Android device owners can perhaps stop frantically deleting apps from their phones.  An app that appeared to represent a serious security risk - supposedly transmitting users' passwords, browsing histories, and text messages to someone in China - has been found to mine much less data than early reports indicated.

The scare started when, at the Black Hat Security Conference, representatives of mobile security firm Lookout talked about an app called Jackeey Wallpaper.  They either misspoke or were misquoted, and word spread that the app transmitted far too much personal information.

That created something of an uproar, since Jackeey Wallpaper has been downloaded more than a million times.

But later, Quentyn Kennemer was able to write, "MyLookout chimed in with us to clarify some details . . . .  Specifically, the app does collect data from your phone, but only the device's phone number, subscriber identifier, and voicemail number fields are retrieved.  SMS and browsing history are not touched by any of the apps they analyzed throughout their Blackhat conference."

Kennemer then continued, "Your voicemail's password is also not transmitted unless you included the password in your phone's voicemail number field."

So Android users should remain cautious about what apps they download, always researching the developers behind them, but it doesn't look like any massive security breach has occurred.

Gamerang is launching a new site with "the ever-important social media aspect of games" . If you're unfamiliar with Gamerang, it's been renting video games since 2003, with four distribution centers across the United States. Gamerang boasts over 9,000 titles for every major platform. It works essentially like a Netflix for video games, or a Gamefly if you will.

"While many sectors of the video games industry continue to grow, one niche area has shrunken to only a few companies – video games rental services," a representative for the company tells WebProNews.

Gamerang CEO and founder Greg Gentling shared some viewpoints with us on topics such as why it's important to have both rental and sales in this space, the impact of social media on rental activity, etc.

"Rental is try before you buy," says Gentling. "Our model is rentals AND sales. Some publishers are charging $10 for their exclusive content, for example Tiger Woods 11 which has a code giving you access to downloadable content if you buy it outright. Gamers use their copy and sell it and the next person that buys it doesn't get that content. When it comes to used game pricing, we will factor that into the price."

"Netflix is making a lot on the streaming side," he says. "Sony/Microsoft have built platforms. It's really video games vs movies and there's some crossover, but they're targeting different audiences with different usage patterns leading to a very different business proposition."



Gamerang's new offering places a great deal of emphasis on social media and APIs. The company highlights the following features:

Gamerang 2.0 Beta: Social, community and news features have been added to give members all the information they need in one destination. It's about getting the maximum content and value out of a service people can enjoy.

Gamerang Rewards : Members earn points towards Gamerang subscriptions or purchases by posting news, reviews or videos to our social community. The more gamers do what they already love doing, the more points they earn.

Gamerang QuickReturn: Members with accounts in good standing for two months or longer can simply notify Gamerang that they are sending back outstanding rentals and their next available rentals will be shipped, cutting down the turnaround time of sending back and receiving games.

Gamerang API: Now it is easy for individual sites to write a widget and grab Gamerang's extensive social and news content to incorporate into their site.

"We're trying to give people more info about a game and attracting people to certain games, creating community, facilitating relationships with other people, expanding the conversation," says Gentling. "We're pulling and aggregating information via our infrastructure. This involves catering to our consumer demand and increasing the upsell of games, which is why partners want to work with us."

"It's easy for individual sites to write a widget and grab Gamerang's extensive social and news content for their site, [and] thus provide depth to their own opinions."

Gamerang says it will soon offer more developments as it goes mobile and integrates deeper API features.

A House committee yesterday voted on legislation that would legalize and regulate online gambling in the United States.

The Internet Gambling Regulation and Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act (H.R. 2267), legislation introduced by Representative Barney Frank (D-MA), Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, passed by a 41-22 vote.

Michael Waxman, spokesperson for the Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative, told WebProNews "This historic vote clears the way for Chairman Frank's online gambling regulatory bill to move forward."

"With Congress bitterly divided and only a handful of bi-partisan bills coming out of the Financial Services Committee, we're pleased Committee members from both sides of the aisle were able to come together to advance this important legislation," said Waxman.

Rep. John Campbell (R-CA) offered, and the Committee approved, an amendment that would further strengthen the legislation's already strict consumer protections, including a requirement for licensed operators to have each customer choose his or her loss limits before being able to play on-line.  Rep. Campbell's amendment also requires licensees to protect customers by ensuring the customer privacy and security and protecting against fraud and money laundering.

