Googling Google

May 9th, 2008

Gmail can be used as “Spam Bazooka”

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:46 am

Categories: Gmail

Tags: Google Inc., Google Gmail, Vulnerability, Spam, E-mail Providers, Security, Internet, Garett Rogers

INSERT, the Information Security Research Team, has sucessfully created a proof of concept exploiting the “trust hierarchy” that exists between mail service providers. Taking advantage of the way Gmail forwards messages, the team was able to send 4000 messages in a short period of time from a single account without any countermeasures taken by Google.

Using Google as an open email relay is highly desierable for spammers because Gmail is trusted by most email providers — making messages sent though Gmail immune to most spam filtering.

Since the messages are delivered by Google’s own servers, an attack based on this flaw is able to bypass all spam filters that are based on the blacklist / whitelist concept. We were able to confirm that this vulnerability is indeed exploitable by crafting a proof of concept attack that allowed us to send forged email messages unrestrictedly through Google’s server infrastructure.

There has been no official comment by Google on this matter yet, but I’m hoping the problem will be resolved in short order. The vulnerability isn’t as serious as past ones that exposed contact lists, or let attackers steal cookies, but that shouldn’t stop it from being high priority.

For more details on this vulnerability, you can read the draft paper by INSERT here.

May 8th, 2008

Google offers enterprise web security

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:53 am

Categories: Google, Google Apps

Tags: Google Inc., Postini Corp., Web, Web Security, Productivity, VPNs, Blogging, Spyware, Adware & Malware, Network Security, Networking

Postini, a company acquired by Google, is now offering enterprise web security. All traffic is routed through Google, and they take care of making sure traffic meets your corporate policies. The interesting part of all this though is how it secures computers, even when they aren’t in the office.

According to the Google Enterprise blog, this new system forces users using corporate computers to use the Postini web filtering tool — without requiring a VPN connection.

Protecting off-network users used to require them to connect via a VPN when they were out of the office — often with mixed results. With this new feature, all off-network users’ web traffic is automatically directed to scanning infrastructure to enforce your policies and protect their computers, requiring no action on the part of individuals. It’s easy to deploy and users can’t tamper with it, ensuring your security and appropriate use policies are always in place. — Google Enterprise Blog

Since users cannot tamper with it, this service becomes very desirable for network administrators who are constantly fighting against malware and spyware that creeps onto systems while connected to networks outside the company. There is no reference to the cost of the service on the website, but if the price is right, this could be big.

[Thanks Nate!]

May 6th, 2008

Google Reader lets users do micro-blogging

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:55 am

Categories: Google Reader

Tags: Google Inc., Google Reader, Twitter, E-mail Servers, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Garett Rogers

Ok, Twitter and Google Reader aren’t exactly apples to apples, but the new “Notes” feature in Google Reader feels a lot like posting status updates in Twitter. When you type a note, it’s automatically shared with all your friends unless you unshare, and it appears almost as a real article in the reading list of all your friends.

To use the feature, log into Google Reader and click on “Notes” in the sidebar under “Your Stuff”. Type a note, and click “Post Note”, and you are done. Try not to post too many tests because there is no way to delete them, and your friends could get annoyed.

There is a second way to use notes also — while reading an item, you can attach notes to items that you decide to share — this is a good way to let people know your two cents.

I think this feature is awesome — minus how it’s impossible to delete notes. What do you think? Could this give Twitter some competition? Or is it simply a feature on Google Reader that nobody will use?

May 5th, 2008

Has Google mastered time travel?

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 5:13 pm

Categories: Privacy

Tags: Google Inc., Desktops, Hardware, Garett Rogers

It appears that Google has mastered time travel — either that, or the privacy policy for Google Desktop in the UK doesn’t take effect until later this year.

Of course, it could just be a mistake, but i doubt it.

[Thanks Denny]

May 4th, 2008

Microsoft withdrawals bid for Yahoo, Google wins

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 8:13 am

Categories: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo

Tags: Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft Corp., Mergers & Acquisitions, Corporate Law, Investment, Finance, Business Operations, Garett Rogers

In a press release from Microsoft yesterday, Steve Ballmer said that it officially withdrawals it’s bid for the acquisition of Yahoo, and cites the deal with Google as the main contributing factor for his decision.

“In our view, such an arrangement with [Google] would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons” - Microsoft Press Release

Now that the dust is settling, we can see what kind of impact this withdrawal will have. As Larry Dignan says on BTL, Google is the big winner. Not only do they not have to worry about a combined Microhoo working together to destroy them, they could also get a lucrative ad deal with Yahoo!.

Before Ballmer withdrew his offer to purchase the company, Yahoo! did everything it could to try and derail the efforts of Microsoft. That included reaching out to Google, and asking them to try using AdWords on their own search engine. Mind you, this is still only a “test”, and it could be subject to close scrutiny by regulators, but it is still looking pretty good for Google.

May 3rd, 2008

Is Google reliable enough?

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 8:51 am

Categories: Gmail, Google

Tags: Google Inc., Phone, YouTube Inc., Internet, TVs, E-mail, Tv & Home Theater, Telecom & Utilities, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment

Dan Farber wrote about some downtime he experienced at YouTube this morning — it lasted 20 minutes, and was then restored. The part that got me thinking about his post was his reference to why the internet isn’t like TV — TV is much more reliable, but content on the internet is usually more interesting.

