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Posts Tagged ‘Caveats’

Too Easy: How a Simple Hack Can Turn Your Numeric Google Profile URL Back into a Gmail Address

Over the last few days, there has been a lot of buzz about how much private information your public Google profile contains if you don’t choose the right settings. The URL of your profile alone can already give away your Gmail address. To hide this address from public view, you can switch your profile URL away from showing your name to using an address that features a 21-digit number instead of your username. However, as it turns out, this isn’t a foolproof method either. By using a very simple trick, anybody can quickly figure out your Gmail address from these numbers.

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Security blogger The Harmony Guy just told us about how this hack works. While the way to reveal these addresses isn’t obvious, you can easily follow along and try this method out yourself.

How does it work?

First, you simply copy the numbers from a user’s Google profile and then append these numbers to http://picasaweb.google.com/[numbers].

For some users who haven’t customized their Picasa page, the username (which is also their Gmail address) will come right up. If the user has customized the account and added a nickname, you simply have to replace the URL in the address bar with javascript:alert(_user.name); and a small pop-up window will show you the username.

Caveats

It’s important to note that this only works for Google users who also use the Picasa web service. This, however, is likely a large percentage of Gmail users.

How to Protect Yourself

In Picasa Web Albums, go to the settings page and add a new username. Then, select the new username for your gallery URL. As The Harmony Guy points out, you may also want to edit your nickname.

Is this a major issue for Google? Probably not. But given the ruckus around privacy, Buzz and Google Profiles these days, it is disheartening to see that it is this easy to circumvent the only way to hide your Gmail address from public view. After all, if you want to use Google Buzz, Google forces you to have a public profile.

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Late Last Year, Google Overtook Apple In WebKit Code Commits

Today, the blog Chromium Notes, which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit. Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project.

Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project.

WebKit is the open source web browser engine that both Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers (among others) are built on top of. As such, it should be obvious why both are so heavily involved in the project (others on the graph include Nokia and BlackBerry maker RIM).

The graph ranges from 2007 to the present. According to it, on November 15, 2009 Google surpassed Apple in number of commits for the first time. Google has been ahead ever since, and the gap between the two appears to be growing. That said, the two big spikes for Apple came during major releases of Safari, so when Apple releases another version, it could spike up ahead of Google once again.

I’ve included a picture of the graph below (Apple is the blue line, Google is green, “Other” is purple, Nokia is gold, and RIM is light blue). But be sure to check it out on Chromium Notes’ site as you can drill-down to see more detail there. The author has also posted the code for the graph on github.

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YouTube videos now available in HTML5: Good riddance, Flash

Filed under: Video, Internet Tools, Beta Beat

We haven’t exactly been secretive about our distaste for Adobe’s Flash Player here at TUAW. Flash on the Mac has traditionally been a terrible resource hog, and while the pre-release of Flash Player 10.1 alleviated (to an extent) Flash’s inordinately high CPU usage, many of us still dreamed of a golden age when Flash would be supplanted by something else, especially if that something else was HTML5.

Dream no longer, because the first step toward realizing a Flash-free internet is here. YouTube has introduced an HTML5 beta. The formerly Flash-laden site, whose popularity most likely led to the profusion of Flash on the internet within the past few years, can now be viewed without using Flash at all if you opt into the beta.

The HTML5 option is only available for browsers that support HTML5 (obviously) and h.264. Safari (version 4 and above), Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame are a few of the qualified browsers.

There are a few caveats to the HTML5 beta. Videos with ads aren’t supported (awww…) – they’ll play in the standard Flash player instead. There’s also no support for full screen; clicking the little expander button on the lower right corner of the video will instead expand the video within the window to about double the normal size. Honestly, YouTube’s full screen video has never impressed me much anyway, so this isn’t a huge loss. Macworld notes that you also lose support for annotations and closed captioning, though, which might be a deal breaker for some.
Although YouTube is calling the HTML5 beta an “experiment,” this is an experiment I’d encourage everyone reading this to take part in. While the pre-release of Flash Player 10.1 reduced Flash’s CPU footprint considerably, using HTML5 instead results in a dramatic reduction – YouTube videos played in Safari using HTML5 never used more than 15% of my CPU. Even compared to Flash 10.1, which generally used about 35% of my CPU, that’s pretty tremendous.

One other thing I’ve noted in my brief experimentation with the HTML5 beta: the scrubber bar on videos seems far more responsive, without any lag at all. Flash videos were very jittery when switching between different spots in the video using the scrubber bar, but the response using HTML5 is instantaneous and seamless.

I hope YouTube’s HTML5 beta is a smashing success. If the biggest video site on the internet eventually abandons Flash Player, it’s only a matter of time before everyone else does, too. Personally, I can’t wait.

[Via Macworld]

TUAWYouTube videos now available in HTML5: Good riddance, Flash originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MySpace Music Resurrects Imeem Playlists

Last month, MySpace finally completed its deal to acquire troubled music startup Imeem. Unfortunately for imeem fans, the service shut down as soon as the deal was completed, redirecting them to a MySpace Music splash screen. MySpace was subsequently trashed by outraged users who wanted their playlists back. Today, they’re getting what they asked for: MySpace has just sent out an Email to imeem users, informing them that they’ll be able to restore their playlists using a new import tool. We’ve confirmed with MySpace that the feature is now live.

The process is simple: users enter their imeem Email address, hit “Import Playlists”, and will find their imeem playlists restored under the “My Music” section of MySpace Music. The playlists will behave as normal MySpace playlists do, but will be labeled to indicate that they originated from imeem. The process should be seamless for most users, but there are a few caveats: MySpace won’t be able to restore songs where there are differences between the imeem and MySpace music license catalogs. MySpace says this won’t be an issue for most songs, but didn’t have an exact percentage for how much of the catalogs overlap.