The legislation reinforces the rights of each state to determine whether or not to allow Internet gambling activity for people accessing the Internet within the state and to apply other restrictions on the activity as determined necessary.

According to a Joint Committee on Taxation tax revenue analysis, regulated Internet gambling is expected to generate as much as $42 billion in federal government revenue over its first 10 years.  Additionally, a recent analysis by H2 Gambling Capital predicts that Internet gambling regulation would create as many as 32,000 jobs over its first five years.

"The momentum of today's vote and growing bi-partisan support for online gambling regulation demonstrates to congressional leaders in the House and Senate that this issue is a priority and should be addressed," said Waxman. 

"Leaving in place a failed prohibition should no longer be the government's misguided policy approach, leaving millions of Americans vulnerable as they continue to find a way to gamble online in a thriving underground marketplace."

The legislation has the support of 69 bi-partisan co-sponsors. Support for the legislation was also announced last week by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Financial Services Roundtable and the National Association of Federal Credit Unions.

 

Dell annuncia una nuova serie di servizi e prodotti pensati espressamente per incrementare il livello di sicurezza nelle Pmi, agendo a livello di antivirus, protezione anti-spam e anti-intrusione

Joy da 29,90&euro al mese.
Sconto on- line di 75&euro.

Joy da 29,90&euro al mese.
Sconto on- line di 75&euro.

Forse il peggio è passato per Facebook sulla privacy e la sicurezza. Dopo gli sforzi per aggiornare e migliorare le impostazioni e renderle più chiare, ora è ufficiale anche una pagina apposita: Facebook Safety. Annunciata lo scorso aprile, è online e a pieno regime da pochi giorni e promette di rendere la sicurezza un argomento aggiornato ...
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Autore: Marco Viviani
Tags: Facebook, Privacy, social network

Forse il peggio è passato per Facebook sulla privacy e la sicurezza. Dopo gli sforzi per aggiornare e migliorare le impostazioni e renderle più chiare, ora è ufficiale anche una pagina apposita: Facebook Safety. Annunciata lo scorso aprile, è online e a pieno regime da pochi giorni e promette di rendere la sicurezza un argomento aggiornato ...
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Autore: Marco Viviani
Tags: Facebook, Privacy, social network

Joy da 29,90&euro al mese.
Sconto on- line di 75&euro.

Le applicazioni portable rappresentano un'ottima alternativa alle corrispondenti desktop, in quanto ne replicano le principali caratteristiche per poterle utilizzare con grande immediatezza passando da un PC all'altro. Non è inoltre necessario procedere con alcuna installazione e la portatilità è massima in quanto si possono copiare in dispositivi removibili quali pen drive, hard disk e memory card. Dopo la gestione dei documenti prendiamo in considerazione alcune utilità indirizzate ai webmaster e a coloro che per diversi motivi ...

Autore: Marco Mattioli
Categoria: Download

News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch has had a lot of issues with search engines - most notably, Google. He has repeatedly threatened to block News Corp. content from search engines, but content from the Wall Street Journal, for example, still populates a significant amount of Google search results to this day.

Interestingly, while Google has been the apparent focal point of Murdoch's woes, News Corp. has blocked other news aggregators in the past, but not Google. 

This week, News Corp.'s New York Post got a story wrong and pulled it down, but it's still available in Google's cache. It sounds like he's pretty angry about the whole fiasco, and one can only imagine that Google still providing access to the story (with people able to link to it) probably doesn't sit too well with him.

Foster Kamer at the Village Voice reports on the "hot water" the Post's newsroom found itself in:

We received a tip earlier this afternoon: "heads might roll" by the end of the day at the New York Post's Metro desk, as they're in crisis mode after a humiliating correction was published this morning in the paper. Even more, that The Rage of (Post-owner) Rupert Murdoch is fueling it. What's going on over there?

On Monday, the New York Post published a story about "Bronx wife-killer" Johnny Concepcion, who reportedly confessed to the crime of killing his wife via text message, and then took rat poison in an attempted suicide. The crux of the Post's story was that Concepcion was taken to New York-Presbyterian Hospital and given a liver transplant. The story has since been scrubbed from the Post's site, though it's still available to read thanks to Google Cache.

According to Politico, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has jacked up the rate it will charge the White House's news clipping service by $600,000. The publication quotes an unnamed administration official as saying they might have to drop the Journal.

