Information week has a great article highlighting the return of spam in 2007.For the past two years, spam has been on a decline due to advanced filters and anti-spam services.

This coming year we will see a significant rise in the amount of spam sent to your inboxes.Signs of this development can be seen already according to a email filtering vendor known as Postini.They claim spam volumes have grown 73 percent in the last two months.

You can look forward to Spammers who are now embedding their messages in image files to get past spam filters that search for key words and phrases.Since filters are not yet fully capable of OCR(Optical Character Recognition) technology which to put it simple is a process in which digitised images can be scanned to retrieve text used inside of them.The number of emails with images has grown from nearly zero to almost 25 percent.

Spammers are also experimenting with text used inside of spam messages which can be tweaked easily to bypass conventional spam filters.

More spam is being sent from hijacked home PCs, making it harder for spam filters to block so-called blacklisted senders. Spammers are also getting better at identifying vulnerable PCs they can convert to botnets, the hijkacked PCs that are sending all this new spam.

You can definitely expect to find more spam in your mobile devices in the coming year.Spammers are turning to SMS, or text messages, as a way to target both mobile devices and PCs.There is little in terms of security for most cell phones, making them an easy target for spam and phishing attacks.Also most desktop email spam filters are not designed to handle spam or phishing attacks from SMS servers.

The latest development in amazons aspirations toward search engine dominancy comes with the same idea driving wikipedia’s success.The project has been code named “Wikiasari” which is a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

Google does have flaws that come with it’s massively popular search engine which Jimmay Whales hopes to exploit for his benefit.

Traditionally Encyclopia’s were created by authors who were limited to a specific area of expertise but with the launch of Wikipedia back in 2003, people from all over the world were able to add in their input.To put it into simple words “user interaction” has been the driving force behind its success, and the same may hold true of a search engine.

Basically,Jimmy plans to create a search engine in which the general public decide the usefulness of the content found in sites all through out the web.His Wikipedia project has been a huge success and so the possibility of success in his newest venture could also prove to be viable. 

Mr.Wales did however conclude that catching up with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft’s MSN or even smaller operators such as Ask.com will be a difficult challenge.

Update:Jimmy has stated that Amazon has nothing to do with this except for being a financial investor.This just goes to show you the extent in which certain reporters would go to create a sensational story.

[via:Times Online]

This goes to show you that even large corporations are not immune to mishaps when it comes to blogging. You wouldn’t think google of all the companies out there make a mistake with their blogs, especially since they own blogger. 

Well the google blogger team has made history this year with some shameful acts. To start of, an employee accidentally deleted the company’s official blog last March. To add a twist to the whole situation was that a 19 year old student named Trey Phillips claimed googleblog.blogspot.com for himself (imagine the traffic) but to google’s luck gave it back peacefully.

In October, an attacker exploited a bug inside Blogger to post a message claiming Google had discontinued a joint advertising project with eBay. That same month, a Google employee posted two messages to its Blogger Buzz site that were meant for her personal blog. Thankfully, those posts did not reveal any intimate secrets or anything of that matter but did put blogger team to shame.

Who knows whats to come in the year 2007, but I am sure it will reveal some exciting suprises.I hope that google will atleast pay more attention to their blogging habbits.

The Situation room located at washington D.C is the center of presidential activities during times of national significance.It s no wonder that everyone has been calling for a upgrade to suit modern needs. 

Now all of a sudden gets a long awaited upgrade, inspired somewhat by the situation room used by Wolf Blitzer at the CNN situation room.President Bush felt that the Situation room wasn’t capable of handling the massive information network needed for a post 9/11 era.

The new and updated Situation room comes with some impressive technology that will definitely set the white house in to the modern age.The president’s primary conference room is outfitted with high definitions screens ,each with split-screen technology.Also the situation rooms comes with cameras, microphones and speakers in the ceiling.

A new ”surge room” is positioned next to the situation room, where the watch officers will moniter threats and information coming in 24/7.

The latest modifications aren’t the type of technology you will find in those high budget hollywood movies but it does the job.The price for the upgrade is classified but they claim to have been on a budget during the whole process.

Image Credit:cnet

The latest version of google blogger certainly focuses on security more than ever before.One of the biggest changes you might come across is a feature to restrict readership to a predetermined audience.There are several other features to maximize the security of your blog.

Users are now free to determine wether they want a mass readership or maybe just a diary in which they can only access.One of the more advanced features include the ability to allow access to readers you choose by adding their email address to your blogger account.

Those readers you feel comfortable allowing access must be using a google account that contains a gmail address.If in any case they are not using a address associated with google email service, a invitation to join gmail will be presented in their inbox.

Blogger has always been known for its ease of use, even those without any knowledge in HTML or CSS can publish and maintain a blog.With this new release, the blogger team has made editing your template a breeze. You can easily add feeds,pictures,lists and even edit the navbar without even knowing a bit of CSS or HTML knowledge.

Google has also added a labeling function in which users can place keywords relating to their post topic.Your readers can then read posts by topic,much like the catagory function found in blogging platforms such as wordpress.Another bonus for new bloggers would be the ability to sign into blogger using your google account.Previously you had to sign up for a completley separate blogger account.

Sources:Google Blog | Yahoo News

The makeblog has posted an interesting entry about the largest book ever published in the world.The worlds largest book ever published is from the tiny country of Bhutan.The book is called “Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Kingdom” and its author is a scientist named Michael Hawly at the massachussets Institute of Technology.

Each copy of the book is 112 pages and costs about $2,000 to produce.The book details the large and diverse natural habitat of bhutan which has been described as being very beautiful.Guinness World Records has certified Hawley’s work as the largest book ever published.In fact they state that the book is about 133lbs.

Newsgator brings us another breakthrough in designing websites.TopStyle is a multiple script language editor packed with some serious features that will make your hair stand up.Here we have taken the time to review the latest edition of this software written by the creator of HomeSite.

Are you a web designer who spends hours trying to create websites and make them compatible with multiple browsers using a variety of tools?Well, there is some positive news for those of you spending hours of pains taking work to design sites.Using TopStyle is both fast and easy when you are looking at a large web project at hand.

Newsgator TopStyle is a program capable of handling multiple script languages in only a 3mb download.You can edit CSS,HTML,and xHTML in a single program and can even convert your age old markup to an equivalent style of the new version.Haven’t taken the time learn xHTML?No problem,newsgator can even convert HTML to xHTML.To make it even better, the style checker can validate style sheets in multiple browsers.

Web developers have been wishing for some time to have the ability to preview markup in multiple browsers integrated in to a single program.TopStyle does just that and one better with a feature to actually preview your markup side by side.A built-in color schemer makes the daunting task of finding appropriate color schemes quick and easy.

TopStyle is also Integrated with W3C HTML Validation which means results of the validation are displayed within TopStyle, with hyperlinked line numbers that synchronize with TopStyle’s editor.

Newsgator has priced it at $79.99 which is reasonable for all the added features and the ease of use.This editor is a must have for those planing to design websites or just want to create a suitable layout for their blog.