Lycos UK launches 10GB webmail - Includes Online Drive

Digital Media Europe is reporting that Lycos UK has launched today a 10GB webmail service - Lycos Personal Mail 10GB.



Storage on the Lycos UK Freemail service rises to 300MB as part of the upgrade.



The expanded LYCOS UK Personal Mail 10GB account is now the largest fee-for-service e-mail service available.



All the revamped e-mail services include access to Lycos UK's new Online File Storage Drive (Online drive). The service enables Lycos UK customers to drag and drop files from windows directly into an online storage drive.





VIA: ResearchBuzz

Cloaking 101 - Questions and Answers

A frank and very open discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums regarding cloaking techniques ... and the pitfalls.



The thread has liberal amounts of thoughts from their resident "industrial strength cloaker", Fantomaster. You will learn such things as IP Delivery, Shadow Domains, and a host of other tricks of the cloaking trade.



Meanwhile, Larry and Sergey are in Japan on their promotional tour. They had this to say:

"The company is also working hard to stop search engine optimizers (SEO) from distorting search results...There are many SEOs that are trying to manipulate Google. Our biggest message is that through our products, we always want to promote a better and healthier service."

No that was not in response to the thread at SEW, it is just Peter's quirky sense of humor in his blog post today.

Google Desktop Caches Deleted Files

Philip, of Blogoscoped, has just discovered that Google Desktop will cache files that have been purged from your Recycle Bin.

"I tested this by creating a text file with a unique string in it. I then threw the file in the Windows trash can, which I emptied afterwards. And guess what, the file can now still be found, and Google Desktop offers me its full-text cache of the file even though it had been removed."

This is something I think all people should be aware of. It could be a good thing, then again, it could be a bad thing.



You can instruct Google Desktop to exclude the Recycle Bin from being indexed of course, but I think this is a bass-ackwards approach myself. I think it would be more convenient to actually be able to select what you want to include in the first place. I am hoping that Google will take this approach in the future. It will be far more simpler, and then they do not have to worry about people wondering why their private documents are showing up in searches. They would only have themselves to blame.

MozillaNews (re)Ponders Google's Browser Plans

It seems that some people within Mozilla are digging up certain inconsistencies and covert goings-on which add to the speculation of a new Google browser may still be in the works.

"As I stated, Mozilla.org and Mozilla developers have been very quiet on all of this. But with such an open organization, it's hard to hide all secrets. There have been a lot of hidden bugs in Bugzilla related to searching, bugs that even members of the Security group can't access. Recently, there was a bug duplicated to a confidential bug with the following comment by the triager: 'This is a duplicate of a private bug about working with Google. So closing this one.' That bug also now closed, but it was open long enough for people to notice it.



There's also a lot of 'covert' code going into the tree without individual bug references. And none of these patches are being checked in by Google staff, but by other Mozilla developers, ostensibly checking in code for Google employees to keep a low profile. None of this is Google-exclusive, per se, as much as it is code that one could easily see as making life easier for a third party developer making heavy integration changes. The checking commends are usually very technically described, possibly to obfuscate their use to the majority of watchers to maintain the secret. Example"

The bug mentioned above, is one that I reported on earlier, in which Blogzilla's Pindar reported that Bug 226572 - Google branded Mozilla browser was suddenly marked as Private. Now a duplicate bug appears, and disappears from sight. This time the reason for marking it Private is because of "working with Google". It is still unclear what the bug actually is, but it does show that there is activity going on around this non-existant Google browser.



There are also recent acknowledgements from the Google camp which fan the flames even higher. Google, being Google, are pretty good at secrets though. This is one that they are seemingly playing very close to the vest.

"IE Shines On Broken Code", says BugTraq Test

Slashdot has a post from timothy where he came across a BugTraq entry on web browser security. Basically, the story is that Michal Zalewski started feeding randomly malformed HTML into Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, and Links and watching what happened. The bottom line?

"All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption, buffer overflows, sometimes memory exhaustion; taking several minutes on average to encounter a tag they couldn't parse."

If you want to try this at home, he's also provided the tools he used in the BugTraq entry.

France's Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool has Trademark Warning

The French version of the Overture keyword suggestion tool has an additional note attached. The note briefly states:

Note 2: You can check whether a word corresponds to a registered trademark by visiting the INPI website <http://www.icimarques.com>

This seems to suggest that Overture is putting the burden on the user to validate whether a Trademark has been registered or not. At least, that is the way I look at it.



VIA: SEO & Web Marketing News -> North

Ping-o-matic hits 20 Million

Ping-o-matic hit it's 20 millionth ping sometime today.



Them's a lot of pings, but I am sure it is just the beginning of a lot more to come. Congrats guys!