of any interest. (I have heard that it is rude to whack behind someones back so I thought I would tell you).

Maybe I should put my email on every post I make too?

Google Inc., which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, a Google executive said.

Who thought that blogging would be part of companies like HP, Google, and Microsoft, to name a few.

Google said today that it will graually roll out POP3 (Post Office Protocol) support over the coming weeks to users of its Gmail e-mail service. "With POP3 support, users will be able to transfer their server-based Gmail messages to a client-side e-mail application such as Microsoft's Outlook and have the messages stored on their local hard drive and thus accessible when they are offline. Users with wireless devices that have POP3-compliant e-mail clients will also be able to download their Gmail messages to personal digital assistants or cell phones. Google is also working on adding an antivirus scanning feature to the Web mail service."

Hell yea! What a great idea.

First come, first served. Post a comment. The first 6 will get accounts. Good luck!

Just put your email in the email field. Don’t put it in the comment body as MT only spam protects emails in the email field.

I will close comments after I have 6 requests.

First come, first served. Post a comment. The first 6 will get accounts. Good luck!

Just put your email in the email field. Don’t put it in the comment body as MT only spam protects emails in the email field.

I will close comments after I have 6 requests.

Only 4 more left!