TechBlog

The National Bureau of Economic Research has previously indicated that the United States has been in a recession since December 2007. What is interesting to note here is that Symantec first reported that spammers were showing an interest in the slowdown of the economy in October and November of 2007, so this begs the question, “Can the focus of spam email be used as an economic indicator or barometer?” Let’s take a brief look at the recession (thus far) by looking through Symantec’s spam folder (a.k.a. the Symantec Global Intelligence Network). ...

I don’t believe it!! This morning I’ve received an email sent by Google notifying me that I´ve won $950,000, so I think this will be the last post I’m going to write 😉 Well, I haven’t taken part in any promotion of this kind and I’ve never heard that Google gives prizes just like that, but I can consider it as if I won the lottery. Here you have the content of the message: ...

Now we know for certain: Twitter is working on a major redesign of its web interface. Twitter’s lead designer has just revealed a taste of what’s to come. Doug Bowman, the head of Twitter’s design team, posted a teaser picture displaying the new interface. While it doesn’t reveal much, it does show that the profiles are being overhauled, and so are the stats that are displayed on profiles. As you can see from the image, new stats displayed on profiles include the amount of days you have been on Twitter, the average number of tweets you send per day, and the percentage of @replies recently. ...

The Indian Premier League 2010 is a huge attraction for the cricket-crazy population in India. These matches are packed with all the ingredients to entertain, and are capable of satisfying viewers’ hunger for more and more cricket matches. People are ready to buy tickets in all possible ways just to watch their local and international cricket stars play. Symantec was anticipating a spamming campaign against ticket sales during the initial period of the sporting extravaganza; however, it is just halfway through the event and still not too late to lure email users with offers related to IPL tickets. ...

Heavy Gmail label users will appreciate the latest experimental feature, available in Gmail Labs: Nested Labels, which let you organize your inbox into as many categories and subcategories as you like. To enable it, open Settings – Gmail Labs, and enable the “Nested Labels” option. Now, if you want to create a child label – or a subfolder, if you will – you must name it with slashes (/). For example, you can create a label named “Friends”. A nested label for that label could be named “Friends/Workplace”. It would be nice to manipulate nested labels via drag and drop, but for now this naming scheme is the only way to do it. ...

One month ago we heard about the official Twitter app for BlackBerry, which has been in the works for quite some time now, bringing features such as automatic URL-shortening, easy photo-sharing, push and message list integration and search filtered by geolocation. Today, the first public beta of the app is available in the BlackBerry App World. Based on the feedback from closed beta testing, the developers have added several additional features. These include notifications of new tweets and @replies/mentions, support for lists, profile editing and persionalization settings, and changing the font size and style. You can get Twitter for BlackBerry here. How do you like it? Please, share your opinions in the comments! ...

Microsoft has put the PC-using world on notice that next Tuesday there will be 11 bulletins released addressing 25 vulnerabilities in Windows, Exchange and Office. Jerry Bryant, Group Manager of Microsoft’s Response Communications, said: “I also want to point out to customers that we will be closing the following open Security Advisories with next week’s updates: — Microsoft Security Advisory 981169 – Vulnerability in VBScript could allow remote code execution. ...

Search terms that are censored in China: “Tibet” “Tiananmen Square protests” “Carrot” Apaprently “carrot” has a Chinese character that is the same as the surname of President Hu Jintao. The New York Times has run a great story by Shiho Fukada about Internet censorship in China, where the effort to control the content seen by 384 million Internet users who have 181 million blogs is like “herding cats.” “This is China’s censorship machine, part George Orwell, part Rube Goldberg: an information sieve of staggering breadth and fineness, yet full of holes; run by banks of advanced computers, but also by thousands of Communist Party drudges; highly sophisticated in some ways, remarkably crude in others,” Fukada wrote. ...

A couple of weeks ago, Digg (finally) launched its official iPhone application to much fanfare. Like all first versions, however, it suffered from a couple of glitches, some of which have been addressed in this latest update, which brings the version number to 1.1.0. The list of improvements and fixes is as follows: – Closing the app on a Digg story page doesn’t result in a crash when reopening the app – A range of stability improvements allows the app to be used for longer periods without crashing – An “open in Safari” option for viewing websites from the story pages – The app opens on the last page viewed when it was last closed ...

Qualcomm’s mobile broadcast television service called FLO TV existed for about five years under different wireless carrier brand names: Sprint TV, Verizon V Cast TV, and AT&T MediaFLO TV. But the carriers didn’t push it very hard, so it did not break through into the public’s consciousness. But then Qualcomm began advertising FLO TV on its own, with its own smartphone-sized pocket TVs made by HTC, and it looks like it is finally beginning to stick. ...