All posts tagged ‘Gmail’
by Randall Stross, Professor, San Jose State University
Logging on to Gmail or other email service has become a routine of daily life, completed without a thought. What would you do, however, if you woke up tomorrow, plugged in your user name and password as you always do, but then received an unfamiliar message: “User name and password do not match”?
If you’re a Gmail user, what you’ll want to do after a few more unsuccessful, increasingly frantic attempts is to speak with a Google customer support representative, post haste. But that’s not an option. Google doesn’t offer a toll-free number and a live person to resolve the ordinary user’s problems.
Discussion forums abound with tales of woe from Gmail customers who have found themselves locked out of their account for days or even weeks.
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by Joel Hruska, Blogger, Ars Technica
2008 hasn’t been the best year for CAPTCHA-based anti-spam systems; Google’s Gmail CAPTCHA was broken in February, followed by that of Hotmail in April. Researchers have fought back by incorporating images into CAPTCHAs, but this is only effective against bot-driven CAPTCHA crackers, and while automated attackers may be responsible for a majority of the CAPTCHA-breaking attempts that occur every day, they no longer account for the entirety.
Dancho Danchev, writing for ZDNet, reports on the emergence of CAPTCHA-breaking as an economic model in India. He reports that it’s impossible to untangle the corporate web that’s unfurled, given that large CAPTCHA-breaking companies often farm work out to multiple smaller businesses, but all available information suggests that CAPTCHA-cracking (referred to as “solving” in marketing parlance) is a booming sector of the Indian tech economy.
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Posted at 12:00 AM PT
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Tagged: Ars Technica, CAPTCHA, Dancho Danchev, Gmail, Google, Hotmail, India, Joel Hruska, Voices, ZDNet, bots, tech economy | permalink
by Frederic Lardinois, Writer, ReadWriteWeb
Today, Google’s Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of the afternoon, the service came back up for a little while, but as of now, there are still a lot of users who can’t access their accounts (Update: looks like Gmail is now up and running again). Google is updating users through a forum on Google Groups. A lot of frustrated Gmail users used Twitter to voice their grievances, which, surprisingly, handled this sudden spike in traffic extremely well.
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by Mike Masnick, Blogger, Techdirt
As Google’s Gmail product has grown, it should come as absolutely no surprise that the company would offer up a tool to migrate users of Microsoft Outlook/Exchange over to Gmail. However, it appears to have come as a surprise to a small start-up that offered similar tools in partnership with Google. That company has now sued Google claiming trade secrets were taken.
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by Scott Karp, Editor and Publisher, Publishing 2.0
Google has been quietly rolling out social features across all of its services based on Gmail contacts. While Google still has to overcome some of its social tone-deafness (e.g. automatically adding contacts without asking), this move makes perfect sense. For people over 30 (and probably even over 25) email IS the social graph.
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