This provides another example of why the Internet isn’t like television, which tends to have higher uptime but the content just isn’t as interesting as what you can find on YouTube.

Reliability is extremely important to people. If you don’t believe me, imagine someone sending you an important document that needs to be replied to within an hour — unfortunately, your Gmail says “Oops.” instead of showing you your inbox. There is nobody you can talk to, and nothing you can do but wait. You would be surprised how often this happens — email always goes down at the worst possible time.

The service I think will be the biggest problem for Google is Grand Central. In the last few months, the service has gone down twice. What does that mean? It means anyone that relies on GrandCentral would have stopped receiving phone calls. when was the last time your real phone provider did that? If you thought people were attached to their email, try taking away their phone.

Google really does provide very cool, and extremely useful services though — and I think that’s more important than 100% uptime guarantees. For me, they are good enough. What about you?

May 1st, 2008

You can now use Google Apps on your iPhone

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 10:58 pm

Categories: Google, Google Apps, Google Mobile

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., Google Apps, Advertising & Promotion, Digital Music, Digital Media, Marketing, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics, Garett Rogers

Google just released a new interface for the iPhone/iPod Touch that lets Google Apps users easily access everything they need in an integrated environment. This new interface lets you use applications like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other services that aren’t associated with Google Apps like Google Reader, Google Notebook, Google News and Blogger.

If you have Google Apps for your domain, you can bookmark or set http://www.google.com/m/a/your-domain.com as your default page for quicker access to the information you find the most useful. This specific functionality is new, but the interface you will be using is actually a few months old. With regards to the interface, Google also announced today that it is now available in several languages. Since Google knows that mobile internet is going to be a big thing in the future, they have been increasing the amount of time and resources assigned to work on mobile related products.

The mobile interface for Google (be it using Apps or not) works great. I find that I use my iPod Touch to keep on top of daily routine tasks — then I use my laptop to do the heavy lifting. The majority of my time online is research, and who needs to use a real computer for that when the iPod/iPhone alternative is quicker, and is far more mobile?

April 30th, 2008

Google looking to map the abyss

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:52 pm

Categories: Google Earth, Google Maps

Tags: Google Inc., Garett Rogers

Google has tackled visualization of Earth, and more recently the sky, by offering up free imagery to the public with Google Earth and Google Maps. The data Google is giving away for free is simply breathtaking — it’s hard to believe we never had access to it as recent as three years ago.

Now, Google has said it will try doing the same thing again by exposing the ocean floor. Even though the amount of imagery available isn’t even close to being complete, Google plans to give users access to as much as they can.

Google Ocean will feature a basic layer that shows the depth of the sea floor and will serve as a spatial framework for additional data, sources said, adding that Google plans to try to fill in some areas of the map with high-resolution images for more detail.

Additional data will be displayed as overlying layers that depict phenomena like weather patterns, currents, temperatures, shipwrecks, coral reefs, and algae blooms, much like the National Park Service and NASA provide additional data for Google Earth and Google Sky. — CNET News

It will be very interesting to see what Google can do with the ocean. Do you think this coming feature will be useful? What do you hope Google does with it?

April 29th, 2008

Is it Google or China censoring Carrefour?

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 6:56 pm

Categories: Google

Tags: China, Google Inc., Government, Vertical Industries, Enterprise Software, Software, Garett Rogers

I guess either way, the answer is ultimately China, but this latest news on Google’s censorship in China is a bit strange. Chinese people are very upset with the French due to an attack on a wheelchair bound Olympic torch carrier. The act caused many Chinese people to call for a boycott on Carrefour — a French supermarket chain.

Today, one of Philipp’s readers discovered that searching for Carrefour on google.cn brought back a very strange result — an almost blank Google page. Google may be censoring search results for this query on behalf of China, but some have even speculated that it could be the Chinese government altering the response to the search without Google being involved at all. The copyright notice on the bottom of the page says 2006, and the HTML itself looks very hacky — there is even some missing code (There is no at the end of the content).

There has been no official word from Google about what is happening.

According to “www” on the Blogoscoped forum, the censored information is not to support the boycott, but to try and derail it.

THe government tries to stop the boycotte,it orders all search engine not to show results about carrefour boycott,because Nationalists post “do not go to carrefour ” everywhere,and it makes the government worried.

What do you think?

April 28th, 2008

Google Product Search gets a bit smarter

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 8:56 am

Categories: Google

Tags: Google Inc., Web Site Development, Web Technology, Internet, Garett Rogers

Google Product Search — the latest name for the Google service that was originally called “Froogle” — recently received another update that makes the service a lot more useful.

Instead of simply indexing individual product listings from online stores, Google has now started grouping similar products together. When you search, Google tries to show group results rather than individual products.

Before this latest update, when you clicked on a title of a result, you would be shipped off directly to a website where you could purchase that product. Now, when possible, you are taken to a screen where you can compare prices for that exact product, read user reviews, and see product specifications — all without leaving Google.

This is what the service should have been originally. With these new changes, I have a feeling I will use this service more frequently.