Opera has announced that its Opera Mini users viewed over a billion pages on July 25. On that day, every second, Opera Mini servers compressed over 11,500 pages before sending that content to phones around the world.

"Opera Mini has experienced tremendous page view growth in recent years," the company says. "In June 2008, Opera Mini servers processed 100 million page views per day for the first time. In June 2010, Opera Mini users viewed more than 910 million pages on average every day, an increase of more than 161% since June 2009."

"Each day is different in the fast-growing mobile Web. Every day more people around the world choose Opera Mini and view more pages through this browser," said Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner. "Crossing one billion pages views in a day is further proof that people desire the best Internet experience, no matter where they live or what device they use."

Opera Mini is available on over 3,000 different phone models. Version 5.1 was just launched for Android a couple weeks ago. This may pad opera's numbers even more as Android growth continues.

Yesterday, Opera released its State of the Mobile Web report, looking at the mobile web explosion in Africa.

(Cross-posted from the Lat Long Blog)

What do Alex Trebek, teachers and Googlers have in common? Last week, these individuals and groups all came together at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA to celebrate exploration and learning.

Google hosted its first Geo Teachers Institute, an intensive two-day workshop in which 150 educators received hands-on training and experience with Google Maps, Google SketchUp and Google Earth, including features like Mars, Moon and SkyMaps. Attendees from around the globe not only learned how these products work, but also discovered tips and resources for introducing these tools to students and using them to conceptualize, visualize, share and communicate about the world around them. Through this event, teachers were hopefully inspired to bring the world's geographic information to students in compelling, fresh and fun ways.

As part of our continued effort to collaborate with teachers and help students get a better sense of places across the globe, we also announced that Google Earth Pro is now available to educators for free through the Google Earth for Educators site. Educators from higher educational and academic institutions who demonstrate a need for the Pro features in their classrooms can now apply for single licenses for themselves or site licenses for their computer labs. A similar program exists for SketchUp Pro through the Google SketchUp Pro Statewide License Grant, which is currently being provided via grants to 11 states, and available to all others at the K-12 level at no cost.

In conjunction with these exciting Geo-related events and announcements, the Geo Education team also thought it’d be timely and fun to test Googlers’ geographic knowledge by hosting the company’s first ever Google Geo Bee. With help from National Geographic, 68 teams relived their school years and took a written geography exam, competing for a spot on stage with Alex Trebek, who hosted the main event. The competition was based on the group version of the National Geographic Bee for students, which Google has sponsored for the past two years. Questions included those like “Which country contains most of the Balkan Mountains, which mark the boundary between the historical regions of Thrace and Moesia?” and “Ben Nevis, the highest peak in the United Kingdom, is located in which mountain chain?”

This is part of our summer series of new Search Stories. Look for the label Search Stories and subscribe to the series. -Ed.

Having been a new dad for six months now, I’ve quickly come to learn two valuable parenting lessons. First, being a father is truly a full-time job—and second, sleep is completely overrated. Whether buying the latest bottles, binkies, blankets and bibs, or just blogging about the whole magical journey, becoming a father has been the most invigorating and moving experience of my lifetime.

This week, I’m excited to help introduce our latest search story, New Baby. The video really captures the joys (and costs!) of becoming a new parent. I’d like to share my heart-felt compassion with new dads everywhere (and of course, my wife and the other mothers out there who are the true heroes.) We will all rest when they head off to college—in the meantime, enjoy!



Posted by Murali Viswanathan, Product Manager

Il più grande scoop del decennio. Lo scandalo di guerra che sconvolge gli Stati Uniti come solo il Vietnam aveva potuto fare. Si sprecano le definizioni per il caso sollevato da una triplice inchiesta giornalistica, del New York Times, del Guardian e dello Spiegel, sulle 92.000 pagine di documenti militari segreti che il sito Wikileaks ...
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Autore: Marco Viviani
Tags: web journalism, Wikileaks

Humans have always been fascinated by the night sky. And Googlers are no exception. Over the years, Google engineers have used their 20 percent time to create Google Sky, Moon, Mars and most recently Google Sky Map for Android. This handy app, built by engineers in our Pittsburgh office, turns your Android-powered phone into a live map of the night sky. You just point your phone to the sky and it gives you information about the stars and planets that you’re looking at. Since we introduced the app a year ago, Sky Map has been downloaded more than 5 million times.

On Sunday night we had a wonderful opportunity to share our passion for astronomy with our community in Pittsburgh at the Deep Sky Urban Star Party, held in the abandoned swimming pool at Leslie Park in Lawrenceville. We loaded up a bunch of Android phones with Sky Map and joined the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh—who brought along their telescopes—and several hundred local residents for a night of stargazing.

As a Sky Map engineer the biggest thrill I get is when we get emails from people who have used our app to show a planet to their children for the first time. At the Star Party we were delighted to have the chance to show people around the night sky in person. It was great to meet so many people who were both excited by astronomy and interested in Google’s technology. Thanks for all of your ideas for new features, and a big thank you to the Leslie Park Pool Collective and all involved for organizing such a fun event.


Photos by Jason Parker-Burlingham

Posted by John Taylor, Software Engineer

Uno strumento potente ma semplice da usare per creare album fotografici e raggruppare in modo ordinato immagini e foto sul proprio PC

Autore: Marco Mattioli
Categoria: Download

Creare alternative sicure al classico campo di input con le password mascherate
Questa è la traduzione dell'articolo The Problem with Passwords di Lyle Mullican, pubblicato originariamente su A List Apart il 9 Febbraio 2010. La traduzione viene qui presentata con il consenso dell'editore (A List Apart Magazine) e... - Seconda parte: una tecnica alternativa

Autore: Lyle Mullican
Categoria: JavaScript

Last November, we added legal opinions to Google Scholar. Legal opinions consider serious issues and help refine the laws that govern our country—but they can also be surprisingly entertaining. We’ve shared some of these for your summer reading pleasure on the Google Scholar blog.

LeAnn Rimes
A very rich and famous star
Wasn't so rich in times afar
But what a talent she had!

Webmaster Level: All

When Googlebot crawls your site, it’s expected that most URLs will return a 200 response code, some a 404 response, some will be disallowed by robots.txt, etc. Whenever we’re unable to reach your content, we show this information in the Crawl errors section of Webmaster Tools (even though it might be intentional and not actually an error). Continuing with our effort to provide useful and actionable information to webmasters, we're now sending SiteNotice messages when we detect a significant increase in the number of crawl errors impacting a specific site. These notifications are meant to alert you of potential crawl-related issues and provide a sample set of URLs for diagnosing and fixing them.

A SiteNotice for a spike in the number of unreachable URLs, for example, will look like this:


We hope you find SiteNotices helpful for discovering and dealing with issues that, if left unattended, could negatively affect your crawl coverage. You’ll only receive these notifications if you’ve verified your site in Webmaster Tools and we detect significant changes to the number of crawl errors we encounter on your site. And if you don't want to miss out on any these important messages, you can use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.

If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.

Posted by Pooja Shah and Jonathan Simon

Today we’re excited to announce a new edition of Google Apps. Designed with guidance from customers like the federal government, the City of Los Angeles and the City of Orlando, Google Apps for Government includes the same great Google applications that people know and love, with specific measures to address the policy and security needs of the public sector.

We’re also pleased to announce that Google Apps is the first suite of cloud computing messaging and collaboration applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and accreditation from the U.S. General Services Administration. The FISMA law applies to all information systems in use by U.S. federal government agencies to help ensure they’re secure. The federal government’s General Services Administration has reviewed the documentation of our security controls and issued an authorization to operate, the official confirmation of our FISMA certification and accreditation. This review makes it easier for federal agencies to compare our security features to those of their existing systems; most agencies we have worked with have found that Google Apps provides at least equivalent, if not better, security than they have today. This means government customers can move to the cloud with confidence.

Take Berkeley Lab, a member of the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. It’s managed by the University of California and conducts unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Berkeley researchers collaborate with scientists around the world, so emailing version upon version of documents among collaborators and trying to juggle disparate files is difficult. Berkeley Lab researchers have been using Google Apps to share documents that live in the cloud, and can view and edit documents and spreadsheets simultaneously knowing they are always working from the latest information. (Read more from Berkeley Lab’s Chief Information Officer on the Enterprise blog.)

And we’re not stopping with FISMA certification. Google Apps for Government will continue to evolve to meet unique government requirements. Google Apps for Government stores Gmail and Calendar data in a segregated system located in the continental United States, exclusively for our government customers. Other applications will follow in the near future. The suite is a “community cloud”—as defined by the National Institute for Science and Technology—to support the needs of our government customers. Google Apps for Government is available now to any federal, state or local government in the United States.