It’s worth pointing out again that MySpace didn’t really have anything to do with the shutdown of imeem — it would have shut down anyway as its licences expired and money ran out. We’re hearing this actually took quite a bit of work from MySpace’s end, as they had to pair up thousands of songs to prepare for the import process.

Here’s the Email message being sent to imeem users:

We’re happy to share that we’ve recreated your imeem playlists on MySpace Music. We spent a lot of time and effort to make a home for your music on our platform. Beginning today you’ll be able to access your playlists. Here’s how:

1) Access your playlist by clicking here: http://www.myspace.com/music/import-playlists. You will need to be logged into MySpace. Click here to login or signup for MySpace.

2) Enter your imeem e-mail address.

3) Click import and we will retrieve your playlists.

4) Upon completion, your playlists will be stored in “My Music,” our playlist management tool. All playlists can be identified by the name “import_[yourplaylistname]”

This process isn’t perfect and while we expect most of your content to have migrated from imeem to MySpace Music, we appreciate your understanding if any discrepancies between the two music catalogs affected your individual playlists.

If you have questions, please visit http://faq.myspace.com/app/home.

Thanks,
The MySpace Music Team

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Cartoon: Apple Tablet: Now With Barometer and Bird Call Generator

I’m just aching to know if the new Apple tablet (insert caveats, weasel words and qualifiers here) is a potential Cintiq competitor. I don’t think it will be, but you never know. It may also have a built in barometer and bird call generator.

I’m never sure if Apple does themselves more good than harm with the secrecy and anticipation that surrounds the run-up to these announcements. Unless there’s something truly jaw-dropping about whatever device rises from the stage when Steve Jobs reaches that particular slide in Keynote, the reaction may be muted disappointment: “Oh.” “Huh.” “Wait a minute… my life is still the same miasma of thwarted potential and spiritual anomie that it was half an hour ago!”

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That said, what are you expecting on Jan. 27?

More Noise to Signal.

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Want To Try Out Google Chrome OS For Yourself? Here’s How.

The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.

First, you need to get an image of Chrome OS. You can do that using this torrent. You can also try out the build that GDGT has uploaded, which worked fine in our test as well. If you get the torrent version, you’ll see it’s in a .BZ2 format. You’ll need to extract it. Macs should be able to do this automatically, but for Windows you may need a tool like Win Rar.

Once that’s done, download a version of VirtualBox for whatever OS you’re running on here and install it. After registering (or declining to) you’ll be met with a screen like this. Click the button that says “New” in the upper left hand corner. We’re going to be making a new virtual machine.:

You’ll enter a wizard like this. Hit next.

Go ahead and title the OS whatever you’d like. For the operating system, choose Linux, with Ubuntu as the version (other setups could potentially work, but this is the only one we’ve gotten working).

Choose how much memory to allocate to this virtual machine. This will be dependent on how much memory you have in your computer. The more, the better, but if you choose too much your real computer will become unstable/very slow.

Here’s the tricky part (fortunately it isn’t very tricky). You don’t want to create a new hard disk, instead, you want to use an existing hard disk. Don’t choose one from the drop down menu either — you’re going to want to hit the folder icon just to the right of that to enter the ‘virtual media manager’.

Hit the ‘Add’ button.

Now you have to find the Chrome OS image you downloaded earlier. This is probably on your desktop or in your downloads folder. Once you’ve found it, hit ‘Open’.

Hit ‘Select’ once you reach this window.

Almost there. Make sure ‘use existing hard disk’ is checked. Hit next.

Hit ‘Finish’

You’re done! Hit Start. Hopefully the screen will go black, but only for a little while (this could be anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute or so, depending on how fast your computer is).

Once you’re in, you’ll see a splash screen for ‘Chromium’ (which is what Google calls dev builds of Chrome). To login, you’ll need to enter a valid Google Account ID. Your standard Gmail account should work, but as we said before, this build of ChromeOS came from bittorrent, so you may want to use a throw away account like we did in the screenshots below (you can make one here).

You’re in. Now time to explore. To be honest, everything looks quite similar to Google’s Chrome browser, but there are a few key differences. Note the battery life indicator and options menu in the far upper right. Also try playing around with the ‘New Window’ functions — you’ll find that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to navigate between multiple windows. And be wary of the Bookmarks manager. As far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to get out of it — you’ll have to manually create a new bookmark, which will kick you back into the browser mode once you click it. Oh, and good luck finding the ’shut down’ button, because we sure can’t.

You probably won’t need it, but the shared user password for this install (which you’d need for functions like sudo) is ‘chromeos’ according to the torrent’s listing on ThePirateBay.

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ISPs react, sort of support network neutrality—with caveats

In the wake of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s major speech this morning supporting network neutrality, the responses have flooded in—and they’re surprisingly positive, even from ISPs. AT&T even goes so far as saying it could support all six of the rules that Genachowski wants… as long as they’re kept to wired networks.

For net neutrality backers, today’s announcement was a major victory, and it was also no surprise that Internet companies like Google strongly support the move. But the ISP reaction was surprisingly muted—even, in some cases, fairly positive.

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Caveats aplenty in "fat and depressed" gamer study

A large body of studies have focused on the potential health risks, both physical and mental, caused by heavy gaming. But the vast majority of these studies have focused on the young and adolescents, which makes a new study of gamers released by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine exceptional: its average participant was over 35. The research has made headlines as the media has interpreted it as indicating that gamers are “fat” and “depressed,” but the research itself is too limited to support such generalizations.

One of the most obvious problems with such generalizations is that the study is based on survey data gathered online back in 2006. For whatever reason, it sat unused for two years before being analyzed in 2008, but it’s important to note (given the conclusions about weight) that the Wii didn’t hit the market until the end of that year. 

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