Note: All stuff posted here, is for the educational purpose only. If anyone misuses the info, the management of the OFF Club can not be held responsible and shall stand withdrawn from any damages which may arise as a result of mishandling of the info; hence it is advised to use them at your own risks and cost. Thanks for your patience and cooperation.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

News: Yahoo to put adverts in PDF files

Adobe PDF logo
Adobe is one of the world's leading PDF software producers
Yahoo has reached a deal to start running advertisements in Adobe's popular PDF document-reading format.

The service will allow publishers to make money by including adverts linked to the content of a PDF document in a panel at the side of the page.

It is Yahoo's latest way of expanding the places it can advertise online following deals with the auction site Ebay and the cable TV group Comcast.

The advertisements will not appear if the PDF document is printed.

It is the first time that Adobe has allowed dynamic adverts into its PDF (Portable Document Format) files.

Dynamic adverts can be changed for particular audiences or rotated to make sure that a particular user never sees the same advertisement twice.

PDF files can be created by a range of software and can then be read by people who have a PDF reader, such as Adobe's Reader.

The PDF format has proved popular with both companies and home users, and has been used to produce large reports and shorter newsletters, as well as preparing documents for printers.



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What is Grease Monkey & GM Scripts

Grease Monkey is a Plugin for FireFox Browser. Its Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript...

Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org.

Before to Install Grease Monkey you Need to install FireFox so...

Install
Latest Forefox from Here....

then

Install
Grease Monkey from Here....


Now What is GM Script..??

GMScript is Short of Grease Monkey Scripts a bunch of Javascrits witch make change in yout HTML and Browsers..(-:



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In Side Google Office/ Google's Intranet

What do around 16,000 Google employees stare at in the morning when they’ve arrived at the office? They might be looking at Moma, the name for the Google intranet. The meaning of the name of “Moma” is a mystery even to some of the employees working on it, we heard, but Moma’s mission is prominently displayed on its footer: “Organize Google’s information and make it accessible and useful to Googlers.” A “Googler,” as you may know, is what Google employees call themselves (they have other nicknames for specific roles; a noogler is a new Google employee, a gaygler is a gay one, a xoogler is an ex-one, and so on).


A Google employee in Hamburg (photo taken in mid-2007)

Moma “was designed by and for engineers and for the first couple of years, its home page was devoid of any aesthetic enhancements that didn’t serve to provide information essential to the operation of Google. It was dense and messy and full of numbers that were hard to parse for the uninitiated, but high in nutritional value for the data hungry.

Here’s a picture of the Moma homepage that we got hold of – please note that large areas have been grayed out or whitened out:



On the top of the Google intranet homepage, you’ll find the logo reading “Moma - Inside Google.” Next to it is a search box allowing you to find information from Moma in general, information on specific Google employees, information on availability of meeting rooms, building maps and more. You can choose to include secure content or not via a checkbox. Another checkbox offers you to use “Moma NEXT" for a more experimental variant of search results.

To the top right, there’s an option to switch to iMoma, an iGoogle-style tool prepared by the company which allows further customization of the intranet start page. This way, employees may be able to select their own news and service widgets of interest to be displayed when they log-in.

The actual content of the homepage in the picture is split up into 4 columns. To the left, there’s a “My Office” section, with information for employees and a way to choose your own office for more relevant links. It’s followed by the sections “Survival Kit” and “My shortcuts.” In the middle columns, news gadgets are headlined “Welcome to Google!,” “Communications,” “HR” (human resources), “Company Info” and “Internal Google news,” all in common soft shades of Google base colors. The right column is listing Google teams.

Searching Moma



When you perform a search on Moma, you will see a result similar to the following; this screenshot, which was edited by Google to include comments, has been published by the Google Enterprise Blog in a post of theirs in July to show-case the kind of functionality available:



On the image, you will see a “universal search" style result including employee information, bookmark results, documents hosted on Google’s intranet, and a list of related queries. Users get to choose between ordering by date or by relevance. One can also limit the results to different segments like “Tech,” “Official,” or “Community.” Google in their blog said the use the Google Search Appliance to power this service.

Ex-employee Doug Edwards mentioned how he came to take for granted everything was available on the intranet, “from the status of products in development to the number of employees at any point in the company’s history.” He adds that the transparency was also a motivator, as “Your failures are also visible to everyone in the company, which provides an even greater motivator to continuously improve performance in the areas for which you are responsible.” These days however, as Doug writes, Google “clamped down on who had access the complete state of the business.

The following photo shows a result for what seems to be an employee search. The photo is used with permission from Zach at HannaCabana.com, though Zach tells me it had been anonymously submitted to him (note we added blurring to the phone numbers of the zoom version):



On the employee results page, everyone is listed with their name, a photo, their job title, telephone number and more. Clicking through to an employee lands you on their full profile page. Ex-Googler Doug Edwards remembers how many Google employees used “alternative images and titles" for their Moma listing. “I recall photos of samurai warriors and masked figures with titles like ’Shadow Ops’ and ’Black Ops.’ These were later weeded out as part of an upgrade”.