With reviews of our security controls in place, government agencies can more easily take advantage of all the benefits of one of the world’s best cloud computing systems. Google’s cloud offers higher reliability, best-in-class disaster recovery and access to a steady stream of innovation—all of which can provide substantial improvements over existing systems in addition to significant cost savings. And with no hardware or software to install and maintain, Google Apps for Government allows agencies to redeploy resources to technology projects core to their mission of serving the public. This new edition should give governments an even stronger case for making the move to the cloud.

Update July 27: Clarified details regarding the source of our certification and accreditation.

Posted by Kripa Krishnan, Technical Program Manager, Google Apps for Government

I social network dei luoghi: tutte le applicazioni per creare comunicazione e interattività quando si va in giro per il mondo con il proprio cellulare
I social network sono luoghi digitali che non bisogna frequentare solo seduti sulla propria scrivania. Molti servizi, con caratteristiche differenti rispetto a quelle tradizionali, sono...

Autore: Alfredo Bucciante
Categoria: WebApp

Vignetta di Alessandro Romani, per Intel Tech Legends, sui cavi RJ11 e RJ45.
Autore: Roberto Rossi
Tags: cavi, internet

Vediamo quali modifiche apportare a Joomla 1.5 per ottimizzare la SEO
Introduzione Una delle motivazioni principali del perché un'azienda decide di farsi conoscere in rete, è sicuramente la possibilità di pubblicizzare le sue attività, i suoi prodotti ad una platea potenzialmente infinita di utenti. Farsi trovare ed...

Autore: Antonio Avolio
Categoria: CMS

Nella soddisfazione generale per le profonde modifiche alla legge sulle intercettazioni, nessuno si era ricordato della questione legata all’obbligo di rettifica per i blog che tanto preoccupa la blogosfera. Quando poi qualcuno ha chiesto che fine avessero fatto gli emendamenti pensati per ammorbidire quegli aspetti, la risposta della presidente della Commissione Giustizia, l’On. Giulia Bongiorno, ...
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Autore: Marco Viviani
Tags: blog, legge bavaglio

Apple ha finalmente risolto il problema di Antennagate… Vignetta di Etsy.com.
Autore: Orazio Tassone
Tags: apple, iPhone

Webmaster Level: All

We know that some of you, or your clients or colleagues, may be new to online video publishing. To make it easier for everyone to understand video indexing and Video Sitemaps, we’ve created a video -- narrated by Nelson Lee, Video Search Product Manager -- that explains everything in basic terms:



Also, last month we wrote about some best practices for getting video content indexed on Google. Today, to help beginners better understand the whys and hows of implementing a Video Sitemap, we added a starting page to the information on Video Sitemaps in the Webmaster Help Center. Please take a look and share your thoughts.

Posted by Amy MacIsaac, Content Partnerships

Webmaster Level: All

Have you ever wanted to submit your various content types (video, images, etc.) in one Sitemap? Now you can! If your site contains videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information, you can now create—and submit—a Sitemap with all the information.

Site owners have been leveraging Sitemaps to let Google know about their sites’ content since Sitemaps were first introduced in 2005. Since that time additional specialized Sitemap formats have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code or geographic content. With the increasing number of specialized formats, we’d like to make it easier for you by supporting Sitemaps that can include multiple content types in the same file.

The structure of a Sitemap with multiple content types is similar to a standard Sitemap, with the additional ability to contain URLs referencing different content types. Here's an example of a Sitemap that contains a reference to a standard web page for Web search, image content for Image search and a video reference to be included in Video search:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:image="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
        xmlns:video="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
  <url> 
    <loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc> 
    <image:image>
       <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc> 
    </image:image>
    <video:video> 
    <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv</video:content_loc>    
      <video:title>Grilling tofu for summer</video:title> 
    </video:video>
  </url>
</urlset>

A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links.

If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content -- something that lets your expertise shine -- people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools.

A promising way to create value for your target group and earn great links is to think of issues or problems your users might encounter. Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience. Both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility. This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and "spread the word." Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site's reputation in a positive way.

