TechBlog

Microsoft has made the right decision to temporarily turn off Hotmail’s vacation (e.g., out-of-office) reply feature. Flip the switch off permanently, I say. “In our fight against spam, we sometimes have to make hard choices, and we had to make one this week. We discovered that spammers were using Hotmail’s automatic vacation reply feature to send spam from their Hotmail accounts,” Krish Vitaldevara, Windows Live Hotmail lead program manager, blogged late yesterday. I missed the post because of Apple’s iPhone OS 4 launch. I spotted the announcement first at LiveSide about an hour ago. ...

Adobe has fired back against Apple’s recent ban on building iPhone apps via Flash. And this time, Adobe’s not pulling any of punches. In a recent blog post on The Flash Blog, Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow goes on the offensive for seven paragraphs, ripping into Apple’s recent change to its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement that only allows for applications to be written in Objective-C, C, C++ or Javascript and executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine. In fact, the post was so strong that Adobe asked Brimelow to delete a segment. ...

The new release rental is officially dead. As expected, Netflix has signed new deals with Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Studios Home Entertainment — similar to its deal with Warner Bros. — that delay new release rentals by 28 days and add new titles to its streaming collection. Both deals go into effect later this month; Netflix will start the 28-day hold for Fox titles with Avatar’s release and Universal flicks with It’s Complicated. ...

Back in November, we started hearing murmurs that Google was considering whether or not to factor site speed into its search ranking algorithm. In a blog post today, the search giant confirms it is now adding site speed to its list of criteria that could affect your Google ranking. It’s another step on Google’s long road toward achieving maximum speed and efficiency. The company even launched a Site Performance tool as part of its Webmaster Tools suite to help assess site performance statistics and make changes accordingly. Today’s blog post recommends a few other tools for evaluating your site’s speed as well, including the Firefox Add-on Page Speed, Yahoo’s YSlow and WebPagetest. ...

Northwestern Bank Online – Orange City is compromised and should not be visited until it’s clean. Embedded in the side is a malicious iframe, as you can see in this screen shot: (Testing the site with Wapawet doesn’t work, since it chokes on the javascript emulation. However, the iframe is malicious.)

Adobe has announced that it will release an updater along with Adobe Reader and Acrobat versions 9.3.2 and 8.2.2 on patch Tuesday next week. On the Adobe blog, Steve Gottwals wrote: “…we have been testing a new updater technology with select beta customers since our October 13, 2009 quarterly update. The purpose of the new updater is to keep end-users up-to-date in a much more streamlined and automated way. “During our quarterly update on January 12, 2010, and then again for an out-of-cycle update on February 16, 2010, we exercised the new updater with our beta testers. This allowed us to test a variety of network configurations encountered on the Internet in order to ensure a robust update experience. That beta process has been a successful one, and we’ve incorporated several positive changes to the end-user experience and system operation. Now, we’re ready for the next phase of deployment.” ...

You may have noticed that certain YouTube videos have a link below them pointing to a popular blog. This little “As seen on” link is Google’s way to thank blogs that have promoted popular videos on their site. If you’re wondering why this or that site hasn’t been linked, it’s hard to say, since there are no clear guidelines as to when a site will be given a link-back. From YouTube’s official blog: ...

…”click here to view”. Yes, it seems almost anything is a target for money generating survey spam. In this case, we start with a Youtube video: And we finish with this: Even better, these “fill in a survey to see the content” websites now pop up an additional message as you try to leave the page: “Help keep this content free. Please take one minute to complete a SPAM-free market research survey to gain access to this special content.” ...

There could be a denial-of-availability risk to the enterprise in the new anti-piracy law passed by the British Parliament yesterday. Employees using company machines to swap pirated files could trigger a suspension of Internet service. The law is aimed at repeat offenders, however, employee misuse of company resources or botnet takeovers of machines for use as file-trading servers are a significant threat. At minimum, unintentionally offenders will have some paperwork to deal with when their ISP lets them know they’re in violation. ...

.Google Books, although an admittedly noble project as Google has framed it, is also a beleaguered one. Attacked first by writers and publishers, the immense online library is now the subject of a lawsuit brought by several professional photographers’ organizations. The American Society of Media Photographers, one of these groups, issued a statement today saying, “The suit[…] relates to Google’s illegal scanning of millions of books and other publications containing copyrighted images and displaying them to the public without regard to the rights of the visual creators.” ...