Employee data may also be rendered in different forms. Below is a screenshot we first posted on in February of an internal application called Google Percent:



This service simply shows how many employees are newer than a particular other employee (some areas in the image have been blackened out).


How employees access the intranet




Photo courtesy of Zach, again.

The dialog reads, “Many internal apps. One login page.” The input boxes ask for the user’s LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) credentials.

A Google employee can log-in to the intranet from within the office, or with a so-called Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection. This connection comes pre-installed on laptops Google hands out, and can be reached via a desktop icon. A Google employee is required to authenticate their sign-in with account credentials.

From within a Google building, an employee may likely reach the intranet via the address corp.google.com. We previously found out Google additionally uses many sub-domains in their intranet, like album.corp.google.com, agency.corp.google.com, alien.corp.google.com, karma.corp.google.com, periscope.corp.google.com, pineapple.corp.google.com. You may also likely just enter e.g. “m” (which maps to “http://m” which is “http://m.corp.google.com”) to be taken to a service like your Gmail-powered email account.

Externally, like from a laptop at a conference – or if you’re one of the employees mainly working from home, as there are some – employees can access the VPN servers located on sites like Mountain View or Dublin, Ireland, with different hostnames each like man....ext.google.com or de....ext.google.com (we depleted part of the hostname).

Google “eating their own dog food”



Google employees use many of the tools Google produces. They even have launched an internal “dogfood” campaign in 2006. But what they see may be newer versions of the services than those released to the outside.


Andrew Hitchcock

from July, Creative Commons-licensed(edited for brightness/ contrast).

If you work in a team for a product, you may also get a prototypical version of the service. Below for instance is a screenshot from a nightly build of Google Spreadsheets – codename “Trix” – which we were able to take a look at (note several areas in this image have been grayed out):



In above image you can see the disclaimer “Warning: This is NOT production. Data can be lost.” Special links to debug windows are offered to developers as well, one of them being opened in the screenshot. Google employees also get to see previews of completely unreleased tools, such as wiki service JotSpot (which is being integrated into Google Apps), or Platypus, the internal Gdrive client for file-sharing.

For code reviews, Google created Mondrian, a “Perforce backend with some custom Google wrappers on top,” as Nial Kennedy, who shot the following photo Creative Commons-licensed, notes:



And the following image shows Google in-house tool Trax (this is part of a larger photo by Google employee Andrew from Flickr, but it is not available anymore; we’re not quite sure how this tool works or what it achieves):



But, Google doesn’t just use their own tools. For instance, we came across information indicating that many Google employees prefer social network Facebook.com to their own production, Orkut (e.g. some Google employees considered Orkut too spammy, or too buggy in the past).

If a Google employee encounters trouble with any Google tool, they can call their internal support hotline named “Tech Stop.” The hotline promises 24-hour availability. Numbers like +1 877... (last part depleted) are partly toll-free and partly with toll, and accessible from all over the world. Internally, a Google employee may also simply press 3-HELP (3-4357). Tech Stop centers aren’t just located in the US, but also in places like Hyderabad, India.


Hope Your Like this Post. .

Your Comments Help me to Improve ma Work (-:



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News: Hackers hijack web search results

Google logo, AP
The booby-trapped sites have been removed from Google's index


A huge campaign to poison web searches and trick people into visiting malicious websites has been thwarted.

The booby-trapped websites came up in search results for search terms such as "Christmas gifts" and "hospice".

Windows users falling for the trick risked having their machine hijacked and personal information plundered.

The criminals poisoned search results using thousands of domains set up to convince search index software they were serious sources of information.

Innocent victim

While computer security researchers have seen small-scale attempts to subvert search results before now, the sheer scale of this attack dwarfed all others.

"This was fairly epic," said Alex Eckelberry, head of Sunbelt Software - one of the firms that uncovered the attack.

Mr Eckelberry said tens of thousands of domains were used in the vanguard of the attack. Most domains were Chinese registered, hosted in the US and were only a couple of days old.

Websites loaded on these domains were booby-trapped with malicious software that looked for vulnerabilities in copies of Microsoft's Internet Explorer used to browse them.

This is not going to go away
Alex Eckelberry
"If your machine was not fully patched you were going to get hosed," said Mr Eckelberry.

The criminals who bought the domains convinced the indexing software used by Google, MSN and Yahoo they were good and popular sources of information, said Mr Eckelberry.

Although the results were indexed by Yahoo and MSN the webpages were coded to only show up if someone used Google.

They accomplished this using comment spam on blogs to push the pages up the search index rankings.

Sunbelt had discovered malicious sites connected with search terms such as "hospice", "cotton gin and its effect on slavery", "infinity" and many more.

"You could be searching for really innocuous things and get nailed," said Mr Eckelberry. "There was really nasty stuff in there."

"If there's any message from this I can scream from the rooftops its make sure you patch your machine," he said.

Security firm Trend Micro also discovered a series of booby-trapped sites aimed at Christmas gift shoppers and those looking for information about many other innocent subjects.