Humor can be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site. With Google Buzz and other social media services constantly growing, entertaining content is being shared now more than ever. We've seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site's source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site. However, we do not recommend counting only on short-lived link-bait tactics. Their appeal wears off quickly and as powerful as marketing stunts can be, you shouldn't rely on them as a long-term strategy or as your only marketing effort.

It's important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site's reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they're likely to have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. If your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid them.

Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it's on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.

It can be a good idea to take a look at similar sites in other markets and identify the elements of those sites that might work well for yours, too. However, it's important not to just copy success stories but to adapt them, so that they provide unique value for your visitors.

Social bookmarks on YouTube enable users to share content easily

Webmaster Level: All

We'd like to highlight three best practices that address some of the most common problems found when crawling and indexing video content. These best practices include ensuring your video URLs are crawlable, stating what countries your videos may be played in, and that if your videos are removed, you clearly indicate this state to search engines.

• Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txt
  
  • Sometimes publishers unknowingly include video URLs in their Sitemap that are robots.txt disallowed. Please make sure your robots.txt file isn't blocking any of the URLs specified in your Sitemap. This includes URLs for the:
    
    • Playpage
      
    • Content and player
      
    • Thumbnail
    More information about robots.txt.
    
  
  
• Best Practice 2: Tell us what countries the video may be played in
  
  • Is your video only available in some locales? The optional attribute “restriction” has recently been added (documentation at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472), which you can use to tell us whether the video can only be played in certain territories. Using this tag, you have the option of either including a list of all countries where it can be played, or just telling us the countries where it can't be played. If your videos can be played everywhere, then you don't need to include this.
    
  
  
• Best Practice 3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed -- protect the user experience
  
  • Sometimes publishers take videos down but don't signal to search engines that they've done so. This can result in the search engine's index not accurately reflecting content of the web. Then when users click on a search result, they're taken to a page either indicating that the video doesn't exist, or to a different video. Users find this experience dissatisfying. Although we have mechanisms to detect when search results are no longer available, we strongly encourage following community standards.
    
    To signal that a video has been removed,
    
    1. Return a 404 (Not found) HTTP response code, you can still return a helpful page to be displayed to your users. Check out these guidelines for creating useful 404 pages.
       
    2. Indicate expiration dates for each video listed in a Video Sitemap (use the <video:expiration_date> element) or mRSS feed (<dcterms:valid> tag) submitted to Google.

The last time I wrote about a hacked site, it was using a redirect that sent some users to a different site. This kind of hack is pretty common (even though it’s usually not as complex as mentioned in that post), it leverages the sad fact that users are often easy to trick and not browsing with protection (or a current browser).

A different angle of attack is to redirect only search engine crawlers to a different site. By doing this, they can make it look like the pages of a website moved to a new domain name. In general, when search engines find redirects like that, they will more or less pass the “value” that a page had on to the new URL — that generally also applies to PageRank. So in a sense, they are trying to steal the value that a webmaster has built up over time.

In this particular case, a “massive amount” of sites were hacked and likely redirected through suomi.co.in.

The webmaster generally doesn’t notice this kind of hack because there’s nothing that would alert him to a problem. Only search engine crawlers would get redirected, normal users (including the webmaster) would see the page normally.

The first symptom that you would see is hard to interpret: URLs from the website are just not indexed anymore. URLs not being indexed is something that could happen because of any number of reasons, so how do we find out more?

One of the first things I like to do in a case like this is to access the site with a search engine crawler’s user agent. This gives you a rough look at how the website reacts to a search engine crawler (although it’s not complete, it’s often pretty close). There are two relatively easy ways to do this:

1. Use an online tool such as Web-Sniffer. It’s pretty easy to use and is somewhat close to an actual crawler.
2. Use FireFox with the User Agent Switcher plugin. If you use this plugin, you’ll have to add the user agent yourself. I usually use the current Googlebot user agent string:
   

   Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

   Note: if you use Firefox for this, make sure that your Firefox installation is up to date and locked down properly in case you run into a site serving malware like this. Sometimes it even makes sense to use a virtual machine for this.

3. (I wish there were a half-”li” ) There’s also “wget”, which is easy for those of you who prefer use console tools. I usually use the above user agent string with wget.

If you access the site using one of these tools, you’ll often be able to spot these redirects (or other issues that a site might be having with regards to being accessed by search engine crawlers). It’s rare that someone uses cloaking by IP address for things like this. In a recent thread in the Webmaster Help forums, “webado” spotted the redirect using Web-Sniffer.

In this particular case, the URL was redirected to http://suomi.co.in/ , from where it was redirected to a page that they wanted to promote with the original site’s “value”. I’ve seen the same kind of redirect going through http://ahtung.co.in/.

The webmaster responded with a note from his hoster in the thread:

Note from my host server (support @ hostgator.com)
I have removed the file “.htaccess” from the directory /home/aceuropa which was causing the redirect. The logs show a massive amount of .htaccess files being edited over the last couple of days. I would highly suggest changing your password to something more secure. Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.

(It’s great to see a hoster act so quickly!)

There’s another way to spot this kind of hack with Google Webmaster Tools: When you submit a Sitemap file, Google will show warnings for URLs that redirect. By design, you should be listing the final URL in your Sitemap file, so if the URL is redirecting for our crawlers (as in this case), we’ll show a warning in your account.

Here's a simple trick to view nofollow links in Google Chrome. Just drag and drop the following button to your bookmark bar and hit it whenever you want to see links with the rel=nofollow HTML microformat:

Nofollow?

This bookmarklet inserts a tiny bit of CSS into the top of the page you're currently viewing. The CSS is similar to that which is used in other nofollow highlighting methods:

Try it out on a page with nofollowed links!

By the way, this bookmarklet also works in Opera & Firefox (but there are simpler ways to handle it in Firefox).

Here's something from my mailbox - someone wanted to know how he could crawl his site and confirm that all of his pages really have the Google Analytics tracking-code on them. WordPress users have it easy, there are plugins that handle it automatically. Sometimes it's worth asking nicely - let me show you how I did it. As a bonus, I'll also show how you can check the AdSense ID on your pages, if you're worried that you copy/pasted it incorrectly.

This is pretty much cross-platform, but as a Windows-user you'll have to grab and install two files first:

• wget - a tool to download copies of web pages
• UnxTools - a collection of popular Unix/Linux tools for the hacker in you

Extract the ZIP files, copy the contents somewhere where you can find it and make sure that the appropriate folders are in your "path" (the files you'll need for UnxTools are in "...\usr\local\wbin"). We'll need to access these tools through the command line. I have a feeling I may need to elaborate on that for Windows users -- let me know if that's the case.

First, we'll mirror our site on our local machine (this assumes that your site is crawlable; if it isn't, then fix it first ):

1. Open a command box or terminal window (on Windows, hit Start / Run ... and enter "cmd")
2. Go to or create a temporary folder
3. Run the following command to mirror your site:

   wget --mirror --accept=html,htm,php,asp,aspx http://domain.com/

   This command mirrors pages with .html, .htm, .php, .asp and .aspx extensions on http://domain.com/. It'll create a folder for the domain and put all the files in it. Dynamic URLs will get adjusted so that they can be used as file names.

4. Wait ... until it's all downloaded ... if it feels endless, you might have endless URLs, perhaps an infinite calendar script or something similar? It's worth fixing!

Alrighty, now that we have a copy of your site, let's check things out.

Finding pages without Analytics

We can find pages without the Analytics tracking code by listing all pages which do not have certain content in them:

grep -r -L "google-analytics.com" *.*

This command goes through all subfolders (the "-r" option) and lists the files that do not contain a match ("-L") for "google-analytics.com". That could be extended to just about anything .

How about pages that don't have a "description" meta tag?

grep -r -L "meta name=.description" *.*

The "." (period) matches any character -- in this case, it is used to match the " (double-quote).

Finding pages with AdSense (and the ID used)

Finding pages that contain a certain text is even easier:

grep -r "google_ad_client" *.*

Note that all we did was drop the "-L" (and change the text, obviously). It will show the lines that match this pattern in all of your pages, which includes the AdSense ID.

Similar to the earlier check for missing "description" meta tags, assuming you have the contents of that tag all in one line, you can easily find all of these meta tags with:

grep -r "meta name=.description" *.*

What would you like to search for today?

Sometimes it would just be great to have multiple instances of Firefox running at the same time. Some web applications just love to eat memory in Firefox, some web pages go crazy if you have JavaScript enabled and sometimes you just want different sets of cookies to let you manage two accounts at the same time.

I've been trying to do that for years and did the most exotic things to make it happen. I've used four different browsers in parallel and I've even used a virtual PC running within my PC (that kind of defeats the desire to use less memory, but it feels neat anyway). In the end, a collegue in the office, who happens to use emacs as his main web browser , pointed me into the right direction.

