I remember graduating from university and heading over to Intel for my first job interview. I can’t remember most of the interview (and maybe that’s why I never got the job), but I do remember telling the interviewer my dream was to work for Google, in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have said that.

Even then, and more so now, I had a huge admiration for Google. I admire they way they walk the talk in terms of innovation, but it’s becoming increasing hard to ignore the privacy concerns of having nearly all the worlds search traffic focused on just one engine. It could be argued that Google has more data than any other organization in existence… Governments included.

There are other search engines, of course, but they’re no where close to Googles precision or popularity (those two are actually intertwined), and Bing has recently offered to pay me to search with them and I might just take them up on the offer.

So how much do we trust Google?

A reader nicely pointed me to this wonderful infographic that I’d thought I’d share.

The first (of probably many) xxx domain hijacks have started springing up. Earlier today, a reader contacted me about a recent post I did on the .xxx domains. He mentioned that he spotted popebenedict.xxx in the wild and was curious if this was the first .xxx domain hijack. He maybe right, but in a post on his blog, he also mentions that while ICM registry doesn’t find PopeBenedict.xxx a ‘sacred’ url, it thinks osamabinladen.xxx is sacred and should be blocked from registry. In fact a quick check on the domains reveals that osamabinladen.xxx is a “Domain that has been reserved from registration”.

If you’re curious, PopeBenedict.xxx leads to a page titled “Everyone will find Islam” and notes that the website is for sale – I suspect that sale would be to the highest bidder. The website further adds that it has a long list of other pope related urls, including josephratzinger.xxx (the popes real name) and holyfather.xxx. On a slightly off-tangent topic, I don’t think anyone would be visiting josephratzinger.xxx to look for porn, but holyfather.xxx may have some promise (tongue firmly in check).

YTL Communications has been doing a pretty good job recently. The Star even went as far as claim that “YTL Comms to Break Even” until of course you read the article in which case it mentions that YTL require an additional 500,000 subscribers on top of it’s current 300,000 to achieve that.  However, it did offer a post-paid plan which was pretty decent, and who can forget the tie-up with Proton to offer a a 4G car. Why in the world would anyone buy a car because it has 4G, on the other hand why would anyone buy a Proton? (disclaimer: I still drive a 2004 Proton Waja which has served me well)

However, with Yes latest postpaid offerings I imagine it’s moving away from it’s niche position into more competitive environments, people may use Yes as a fallback, but post-paid is where the real money is and Yes is moving in. Yes Data plans come in various price points, from RM48 for 1.5GB up to RM168 for 10GB, the left-over credits don’t roll over to next month but there’s no extra charge for using over your quota just a speed throttle to 128kbps. (note to YES: 128Kbps is not broadband)

A couple of weeks back, Dreamhost reported a security breach on it’s servers, so I thought for security sake I should change my passwords as well. I’d been using the same password for the past couple of years and it was time for a change anyway.

However, as most of you will notice,  whenever you’ve just changed your password you instinctively try to re-enter the old one on your next login. This obviously prompts and invalid password prompt which should point you in the right direction. If you’re like me though, you end up thinking you typed it wrongly and try again, this can go on for a while and if you’re not careful you could lock yourself out of your account because you entered the ‘old’ password 3 times in a row.

A good piece of design I noticed from Google is that if you’ve changed your password recently, they actually remind you that you changed it and when you changed it. Thereby stoping your automatic response in it’s track and getting you to type the new one. Just a small piece of code and small feature but a rather good piece of design.

Wordpress 3.3.1 was released today. This latest version of wordpress comes fresh of the heels of the 3.3 release and fixes 15 issues including a security vulnerability fix which Wordpress doesn’t fully disclose.

Wordpress admins should see the prompt to update their blogs, and a update can be done fairly quickly via the automated update from within the admin panel itself.

One thing that caught my attention was the blog post on the update from the wordpress team: