Phishing Protection in Your Browser

Wikipedia defines phishing as "a criminal activity using social engineering techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message, although phone contact has been used as well."

Usually, emails that contain links phishing sites have deceptive subjects like "Important message from your Bank", use fake email addresses, copy logos and text from the sites they want to imitate. The URLs included in the emails may contain redirects, IP addresses or may look similar to the genuine URLs.

FraudWatch International reports that, on average, phishing sites remain active for 5 days before they are shut down.

To protect you against the increasing number of phishing sites, the latest versions of many browsers have added phishing protection.

IE7
* the Phishing Filter is opt-in.
* two ways:
- automatically check sites you visit against the list of known phishing sites on the Microsoft server.
- check individual sites, if you have a reason to think they may be used for phishing.
* there's also an heuristic way to detect common elements included in phishing sites. In this case, IE7 shows a warning.
* IE7 has a whitelist, that includes sites like microsoft.com
* privacy: "When you use Phishing Filter to check websites automatically or manually, the address of the website you are visiting will be sent to Microsoft, together with some standard information from your computer such as IP address, browser type, and Phishing Filter version number. To help protect your privacy, the address information sent to Microsoft is encrypted using SSL and limited to the domain and path of the website. Other information that may be associated with the address, such as search terms, data you entered in forms, or cookies, will not be sent."
* the Phishing Filter is also available as an add-on for MSN Search Toolbar, in IE6.

Firefox 2
* the Phishing Protection is on by default.
* two ways:
- by default, Firefox checks each webpage you visit against a local list of pages, that's regularly updated (approximately twice per hour)
- you can also choose a real-time protection, but that means you send every URL you visit to Google or to other provider (for the moment, Google is the only provider).
* Firefox doesn't use heuristics to see if a web page may be used for phishing.
* privacy:
"Firefox sends the URL of the web page, in addition to your IP address and other Non-Personally-Identifying Information, to the selected third party service provider. Firefox displays a warning if the third party service provider returns with a response indicating that the URL you are accessing is a suspected web forgery. Finally, if you take any action in response to a phishing protection warning message, the selected phishing protection service provider may record that action and the URL of the page, and a cookie may be placed on your computer. While it is possible that a URL sent to your service provider may itself contain Personally-Identifying Information, Mozilla's third party service providers have entered into a written agreement with Mozilla not to use Personally-Identifying Information for purposes other than to enhance and maintain their service."
* the real-time phishing filter is also available in Google Safe Browsing and Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Opera 9.1
* anti-phishing will be included in Opera 9.1, as reported by Johan Borg, an Opera developer.
* Opera will include only real-time protection and will send to opera.com the domain name and a hash of the current page. "The reply from the server is an XML document containing the trust level of the domain. This reply will be cached by Opera for a time indicated by our server."
* privacy:
Opera won't store IP addresses or store cookies and chose to sent requests over HTTP, in plain text.

Other interesting solutions:
* Netcraft Toolbar (IE, Firefox) that shows a Risk Rating for each site you visit.
* eBay Toolbar (IE 6.0), that includes Account Guard, a feature that lets you know when you're on a eBay site and when they site you visit is a known phishing site.
* Earthlink Toolbar (IE, Firefox) includes ScamBlocker, a real-time detection feature that shows whether a site is dangerous, questionable, safe or whether there isn't too much information to judge it.

From my empirical testing, Firefox 2 (and also Google Toolbar for Firefox) and Netcraft Toolbar offer the best protection.

If you don't want to use anti-phishing features included in your browser or in other toolbars, it's a good idea to read these tips from Anti-Phishing Working Group.

Google's Goals and Directions for 2006

Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped received two internal Google documents titled "Big Goals and Directions - 2006" and "Objectives and Key Results - Q3 2006 Company OKRs", that outline Google's objectives for this year.

If everything is on the right track, that means Google has already:

* got rid of spam in the top 20 languages
* improved their ad system ("one of their aims was to sell $1B of new inventory")
* pushed their content sites (maybe this is one of the reasons Google bought YouTube)
* optimized page loading for the most visited sites ("any site with over 10 million page views (per day? month?) renders in a second or less, 95% of the time")

Some new products and features that should be launched until the end of the year (or maybe next year):

* a more interactive version of Google News that lets "other news sources, and organizations and individuals mentioned in news stories to debate specific points".
* extract information about time and place from web pages and show search results ordered by time or restricted by time / location.
* enable visitors that have paid subscriptions to (news) websites to access them directly from Google search.

Google attaches straight numbers to its objectives, so when you see they're pushing a certain product or paying for more distribution, it may mean the numbers aren't quite where they should be.

