Kiran Upadhyay

By now, all but the most geriatric Web users know about phishing. Usually it takes the form of a seemingly-official email from a bank or other money-related Web service. Most of the time these attacks are painfully obvious -- but  what if  you removed the email attack vector?  What if  you removed those daft give-away URLs? What if the phishing attack was pure, seemingly-benign JavaScript that's invisible to all but the most judicious of Web users? That's exactly what 'tabjacking' does. Open  Aza Raskin's proof of concept  in a new tab. Admire the sample code. Now, change tabs, wait five seconds, and then watch in horror as his site seemingly becomes GMail. Malicious JavaScript injection isn't a new thing -- and this particular exploit only works in Firefox (and partially in Chrome) -- but you have to admit it's pretty damn scary. It's certainly only a matter of time until workarounds are found for the other browsers -- and the implications when com...

Techy types like the typical Download Squad reader are just fine with manually tweaking our systems and using utilities that less savvy folks would cringe at. For them, it's not always such an easy task to find an easy-to-use program which actually does what it promises. One newly launched app which is perfect for neophytes is  Soluto . Just launched at TC Disrupt, Soluto calls itself "anti-frustration software," though at this point the only frustration it can tackle is slow Windows boot times. But that's a task it handles with aplomb, and its interface provides plenty of information to help guide even the most casual user through the process of trimming down a sluggish startup process. After performing a somewhat lengthy initial scan of the software installed on your system (mine took somewhere between ten and twelve minutes) and first-run boot analysis, Soluto displays startup items in three categories: no-brainers, potentially removable (recommended for mor...

I love freehand painting. While I have absolutely no talent, I love the freedom of working with paint or even crayons. It just feels nice, even if the result is nothing to write home about (in my case, at least). If you're looking to replicate the same experience on a computer, there's always  Corel Painte r. But on the off chance that you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend just to doodle,  MyPaint  gives you a nice chunk of functionality for the even nicer price of...  free . The program comes with many brushes that are divided into several categories. The brushes seem to work quite well at default settings. In case you want to tweak something, though, hitting Ctrl+B shows the Brush Settings dialog, which has a mind-boggling array of parameters that you can change for the brush you've selected. The interface is multi-windowed but is not as horrible as GIMP's (sorry, GIMP lovers). The color picker is quite advanced and features color-matching harmonies (wh...

Just last month , Google let us know that they were working on "a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics." It's now here, and ready for users of Chrome, Firefox 3.5 and 3.6, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Head over to the  Opt-out Add-on page on tools.google.com , install the add-on, and you'll no longer send data back to Google via the Analytics  ga.js  script. The Google Chrome extension has already been downloaded more than 2,700 times. While the installation page says Firefox 3.5+ is supported, the page reported an error when I visited using Firefox 3.7 alpha. You can, however,  download the .xpi from Softpedia  if you're running Minefield. Google also announced yesterday  that webmasters now have the option of anonymizing IP addresses prior to sending analytics information to their servers. The boys in Mountain View are referring to these initiatives as "additional steps to provide even more ch...

Guest post by  James Charlesworth . Most people don’t realize that Google Reader can be used as an amazing SEO tool to monitor your industry, competitors, and their backlinks all for FREE.  This can be accomplished with a variety of Google Alerts and Yahoo Pipes.  The idea is to create insightful RSS feeds and aggregate them into one place, Google Reader. Here are the main SEO resources we will be monitoring: Competitor’s keywords (brand and product keywords) New pages on a Competitors site Industry keywords Forums (find people asking questions about your industries products / services) Competitors backlinks (mainly new backlinks) We  will organize all the feeds that we pull into Google Reader and file them under one folder to keep things nice and clean.  You may have many clients you would like to perform this exercise for and its a good idea to separate them out to avoid confusion. Before we begin, you will need a Google Account to use Google Reader,...

In 2006 Google acquired  Writely , an online word processor. Since then Google’s transformed the service into  Google Docs , a complete online office suite with a word processor, a spreadsheet app and a presentation tool. We’ve written more than our fair share about Google Docs, the most recent piece being Tim’s about  5 New Google Docs Features You Might Have Missed . Google’s goal in creating Google Docs, it would seem, was to bring down Microsoft Office – which is perhaps the most universally installed piece of software on the planet. Google Docs hasn’t yet managed to lessen Office’s behemoth market share, but apparently Microsoft’s worried enough to experiment with the cloud. Four years after Google launched its online office suite, Microsoft is finally taking the idea of web-based apps seriously enough to put out a similar service. The end result is less a cloud “app” and more of a cloud complement to the desktop version of Microsoft Office. Getting Started Wit...

Calling all film and movie fanatics – which is your online home for movie information and its sharing? Please don’t say IMDB or RottenTomatoes. I agree these two and a few others are almost encyclopedic movie sites and first stops for things that are cinematic. But there are some movie and film sites that have grown up in the shadow of these biggies. HelloMovies  is one such Web 2.0 app that helps to narrow down on  which movie to watch next .  HelloMovies  is very similar to  Jinni in the way that it can search and recommend movies. That’s not surprising because both dig deep into the Movie Genome project for its search power. You can read a lot about the  Movie Genome project  in Wikipedia, but here’s a gist. The Movie Genome is a way to tag all movies based on genre, mood, tone, plot, tastes etc. The index is generated from the words people use to describe a movie in internet discussions and reviews. All that web shoveling has resulted in a data...

Did you know that, on average, you only spend 4 1/2 minutes on Google every day? That's how good it is: you plug in your search and, chances are, 11 seconds later you walk away with the result you need. Throw Pac-Man into the mix however and the average goes up to over 5 minutes! Thanks to Google's celebration of Pac-Man's 30th anniversary, and  RescueTime's juicy analytical power ,  we spent 36 seconds extra on Google on Friday. That doesn't sound like a large number until you multiply it by Google's average number of daily visitors...  500 million.  Apparently that comes to a global total of  4,819,352 hours  spent playing Pac-Man on just Sunday May 23. It's even scarier when you realise that the Pac-Man game was actually online for  two days.  The total tally of scuppered man-hours might be closer to 10 million... or 250 million dollars... When I  originally covered RescueTime  I had no idea it would be used to produce such fanta...

This post will be updated: more details to follow (scroll down) -- http://www.google.com/tv -- coming Fall 2010! We currently spend more time watching TV than we have ever done throughout history. Advertisers spend $70 billion dollars a year on TV advertising. There are over 4 billion TV viewers around the world -- and only 1 billion PC users! TV just works. It gives you access to really cool stuff. It's pervasive -- you don't have to think about how it works. It has hardly evolved; it has basically been the same service. Today we are torn between PC and TV. Split loyalty -- they are both awesome. Now, people have tried to bring the Web to the television before, but it's always been a closed system with limited numbers of apps and a cut-down cross-section of the actual Web. The answer: Google TV -- the best of TV and the best of the Web. A new platform that will change the future of television. The key is a new method of navigation: with Google TV you...