I’m no OS X expert, so I was a bit befuddled to find Google Chrome began crashing on startup a few days ago. Was it some evil Apple plot to lock Google out of the Mac?
All the grisly details from the automated report are below… it’s not the most readable of reports.
The fix: What I did was to download Chrome again and re-install. That seems to have fixed it for now.
Nice to know they still promote Google Reader on its logon page, despite it shutting down in a few months.
You can even still take the tour.
At work I’m getting repeated spams from one mob which send surprisingly similar emails about conferences and training from various domains, which include:
enterprisearchitecturetrainingtoday.com
businessawards2013.com
BPMArchitects.com
newbpmtraining.net
Apart from using many different domains, these guys also continually change the address within the domain, and Outlook doesn’t appear to be able to consign an entire domain to the blocked senders list.
They do include this footer:
You are receiving this e-mail because you happen to be either our client or were added to our
comprehensive database on account of your contribution in the IT domain. However, should
you no longer wish to receive any further mails from our side, please Click here Unsubscribe
iCMG | Level 9, Avaya House, 123 Epping Road, North Ryde, NSW.| Phone +61 2 8005 0977
…but of course I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work… it probably only served to prove to them that mine was a live address.
I have been putting these domains into the spam senders list in Exchange, but they still get through. I can only assume that the list in Exchange is a “soft” one.
Annoying.
I have, of course, passed on a spam message to the ACMA spam reporting people… but I don’t hold out much hope of any success there.
You can see the problem here…
The new IE promotion web site talks a lot about IE10, but if you’re running Windows 8, you’d already have it, and if you’re not running Windows 8, you can’t use it.
(Well, not yet. Apparently IE10 will be available for Win7 at some stage… there is a “Release Preview” available. I’m guessing that’s Micro-speak for “beta”.)
This is handy… I had a Youtube video which Youtube had detected as 16:9, even though it’s actually 4:3.
You can tell Youtube to override on playback by adding a tag: yt:stretch=4:3
There are other tags for cropping to 16:9, or forcing 16:9 display — more details in this article: Fix aspect ratio of YouTube videos, which is based on the official Youtube article
Wikipedia is now blacked-out for 24 hours.
Note that at the time of writing, clicking the “Learn more” link takes you to a page that momentarily has more information, but then itself gets blacked-out. D’oh. I’m guessing they’ll fix that soon.
I’m guessing the Google Cache will get a good workout in the next 24 hours. To use it, search Google as normal; look for the Wikipedia link, and click the right button [1] to make the cache preview appear, then click the “Cached” link [2] to look at it in full size.
The work email server spam filter does not simply reject everything suspicious – this would risk us losing legitimate emails, something made worse by some companies choosing to send invoices and remittances as PDF attachments with no accompanying text whatsoever, something the mail server considers dodgy.
So (until I work out a better, foolproof automated process, or take the time to properly tweak the spam settings on the server) I manually look through some of the doubtful messages to pluck out those that are not actually spam.
The most common types of spam messages caught seem to be…
5. Your credit card is blocked (enter all your details into our dodgy web site)…
4. Work from home and earn $$$…
3. Marry a gorgeous Russian girl…
2. Cheap replica watches (Rolex etc)…
1. Cheap medicine to help gentlemen with, err, size-related personal problems.
…though it appears cheap Canadian pharmacies are also gaining in popularity, despite this being for a .com.au address.
Surely not? Yet I’m getting this error in Chrome…
IE doesn’t appear to have this problem.
Update 21:43. Ah, it’s come good. Momentary blip? Wonder how many others got the scary message.
Google Buzz went west; the lesser-known Google Jaiku is shutting-down in January. No surprise to hear another aborted Google social media product will go belly-up: Google Wave to go read-only from 31/1/2012, and being switched-off on 30/4/2012.
They must really be hoping that Google Plus stays the distance.
This seems to happen constantly; it’s out by one. It says UserX and Y others, and shows Y+2 avatars, rather than Y+1.
Usually the GMail spam filter is very good. I wonder what happened this morning.
No, I don’t recognise the sender, nor do I recognise any of the other people on the To list. Odd.
(Okay, not an actual filter outage, but certainly the most obvious spam I’ve seen the filter miss recently.)
Nofollow attributes were added to the web in 2005, with major search engines and blog/CMS vendors providing support.
I find it interesting that it clearly hasn’t stopped comment spammers, who continue to bombard blogs. I can only assume they don’t care about Pagerank etc, but just want their links to be seen by humans, though I would have assumed most blog owners use spam detection of some kind, and most spam comments which do make it through are unlikely to get clicked on.
But that’s always been the issue with automated spam. Only a tiny number have to be acted upon to make them profitable.