It's also interesting that I wrote something about a new Google News and about "structuring unstructured information", and both are included in Google's plans.

Bad Week for Blogger

Blogger had a bad week with many planned and unplanned outages. Let's see:

October 18 - Apologies to everyone affected by tonight's Blogger slowness.

October 20 - We've been having a bit of slowness this morning.

October 21 - Blogger was down for a little over three hours this evening, due to the near-simultaneous failure of a critical component and its backup.

October 25 - We experienced an outage this evening due to a problem in our networking hardware.

October 26 - Sincere apologies for the short notice but we will take down both blogger.com and blogspot.com at 2 PM PST today to replace the piece of network equipment that was causing the outages in the past couple of weeks. The outage will last 60-90 minutes, we will try to get done as fast as we can.

After so many problems in a short time, Blogger decided to apologize in a big way.

"We really regret these outages, which were a nuisance (or worse) to you. The past week’s performance was not representative of the kind of service we want to provide for you. (...) It's been a bad week for Blogger, and, as I hope you can tell, we’re not denying it. Instead, we have taken and will continue to take specific steps that make Blogger a more reliable, overall better service for you to use."

The good news is that the new Blogger, still in beta, was built on a more reliable platform to prevent this issues. There's also a statement that shows Google has neglected Blogger: "The current Blogger infrastructure is — albeit in a very Lincoln's axe way — the same that Google acquired four years ago."

Google Halloween

Google has created some pages for the upcoming Halloween. On Google Video, you can find 14 short videos, including a teaser for "Hood of Horror". Google Books features a big list of famous scary stories, like Bram Stoker's Dracula or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

There's also a page that shows a Halloween party from 2000 at Googleplex. Google made a special logo for Halloween every year, as you can see here.

Google Maps Mania points to a list of mashups, from which the most interesting is HalloweenMashup, a site that helps you find Halloween events in the US.

What Can Opera Learn from Firefox?

I've used Opera as my main browser for many years. It's hard to saw why I switched to Firefox, but someone just did that and wrote an interesting article:

"Nowadays Opera seems to be grumpy and wanting attention for its past innovations and the things it is trying to do to keep up with Firefox and IE7. (...) In version 9.0 of Opera they released widgets to try and compete with Firefox's extensions. They seemed to entirely miss the point of how Firefox's extensions change your entire experience, and in turn created something less than thrilling. (...)

Web designers tend to try and support what the majority of their users will be using. They want everyone to use their web-apps, but tweaking for each browser takes time. Opera is a Web 1.0 browser, not because of Opera's own doing, but because the majority of Web 2.0 does not have the time to make it compatible."

So Opera can't escape the underdog complex, while having an elitist attitude.

"IE 7 comes out and adds tabbed browsing, but Opera has had that for 10 years. Credit is due Opera, and we'd like to see that reflected in market share," says Hakon Wium Lie, Opera's CTO. The problem is that people don't really care about who had this idea (Opera didn't actually invented tabbed browsing), and they don't care that Microsoft has said for many years that tabbed browsing is useless.

If Opera adds a plug-in system similar to the one from Firefox, improves they way it handles feeds, solves the JavaScript inconsistencies, fixes its Rich Text Editor, and has a more user-friendly interface, people might have a hard time choosing between Firefox and Opera.

The extensibility and simplicity is what makes Firefox great and Opera should learn from that.

Related:
10 great features from Opera

Google sites that don't work in Opera:
Google Calendar, Google Pages, Google Docs, Google Notebook, Picasa Web Albums (partially).

Google News Integrates Blog Search

Google News links to Blog Search on the homepage, and lets you go to Blog Search if you want to find more news. Maybe Google could add more features from my list of suggestions, and starts to connect traditional news sources with blogs.

Google Keeps You on the Map

Google Maps shows information about a business directly on the map. If you select a business from the map and click on "more information", the bubble will enlarge to show you general information about the place, reviews and related web pages. Until now, if you clicked on a business name, you were sent to a new page that included these details.

Hail to the Google

George W. Bush admitted he uses Google, in an exclusive interview for CNBC.

HOST: I'm curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps. It's very interesting to see — I've forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

Mr. Bush doesn't have good memories about Google, especially after being googlebombed for "miserable failure" and after Google refused to hand over a big list of search queries. Also this video is very popular on Google Video:


{ Via Blogoscoped. }

* "Hail to the Chief" is the official anthem of the president of the United States.

Google Video with Post-Roll Ads

Google Video promotes on the homepage a video titled "Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments II - Trailer", a teaser for a video that will be launched on October 30. At the end of the video, Google shows an ad for a contest hosted by Coca-cola.com. Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, the creators of the Diet Coke & Mentos videos, promote the contest that offers people the chance to be in their next video.