Now I have three completely independant instances of Firefox running at the same time!

So what's the trick?

Firefox has command line options to let you start multiple profiles and specify a certain one. In our case, we're going to change the command line to:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P NewProfileName

To get started, check the name of your current profile. On Windows you can find it in "c:\Documents and Settings\[user-name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles". It will generally have a few characters and numbers, a period and then the profile name (in my case it was something like "36fc232a.default"). Use this to adjust the settings of the icon you use to start up Firefox. On Windows, right-click on the icon and select "Properties"; you can add the options in the field called "Target":

If you click on that icon now, it should start up Firefox just as before (ok, this is not the neat part yet ).

Now make a copy of the icon (I right-click drag it into a folder and select "Copy") and change the command line options (and file name) again, only this time choose a different profile name. If you want to use a copy of your existing profile (with all cookies, bookmarks, themes and add-ons), you can do that by going into the folder where your profiles are stored (mentioned above) and copying your default profile. Now when you start up Firefox with that icon, it will bring the profile manager since it can't find that new profile. Create a new profile and use the exact name you used in the options. You will then have a choice of either creating a completely new profile or using an existing profile folder.

Now you have two instances of Firefox running at the same time. They're completely separate, so if one crashes, the other will continue normally. If one starts using too much memory, you can close it and restart it without impacting the other one. If you have conflicts with add-ons or want to use different cookie sets, just use a separate instance.

Since the various instances will generally look the same and be hard to keep apart, I just applied different themes to them. The "Safari-style" theme is my private one, the blue one is used for all my work-apps and the normal one is used for all kinds of testing.

This trick should work on all platforms with Firefox, not that I tried it out so try it at your own risk . Now if only I could migrate my IE profile back to Firefox ...

All of the websites I put together at the moment are used for playing around and testing things. It's fun to set up a site, try some things out, delete it or just let it sit and then - usually much later - start over and try something else. The only problem is that by the time I am ready to start over, I have forgotten my password. I can find my user name, it's in the FTP client and visible in my hosting control panel, but the password is not visible anywhere. The secure way would be to just pick a new password, but let's assume you need your old one . The following will also work for email passwords stored in your email client, by the way.

What we'll do is "sniff" the connection that your FTP client builds up, we'll take a look at the packets sent out and received. Remember that other people can do this as well - say if you're on an insecure wireless connection on the road -- use secure connections and protocols whenever you can!

You'll have to get a copy of Ethereal (freeware), a universal network analysis tool (there are many similar tools available, I like the flexibility of Ethereal). Download it, install it and start it up.

To get started, select the menu item Capture and Start, then choose your ethernet interface (WLAN, cable, etc) and let it start. You are now recording your complete network traffic, you 1337 self-h4x0r . Depending on what you're doing at the moment, it may record a lot of traffic. We'll filter it later on, so don't worry about that.

Now start up your FTP client (make sure you're not using a secure FTP connection) and connect to your server. When you connect to your server like that, you will send your user name and password over the network and Ethereal record that for you. Once you have that, you can stop capturing in Ethereal.

If you scroll through the data you collect like that, you'll quickly notice that there's a lot going over those wires. Let's just look at the data going to and from our FTP server. You'll have to get the IP address of your server (which you can usually do in a shell/command box by typing "nslookup ftp.yourservername.com"). In the filter box on top, enter: ip.addr eq nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn (where the "nnn's" are the IP address of your server).

Once you only look at the data going to and from your server, you'll see the authentication information right away:

Now that you see how easy it is to hack yourself, make sure that others can't do the same with your account:

• If you're using a wireless connection, always assume that others can listen in (even if you're using your own access point with WEP or WPA encryption).
• Make sure that you use a secure version of FTP. In general, they will encrypt your authentication information so that it will not be readable on your network. Double-check it with Ethereal, if you want to be sure.
• Change your FTP/email passwords after you have used them on an insecure connection like a hotel or airport wireless.
• If you use a web-based email service, make sure that you are accessing the site with HTTPS and not HTTP. Most web-mail services allow that (though they may not activate it by default since it is a bit slower and is usually not needed on your home network).
• Even if your FTP (or email) client encrypts passwords in the settings, they can still be read with the right tools.

Stay safe!

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