That ain't no ham, Google!

In the last five days I have received Spam Emails from 3 Gmail accounts that are in my contact list. Yesterday my account has been compromised and used for sending Spam.

To check whether your account has been logged in to from unusual places, scroll to the bottom of your Gmail website and locate the text "Last account activity". There's a details-link next to it, revealing in my case :

Mobile Peru (190.42.51.51) Apr 25 (12 hours ago)

If you have received any email from my email account that contained a link without any explanatory text, please delete it at once - most of those links redirect you to online pharmacy / viagra stores. The most original feedback I got was :

It actually gave me visa/mastercard numbers for 34 unique numbers. Thanks! Vegas here I come.

GPU Offloading in new Flash Player

If you have an ION-based HTPC in your shelf, you might be very happy to read this article. About time this happened, man!

A lot of cover song activity going on

I haven't found much time for music for a while, but right now I priorized it above anything else I spend my private time with.

My myspace account turns out to be a dead end: The limit of only 5 / 6 songs is as frustrating as the 30 seconds-preview introduced on imeem, and since my myspace account is a non-musician account, I can't even use the 6 songs decently and have to mess around with my dummy account. I dare say, I've just about had it.

The only alternative I really see is to put it all up on YouTube, which has the nice side effect of making every recording feel like a little web-gig.

One more thing in the pipeline is a new version of my private website, which will come later this month, and - along with it - a new skin for my blog.

Yahoo Fire Eagle and Web Self Exposure in general

Yahoo have launched their service "Fire Eagle", which is like twitter for locations. You can by various means tell the service your current location and have it displayed online. I have tried it. The pixelart design is pretty cool and - from what i see - the website seems to be up to the current technical standard (can't judge the backend...).

No reason to get over-excited, for me. I'd rather spend some time thinking about where the web takes its users.

The (growing) Web population is obviously divided into three groups. Group one is careful, sceptic about things like online banking or ebay, and very reluctant to use them. I don't know what those people actually do online, but they exist in small numbers.

Group two is the "webstertainment" group, mostly online to have a good time, meet friends (we used to do that somewhere under the sky back in my younger days) or watch ostensibly funny videos. Average age probably somewhere between 12 and 24. You can meet them at unique locations like studivz.de, where they are linked to on various photos and expose themselves more or less completely.

Somewhere in between lies the group I hope to be a part of, which is : willing to try but not completely air-headed. Although I fear I have a tendency to slide into group two from time to time...

While people keep on moaning about wiretapping and biometric passports, more and more web apps for self exposure emerge. While networking implicitly requires a certain amount of privacy loss, you should be careful not to give away too much about yourself, especially information that can be used against you in any way. Which brings me back to Fire Eagle : I just read the news about this being staged on heise.de, where critics already said it was a welcome gift for housebreakers and burglars. Knowing that the Millers from house number 18 will be in spain for the next three weeks makes scheming somewhat more easy, it is justifiably said.

Definitely, it is time to think about what information you are willing to share about yourself. Always think about the harm the information could cause. And if you want, try Fire Eagle

Web-Update : Missing Images and Ugly Errors

Hi folksy bits,

as you might have noticed, there are not all images and contents on my websites as of now.

The reason : I moved to another server. My backup via FTP didn't work in all path-depths
as it seems, so that everything deeper than 2 folders got lost. I think I have most of the stuff
at home and will restore my own world order somewhen tonight.

Cheers and happy existing