The ad can be seen only in the US. Google used to show ads at the end of premium videos, in an experiment called Free Today. This may be a sign that Google Video starts to monetize its free content too.

{ The second screenshot, from Donna Bogatin. }

Firefox 2 Officially Launched

People were so anxious to grab a copy of Firefox 2, that they launched the rumor that Firefox 2 is here a day earlier. Slashdot linked to the British version for Windows of a Firefox build from a FTP server and Mozilla developers had to explain why that was a bad idea. In the past, I also placed direct links to files from Mozilla's FTP server.

All in all, Firefox 2 is now officially launched and available at mozilla.com.

You can find out more about the new features from the reviews of Firefox 2 Beta 1 (spell checking, feed preview, anti-phishing, how to make your extensions compatible with the new version) and Beta 2 (the new visual theme). There's also a complete list of the new features.

The new features are not that significant to justify a major version. Chris Beard, VP at Mozilla, explains that "it's more sort of a natural evolution. It felt to us like a 2.0 product, particularly if we looked at it from what 1.0 was, to 2.0." The update comes 5 days after Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 7.

Related:
Handy calculator in Firefox 2.0
10 useful Firefox tips
Internet Explorer 7 released

Google and Open Source

Chicagoist has a small interview with three Google engineers that work in Chicago (although they weren't supposed to do that). An interesting part of the interview is about open source:

"Ben Collins-Sussman: I think of open source as software that's in the public domain. There may be a copyright assigned, but it's so liberal that effectively anyone can do what they want with [the software]. It's software that's essentially worked on by volunteers collaborating over the Internet. (...)

Jon Trowbridge: Google uses a huge amount of open source software internally on their own systems. Most people have heard of Linux by now, but most don't realize that they use Linux every day because all of Google runs on Linux. When you do a search on Google, that's hitting Linux. Because Google's a huge consumer of open source, they have a natural interest in it right there. They benefit from it tremendously and want to make sure that open source stays healthy and continues to improve. There's also a feeling of wanting to give back.

Brian Fitzpatrick: Open source also creates a level playing field. On the level playing field, you're forced to compete and cooperate based on your merits as opposed to locking people in. (...)

Ben Collins-Sussman: There are certain things like the PageRank algorithm, which they'll never release. And there are some things like anti-spam and anti-fraud where there's a benefit to keeping it secret. It's more effective if spammers and people committing fraud can't see what we're doing. Things like that will always be secret. There's no rule of thumb, but only the most hardcore open source zealot would have a problem with that. A lot of the stuff that we're working on could be released as open source software. That's what we're working on. Getting more and more of our code out so others can benefit from it."

Google would never open source their search engine because no one would have the resources to actually run the search engine (except for the competition). But we can expect to see more and more little tools released at Google Code.

{ Thank you, James Koh. }

Resurrecting a Failed Attempt to Categorize the Web

Google knows that people are selfish and act in their own interests. Google also knows that good ideas don't have to be killed if they're not successful, they just need a new twist.

Google Co-op, a place "where users can contribute their knowledge and expertise to improve Google search for everyone", didn't have too much success. Google wanted to collect some meta information about web pages, so it would be able to refine results for general queries. People would find good sites and add one or more labels from a predefined set. The task is cumbersome and the motivation almost non-existent.

If people can create their own search engine, the motivation increases:
* they actually create something tangible
* the search engine might actually become successful
* people can work together for a smaller common cause with someone they trust
* there's a monetary incentive

While "search engine creators" improve their sites and add more labels and sites, Google collects this information, combines it, and uses it to label the entire web. If you think about it, the process has a lot in common with Google Image Labeler (the ESP game).

Google Custom Search Engine

"Google is launching Customized Search Engine, a program where individuals' and organizations' can tailor the search results on their personal Web sites to better accommodate audience requests. The Custom Search Engines also enable users to monetize their search results using Google's AdSense – a program where Web site publishers can make money when visitors click on the Google ads displayed on their site. Google officials say the Custom Search Engine also allows its users to modify their search results so they are branded to look like their own."

Google Custom Search Engine, available at www.google.com/coop/cse lets you actually create a search engine. You give it a name, a description, some keywords, a list of sites where to search, and you may allow other people to improve the list. You can restrict the search to the list of the sites you specified, or just emphasize them in the search results. The style of the search result pages can be customized and you can add a logo, like in AdSense for Search. The search results can be hosted on a Google page or can be displayed in a page from your site. You can even use Google Ajax Search instead of the standard formats. The ads displayed in the SERPs can be connected to you if you have an AdSense account.

