noel alanguilan

this is what i saw when i logged in to my yahoo mail this morning. new interface. and that’s not the only thing that’s new. if you look closely near the bottom left, partially covered by the pop-up window, is the applications section. you’re already familiar with calendar and notepad but there are new things there. the first one (covered) is called big sender–tagged as “The better way to send files – large files, videos, photos, and entire folders.” next is edit photos–“Connect right to your Yahoo! Mail and Flickr for basic photo fixes, collages and amazing effects, plus touch up tools, tons of fonts, oodles of shapes and stickers.” then there’s my photos–“See, share, and organize your photos right inside your Yahoo! Mail.” then the last one is the paypal application.

there are a couple more applications–automatic organizer, flickr, photobucker and yahoo! greetings–that you can add to the section. and i’m almost sure that more will be added in the coming months.

the new interface is not available with yahoo! business mail yet. but i expect to follow in a couple of months.

looks like i have something new to play with, at least for a couple of hours.

p.s. a happy birthday to lito

the passphrase is in cebuano. wait. does the account even exist?

it seems that hacking passwords for webmail services is getting some attention. and money. people are actually paying someone to get people’s webmail passwords so they can take a peek at people’s private e-mails.

naughty. santa does not like that.

there is a trend here. people get paid to hack into a webmail account–not to mess it up–but to take a look at what the account contains. they don’t even change anything–not even the password–so the user is unaware that his/her account has been compromised. on one occasion, i got my hands on a compromised e-mail account and all the hacker did was to add another e-mail account, supposedly so that they can send spam using the original e-mail address.

what to do. like i said before, use a passphrase instead of a password. a phrase is longer than a word and is therefore harder and take longer to crack. it would be better not to use any english words or phrases if you can. french. german. tagalog. japanese. whatever. as long as you can remember them. but not english.

change your password. now.

this is a follow up post to securing your gmail.

google has made it easier for you to permanently use https when you access your gmail account. that’s from login and logout and everything in between. in gmail, click on your “settings” located on the upper right hand of the browser screen. this will bring you to the general settings of your gmail account. scroll down to the bottom and you will see “browser connection“. click on the “always use https” and then click on “save changes“.

and you’re done. easy.

please understand that doing this will make your gmail session a tiny bit slower because of all the encryption/decryption that’s going on between your browser and google mail. the upside is you secure your gmail account.

there exist a tool that can “automaticaly steal ids of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into google mail accounts” and it will be released to the public in a few weeks. the tool was presented in the recent hackers’ conference in las vegas called defcon. click on the link above if you want more technical details.

essentially what the tool does is to allow a hacker (unsuspecting or otherwise) to get into your gmail account and do what s/he pleases — like change the password. scary stuff.

the solution is simple enough — encrypt your entire gmail session and not just the login portion. to do that both the server (google mail) and the client (your browser) have to talk to each other via ssl (secure sockets layer) all the time. fortunately, google was informed of the vulnerability about a year ago so they took steps to implement ssl on their side of the fence. browsers has ssl-support built in.

all you have to is to add an “s” to the “http” portion of the google mail address making it look like “https” (without the quotes of course) and you’re done. preferably, you should do this at the start of your gmail session when you log in.

a couple of years ago one of my hard disks crashed. it wasn’t a major crash but i lost a good number of files nonetheless. i do have backups but since then i have tried to offload most of my files from my desktop and/or laptop to the internet.

at the time, one of my fast growing files was my e-mail. i used outlook express and it fit my needs then. but as more mail slowly crept in i realized that i was hitting outlook express’ limits and the space being occupied by my mail was getting uncomfortably bigger.

so i decided, off with the pop mail and go with web-based e-mail. there are definite advantages to this move:

pluses

• i can access my mail from anywhere and on any computer with an internet connection.
• i would think that all my mails would occupy approximately 3 gigabytes of space. maybe 4. i get plenty of pictures, videos and documents and i do not delete them. that’s a lot of space for just e-mails and none of that is occupying space in my local system. outlook’s (not the express version’s) default capacity is 2 gigabytes.
• should my local hard drives or system fail my e-mail data is still safe and i can still access them.
• should i refresh or change my system i do not have to worry about restoring my mail setup and files from backup.

minuses

• no internet. no e-mail. i will not be able to access even the one’s that i’ve read already.
• security is dependent on the service provider and strength of the password. so i use several passphrases and rotate them regularly and i got (i think) a pretty good webmail service provider — yahoo!

i would think that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. if you want more info on service providers there is a comparison of webmail providers from the wiki.