twocentsfromme

2011-03-21T21:48:00.001-07:00

test

Working late on interesting stuff

2009-12-19T03:11:00.000-08:00

Its really nice to work late in the nights when everything is calm and quiet. Hopefully we should be releasing this product soon...

Take action before RockYou rocks you completely!

2009-12-16T17:31:00.000-08:00

A couple of days back, Techcrunch reported that RockYou was hacked and suggested that users might want to change their passwords asap. Today, there was another post which suggested that RockYou was infact storing all the passwords in cleartext, ie., in plain text format without encrypting them.

What does that mean to you?

If you have an account on RockYou, your password can be seen by anyone who has access to the RockYou database! YES, you guessed it right, the hacker has passwords of all the 32 million users on RockYou. You might think its not a big deal because you don't really care if someone hacks into your Rockyou account which you don't use often. WRONG. Since most of us tend to have the same username/password on multiple websites, the hacker could just use the username/password combination on other websites and take control of your account. This was one of the techniques used to hack twitter.

What should you do now now?

If you have ever used any of the RockYou apps on Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, etc. you must do the following immediately.

Change your passwords on all your email accounts and social networks.

Remove/Revoke access to any old apps you are not using on Facebook, Orkut, etc.

http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php?v=allowed

http://www.orkut.com/Main#MyApps

Stop using services which store your password in clear text.

Please feel free to comment on more methods to be secure on the internet.

Started using Bing...

2009-06-21T23:13:00.000-07:00

My journey on the internet started with Yahoo. Yahoo was the first ever website I had visited. In those days Yahoo search was too good and infact was powered by google for sometime. Other search engines in those days were altavista, ask, lycos, etc were decent but somehow dint get my attention.

Later, after a few years someone suggested Google and ever since google has been my default search engine. It seemed like google always had an answer to whatever I was looking for and had it in the first few entries.

In the last few weeks, have been using bing for my searches and surprisingly I find that the quality of the search results is pretty good (although its from microsoft !!!). I started liking the subtle usability enhancements they have made like showing a small summary text on hovering the mouse of the result....the recent searches on the left and so on.

Some cool things that are worth a mention in this post,

1. Image search on Bing has been really good. Firstly, it shows all the images in the same page and I dont have to click through a lot of pages. It also lets you filter images based on size, layout, colour, style and people. It also shows related search queries and lets you search for similar images. So far, all of these filters have worked really good for my searches.

2. Video search on Bing is equally good. A very cool thing about it is that it plays the videos directly from the search results...this is something thats not available on "video specialist" sites like youtube! It also lets you filter your videos based on length, resolution, screen size and source. It even shows related searches where application.

3. Search results are available as RSS by just appending "&format=rss" to the search url. That would let me track stuff as they are indexed by Bing. Not exactly real-time but almost there!

4. Finally, a clean interface with so much focus on usability!

Bing would be my default search engine from today if it continues to give me answers to my questions. At the very least, I would visit the site every day to see the nice background image....