The search engine can be improved using annotations (a set of labels that describe a page), that work like in Google Co-op, and can be added using Google Marker.

Here are some custom search engines from: Macworld, Intuit and a small search engine about Google created by me.

The new product is a combination of AdSense for Search and Google Co-op that makes it easy to create a search engine focused on specific topics.

Twerq - Tabbed Search Results

Twerq says it's "the evolution of search". Actually the site uses Google and shows a new tab for each search inside the page. That means you can launch simultaneous searches using a single query. If you type bmw ++ citroen ++ chevrolet, Twerq opens each search in a new tab, and you don't even need to have a browser with tabs.

This may be useful if you want to compare the results from similar searches or if you don't want to open too many tabs and clutter your browser.

You can also add an initial part that repeats for each search, like rent// bmw ++ citroen ++ chevrolet. This will open three tabs that search for: rent bmw, rent citroen, rent chevrolet. There's also a repeating end for your query: rent// bmw ++ citroen ++ chevrolet \\in ny

While not cutting-edge, the site has a set of interesting options like: searching feeds and previewing them, saving group of tabs and searches.

Giving Google News a New Perspective

Google News is one of the most interesting products developed by Google, centered around aggregating and categorizing news automatically. While the product is already solid, some integration with other services would make it more useful:

1. Blogger's voice

While most blogs can't be considered news sources and many news sites avoid to quote blogs, Google News could use Google Blog Search to show comments. Google could also separate positive and negative comments.

2. Using the archives

Google introduced News Archive, a service that expands Google News with newspaper articles from the last 200 years. But Google forgot to actually use the service. Some articles could be better understood if we read related news from the past.

3. More context

Use Google Search to find links that might help you understand more the context of the news. Google Related Links is a good start for that.

4. More interactivity

Some news are more valuable if you actually see images or videos that describe the content. Google made a deal with AP, to use full content of its news, including images, so that could be a good source for the images. Videos from news televisions, delivered using Google Video, could be the next logical step.

5. The wisdom of crowds

It's hard to understand if a news is important and if it is, to whom. A rating system and a way to keep to track of your favorite news might improve Google News homepage and its personalization system.

To sum up, Google News is a perfect place to integrate many Google service that could give a better perspective on the news.

Job Interviews at Google to Become Less Harsh

Google has decided to change the way they hire people, reports Wall Street Journal.

From...

"In Google's early years, Mr. Brin or co-founder Larry Page interviewed nearly all job candidates before they were officially hired. A former Google executive recounts how, on occasion, Mr. Brin would show up for candidates' job interviews in unconventional dress, from roller blades to a cow costume complete with rubber udders around Halloween. (...) People close to the company say it has traditionally focused a lot on candidates' academic performance and favored those who went to elite schools."

... to:

"Google is experimenting with changes, such as additional short questionnaires for applicants and different interview formats. The company is also considering trying out an abbreviated hiring process, which would allow it to make an offer to some candidates after just two interviews.

Google is also moving from a format in which interviewers provided candidate feedback using free-form text and could give only one overall score to a format in which they offer targeted feedback grouped around four attributes (Google declines to name them) and multiple scores rating a candidate's knowledge, skills and abilities."

By reducing the number of interviews and their complexity, Google hopes to hire more people. Google has 9,378 employees and hires 16 people a day, a big number if you consider that at the end of 2003 Google had only 1,628 employees.

{ Thanks, Kent Dodds. }

Related:
Tough question from Google's interviews

Who Sues Google?

Now that Google is a powerful company, everybody wants to sue Google. From news agencies that want money as a reward for including their articles in Google News, to book publishers that don't want to be included in Google Book Search, from sites that have been delisted from Google Search to advertisers that think click fraud is a major issue.

New York Times has an interesting article about that:

Many of the lawsuits Google is facing carry little weight. Yet it has a vested interest in fighting all of them, even those of questionable merit, and seeing that they are resolved quickly. In part, this is because any lawsuit that reaches the discovery, the pretrial fact-finding phase, poses the danger of revealing too much about Google’s proprietary technology. Google also has an interest in establishing a solid body of legal interpretation in its favor.

Google has been known to settle cases. But in general it mounts a vigorous defense, Mr. Goldman [director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law in California] said. "If they get sued, they turn the tables on the plaintiff and file motions to get the upper hand in the case," he said.

Google Earth Shows Information About US Elections

If you've opened Google Earth recently, you might have notice a new layer called "2006 US Election Guide". If you enable it, and search for a city in the US, you'll see information about candidates and voting. The layer was created by Google especially for its younger audience that needs to make an informed decision.

Elections for the United States House of Representatives will be held on November 7.