Category: annoyances

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annoyances blog

Blogging on the go

Technology is a very good thing. It may help you in your everyday life, pay for your house and meals, get you connected. It may also be a source of the biggest annoyance in your life. Last couple of months I was traveling a lot, so I decided to swap my HTC Advantage for smaller Samsung BlackJack smartphone. Typing a huge blog post ain’t fun on a little keyboard that any smartphone posses, especially on a tiny Samsung buttons. But (as in any such story) I was almost done…

Now I know that holding “backspace” button for longer then 2 seconds in Notepad on Samsung BlackJack deletes the note without the ability to restore it. Cost me 35 minutes to figure that out.

Be aware.

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annoyances

Skype’s Marketing (part 2)

You didn’t think that Skype has improved much since July, when I wrote this post. Right, me neither. However, the page at the URL posted has changed, creative folk at Skype is still going bananas. This time – about Skype Pro.

What’s a Skype Pro? Oh, that’s easy – “Skype Pro™ is our all-singing, all-dancing bundle“. That’s merry, but what are the features that included in Skype Pro, you might want to ask. I did, and here is the answer: “It’s jam-packed with everything you need for one low monthly fee”.

But what are the features that this jam-pack is jam-packed with? I bet you will find the answer just the easy way I did. Here’s how:

  1. Go to Help section, click on Knowledge Base
  2. Just for kicks – search Knowledge Base for words “skype pro” – returns no results at all
  3. Scroll almost all the way down or use your browser’s Search function for “skype pro”
  4. Click on “More Skype Pro Topics”
  5. First article on results page – “What is Skype Pro?” – has the information that should be sufficient to make that decision. To be exact, the following is the full content of the article: “Skype Pro is Skype’s premium subscription that offers the easiest way of getting the most out of Skype.“. If you are, for some weird reason, still unsatisfied – click on the link for more “jam-packed” blabber.

Now, I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade here, but to me this looks like a worst usability I have ever seen. Soviet programmable calculators circa 1987 were friendlier then Skype’s web site. And if you think I am exaggerating – try searching Knowledge Base for words “What is Skype Pro”. See the answer for yourself.

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annoyances

Twitting in a new way

There is a post on Mashable that outlines how to game Twitter into becoming a natural environment to spread malware. There is little to none incentive to create pure spam feeds, as they will, undoubtedly, be closed and all future links will be marked with “nofollow” attribute. Malware, however, is whole another story. In this case the attacker doesn’t have to have clean direct links. In fact, as it is mentioned in original article, attacker, actually, have to mask destination with some sort of shortener (worse yet, if the link looks like “legit” affiliate link). By gathering large enough audience, an attacker can get to them in a single strike. And if the destination look innocent enough, he might get away with it just long enough. After all -it all is still same old social engineering.

Educated guess says that Jaiku might be vulnerable the same way. Just look what happened to the Blogger.com (aka Blogspot) – it became free doorway hosting service right at the beginning…