"Some of the top rated hits are leading to the malicious sites," said Raimund Genes, chief technology officer at Trend Micro.

Windows Vista badges, Getty
The criminals tried to catch out Windows users
Mr Genes said the booby-trapped websites discovered by Trend Micro tried to exploit several different vulnerabilities in Microsoft's web browser. The sites also attempted to stop the malicious software being spotted by intermittently scrambling the package before it downloads.

He speculated that the campaign was being waged by the Russian Business Network - a hi-tech criminal gang known to favour web-based attacks.

The booby-trapped websites were thought to be in operation for about 24 hours before Google began stripping them out of its search index. Some of the trapped websites are believed to be still turning up in searches carried out on Yahoo and MSN Live.

But, said Mr Eckelberry, this attack was likely to be a harbinger of many more.

"This is not going to go away," he said.



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News: Carphone misleading over iPhone

People using the iPhone
Staff at the UK's biggest mobile phone retailer, Carphone Warehouse, have been caught misleading customers about Apple's popular iPhone handset.

Undercover researchers from BBC One's Watchdog found staff made false claims about what would happen if a phone was stolen and hadn't been insured.

This was in the hope customers would take out the store's own insurance.

The firm said there could be "some element of confusion among an isolated number of sales consultants".

But Carphone Warehouse added it did not believe that the "small number of complaints" were "a fair reflection of the experience of thousands of iPhone customers who have received insurance advice in our stores".

The findings come just a year after Carphone Warehouse was fined £245,000 by the Financial Services Authority for breaking the rules on selling insurance.

Commission

Viewers complained to Watchdog that they'd been told if they lost their iPhone, they'd have to buy an entirely new 18 month contract - at a minimum cost of £630.

But that is not true. Customers would have to buy a new handset but the contract itself would continue.

In three out of five stores visited by Watchdog, researchers were told the same.

And at one store, they were also told insurance offered by O2 - the only other UK mobile retailer authorised to sell the iPhone - would not offer as much cover as much, which again was untrue.

Staff at the stores receive commission on all insurance and phones they sell.



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News: Orkut Scrap alerts!

We all love receiving scraps, but constantly checking back to your scrapbook page can be tedious. How many of us have our scrapbook page open and are clicking refresh on it constantly!


With scrap alerts you can be on any orkut page and find out that you have received a scrap - that very minute. You could be browsing your friend's photos, and find out "hey! I just got a new scrap." Then you can click on the "Scrapbook" link to reply on the spot. This way you'll be free to explore all of orkut, comforted in the knowledge that when you have received a new scrap, you'll know about it that moment.

We'll be rolling this feature out over the new few days for all users, but If you really prefer clicking the refresh button all day long, you can go to settings to disable to the feature.



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News: More orkut trends

In our first column, we reported how orkut users rated their beauty by continent. In a poll in the orkut trends community, 69% of you said that you'd like to see the per-country ratings (while 21% said they already know their country has the most beauties). Interestingly, almost all of the comments about beauty were by men commenting on women. We aim to please, so here are the results.

Women from Mexico are most likely (29%) to describe themselves as "beauty contest winners" and the least likely (2%) to describe themselves as "mirror-cracking material". Men from Tonga tend to extremes, with the most (23%) claiming to be pageant winners and an equal number (23%) claiming to be mirror crackers. Uruguayan women are most likely (58%) to consider themselves average, as are 58% of Paraguayan men.

If we assign a numerical weight to each rating (1 for beauty contest winner, 2 for very attractive, etc.), we can get a single "beauty index" for each country's women or men, with lower scores meaning greater (self-rated) beauty, and female Mexicans and male Equatorial Guineans taking the lead. Here are how orkut's leading countries stack up:

country female beauty index male beauty index
Brazil 2.95 3.13
United States 2.82 3.15
United Kingdom 3 3.29
Pakistan 3.05 3.25
India 3.23 3.38

The complete data is available here.

Of course, anyone can claim to be beautiful, especially online, so the above rankings may say more about conceit and humility than about looks. As one user wrote, "Orkut can make a lot of money if they put tax on how beautiful people declare themselves to be."

What if you want to judge people's beauty yourself? Just a week after we announced that you can store up to 100 photos in your orkut album, more than 10,000 of you had already gone to the limit. Iranians averaged the fewest photos per person: only 4.1. At the other extreme were Myanmar (12.8) and the island nations of the Cook Islands (12.6), Jamaica (12.7), the Northern Mariana Islands (13.6), and Madagascar (13.8). Of the most popular orkut countries, Indians averaged 6.5 photos each, Pakistanis 6.7, Americans 7.9, Brits 9.3, and Brazilians 9.4, so most of you can increase your albums tenfold! Of course, as Cesar JB expressed, "The concept of beauty varies from one country [to] another". In any case, statistics can give us information but not wisdom, such as that expressed 2500 years ago by Confucius: "Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."

Until next time, stay beautiful, each in your own wonderful way.



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