TechBlog

Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “‘In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” These days we can add to the certainty of those two inevitable events with the addition of the annual scams that accompany tax time. For those of you who haven’t heard of this type of scam, it’s basically another way to separate a man from his money, or if you want to look at the bigger picture, a way to defraud the federal government. Either way, your wallet suffers. The financial website money-zine has a good article on the latest tax scams you may encounter on the Web. ...

Del Harvey, Director of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, announced on Twitter’s blog that the micro-blogging service has begun using its own shortening service to stop malicious operators from sending tweets with links to their dodgy sites disguised through shortening. He wrote: “By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.” ...

Or is it at the saturation point? The SANS Institute (acronym = SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) web site carried a blog piece that gives a good snapshot of the horrible ongoing plague of spam email that IT folks all over the globe must deal with. The writer, Deborah Hale, said the ISP in the Midwest where she works received almost 20 million pieces of email for more than 9,000 accounts since the beginning of March. Only 713,222 (3.6 percent) were NOT spam. ...

Scheduling meetings is tough, but rescheduling is even harder. We all know how frustrating it can be to try to find just the right time that accommodates everyone’s availability and preferred working hours. Throw in different time zones and conference rooms and it goes from painful to excruciating. We’d rather schedule dental appointments. On the Google Calendar team, they’ve noticed that when people talk about scheduling they say things like “I’m trying to find a time” or “let’s search for a new date.” They wondered what would happen if they treated calendaring more like a search problem. Just as Google search applies ranking algorithms to return the most relevant results from the web, they hoped they could rank meeting times based on criteria important to the person scheduling the meeting. ...

We regularly learn of cases where criminals have gained access to credit card numbers via keyloggers, skimmers or online hacks. Once they have the credit card numbers, they basically have three ways to turn them into cash: Sell them Make fraudulent purchases on them Create real-world cards out of them To create real-world cards, you need blank cards to start with. These are known in the underground as “blank plastic“. ...

You can now access Google Buzz from your Android mobiles easily using the official Google Buzz widget, that lets you post text and photos with a single tap. The widget lets you choose to tag your post with the location or place from which it was posted. To save time, your posts will upload in the background. It is initially available in English for Android phones running v1.6 and later. To download it, search for ‘Google Buzz’ in the Android Market. Once installed, you can add it to home screen: tap “Menu” while on the home screen and select “Add > Widgets > Google Buzz”.

Microsoft is announcing an update to Windows XP Mode today that will make it a more accessible to PCs in small and midsize businesses who want to migrate to Windows 7 Professional but have applications that still require Windows XP. Windows XP Mode will no longer require hardware virtualization technology to run. This change makes it extremely easy for businesses to use Windows XP Mode to address any application incompatibility roadblocks they might have in migrating to Windows 7. Windows XP Mode will of course continue to use hardware virtualization technology such as Intel VT (Intel Virtualization Technology) or AMD-V if available. You can find more information and download the update which will go live later today here. ...

Are Mac OS X rogues an emerging threat? For many years discussions of the potential for malware on Macs have ended with the conclusion: “there isn’t much yet, but as soon as Mac gets a big market share the dark side is going to start writing the code.” There are indications that the bad guys are working on it. There have been some blog posts suggesting that the dark side is working hard to create a Mac OS X compatible rogue. SCMagazine is carrying a piece quoting a spokesman for researchers at Intego. Apparently Intego researchers got proof-of-concept code for an OS X rogue from underground sources and determined that it didn’t quite work. However, they concluded that some sophisticated coding was going on: ...

The more eagle-eyed Reader users have noticed a few tweaks being made to Reader’s mobile interface over the past few days: Google has brought over a few more features from the desktop version of Reader: magic ranking and search. Both can be found in the option drop-down menu. For better consistency with the desktop version, Google has made the titles of items be links to the original page The top of each item now has “collapse” and “next item” links. This way there’s always a consistent space for your thumb to hit so you can advance to the next item. Since Google know the best mobile content is short and sweet, they’re going to leave you with that. Feel free to get in touch with them on Twitter or on their help group with feedback on these changes.

Google has rolled out a significant update to the Google Maps application for Android 1.6+ devices, which includes a new search results page, support for multiple accounts, a new Latitude homescreen widget, and a new Maps live wallpaper for 2.1 devices. Previously, when you performed a search in Maps, you would have to choose a result from a list of markers on the map. When you clicked the marker, it would open a page with three tabs: Address, Details, and Reviews. Under the Address tab, there were options to Show the result on the map, get directions to it, call it, look at it in Street View, or add it as a contact. The other two tabs contain exactly what you’d expect, details and reviews. If you wanted to pick a different listing, you’d have to go back to the map view and pick a different marker. ...