Technology companies are launching big advertising campaigns as they wager on a pickup in business spending and jockey to have their products stand apart in an environment where new customers are hard to find and competition is intensifying.

Companies such as Google Inc. (GOOG) have recently embarked on major ad pushes. This month, Google rolled out globally an ad campaign to flag its Gmail service and Google Docs word processing and spreadsheets. It’s an unusual move for the Internet giant, which has done little traditional advertising.

On Thursday, Juniper Networks Inc. (JNPR), a maker of networking gear, is starting its first-ever global campaign to raise awareness of its brand. Its bigger rival Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) last week launched new radio, print and online campaigns promoting a line of products for small businesses and a new system for corporate computer rooms.

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Phishing attacks that affected customers of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Hotmail Monday have compromised more than 30,000 email accounts, including those of Gmail, Yahoo (YHOO) Mail and other services.

Microsoft blamed phishing, in which cybercriminals try to trick consumers into revealing personal information through fraudulent emails, for a list of Hotmail account passwords that appeared online. The company recommended Hotmail customers change their passwords and said it’s helping phishing victims fix compromised accounts.

But security firms and the BBC said Tuesday that the attack extended to other services, including those run by Google (GOOG) and Yahoo as well as AOL, EarthLink (ELNK) and Comcast (CMCSA).

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Back in April, I became one of the rare people to run out of Gmail space. Due to a glitch with Google, I was also unable to purchase more space for several weeks. As a result, I became hyperaware of how much email space gets eaten up each day routinely. Newsletters, product offers, Facebook and Twitter notifications, that person you don’t know who emails you a 7MB file. It adds up. And Gmail’s supposedly “endless” space might not be keeping pace.

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If you’re a Gmail user who also happens to use Twitter, it’s probably been about five minutes since you’ve seen an ad promising to boost your follower count. The folks at online ad firm uSocial are taking that a step further: Pay them money and they’ll make you at least appear to be very big on Facebook.

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Google’s (GOOG) got a not-so-secret weapon in its bid to convert the world to applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, Google Sites and, soon, Google’s Chrome operating system: the 17 million college students on more than 4,000 campuses across the country.

For more than two years, Google has approached colleges and universities with a near-unbeatable offer: provide unlimited hosted e-mail and other applications, all branded by the institution and delivered free of charge.

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The hacking of Twitter CEO Evan Williams’s email account has sparked an ethics debate after TechCrunch said that it would publish some of the confidential documents that the hacker leaked.

The brouhaha began when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington blogged that a French hacker calling himself “Hacker Croll” said he had broken into Mr. Williams’s account as well as those of Mr. Williams’s wife and two Twitter employees.

An English translation of a post on French blog Koren shows that the hacker claims he gained access to Mr. Williams’s Gmail, PayPal, Amazon (AMZN) and AT&T (T) accounts, among others, and thus was able to find documents containing Twitter employee food preferences, credit card numbers, phone numbers and salaries.

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Gmail turned five on Wednesday, April 1. Launched in 2004 as an invitation-only email service, the Google (GOOG) product now has more than 100 million users. Yet it’s still in “beta”–a term of art traditionally reserved for prototype software that’s ready for testing. What gives?

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A new feature for Gmail aims to rid your life of that classic “Oh Sh*t” email moment.

“Undo Send” puts a five-to-ten-second hold on all outgoing messages. If you addressed an email to the wrong person, let slip with an embarrassing typo or simply said something you really, really shouldn’t have, Undo Send can be a lifesaver. Or, more accurately, a job-saver.

As with most enhancements to Google’s (GOOG) free Webmail app, Gmail users can enable the new Undo Send feature by going into their Labs settings and turning it on–click on the little green flask at the top of the screen, or go to Settings and click on the Labs tab. Gmail users can usually access new features shortly after they’re announced, but the features do take time to roll out across all accounts, so be patient if it doesn’t show up right away.

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Ever wonder what happens to your Facebook account after you die? Someone does.

That someone is Legacy Locker, a new online service announced Tuesday that allows people to securely store usernames, passwords and other access information for all their digital assets–from Facebook and MySpace accounts to Gmail and PayPal–and pass that information along to beneficiaries in the event of their death.

Jeremy Toeman, co-founder of Legacy Locker, a San Francisco start-up, says this kind of system is a lot easier than trying to wrestle the information out of social-networking sites and Web companies as a family member of the deceased. “It’s the online equivalent of a safety deposit box,” Toeman says.

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Beta, as it pertains to Web sites, has seen better days. Not long ago, saying the word as part of your Web development cycle could help land venture capital even faster than claiming “community,” “paradigm shift” or “disruptive technology.” Now, the term is dissipated and confusing.

While the specific origin of its use is unknown, beta as a tagline was popularized by a Google (GOOG) with the release of Google News in 2002, and later, Gmail in 2004. From there, start-ups quickly followed suit. By 2006, it seemed like every new Web site was “in beta.”

When confronted about the phenomenon, Google co-founder Larry Page told investors, “It’s really a messaging and branding thing. If it’s on [Google News and Gmail] for five years, that’s fine.” Google News unceremoniously left beta a year later. Gmail, which is more reliable than most nonbeta software, has yet to do so.

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For all the talk about privacy and security, it seems that a lot of people are downright sloppy when it comes to who they provide personal information.

A couple of prime examples this week occurred where large numbers of unsuspecting or naive [people] happily handed over their usernames and passwords to a third party simply because the service looked cool.

First up was SocialMinder, which is offering a service that lets you get control of your Gmail and LinkedIn contacts. To use it, you have to hand over usernames and passwords to an unknown company offering a beta service. Even worse, SocialMinder is using the information to spam your contacts, unless you realize what they are trying to do, and opt out.

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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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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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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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