Facebook phishing Scams on the Way!

Sunday, May 24, 2009

I received a message today which had "wwww whiteflash be". Its a phishing scam to extract Facebook login information. Searched twitter and found out multiple domains being used for the scam. Beware of entering any information on the following sites:

whiteflash.be
mymarket.be
vispace.be
goldbase.be
greenbuddy.be
silvertag.be
picoband.be

Google and other anti-phising services are yet not updated with these URL's to warn users. In general beware of any links that end with .be. The pages look like this:



These sites are hosted in China on IP: 211.95.78.98, with the following Whois record:

Domain: picoband
Status: REGISTERED
Registered: Fri May 22 2009

Licensee:
Not shown, please visit www.dns.be for webbased whois.

Agent:
Name: 1API GmbH
Website: www.1api.net

Nameservers:
ns1.everydns.net
ns2.everydns.net
ns3.everydns.net
ns4.everydns.net

If you have already entered your login information in any of these websites, I would suggest that you change your passwords immediately. Have a safe browsing experience!

Youtube's Background Image

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

I just saw the background image of YouTube and was amazed to discover that it has all the commonly used graphics on a single image. I don't know how many people have actually noticed that or used this technique, but it looks brilliant to me. Its superb to fit in so much in a png image which is less than 10KB and then using CSS to display the appropriate parts of the image for each div block.

It is common to use such images for hover buttons, where you just change the position of the image for hover effects. This ensures that you don't have to wait for the hover image to be loaded to see the effect. But, I never ever thought of encompassing all my graphic objects in a single image file and then displace the image as required using the background-position property in CSS. It would definitely make the page load much faster than having to download a plethora of small images which are scattered all around.

The YouTube background includes the header logo, the favorite rating stars, the button backgrounds, small buttons, gradients etc. Most of the images in this common background are used in all pages of the website and thus, its a good choice to group them all together as a single image and reduce the overall page load time.

If you want to view the background image, right click on a static background area (the gray header near the search box is a good choice) and select (in Firefox) view background image or (in IE) save background image. I'm sure, you would be surprised to see the huge png image. Alternatively, you might just want to visit this link to view the image.

Progress in Video Advertising

Sunday, May 10, 2009

With the popularity of Youtube and other online video streaming sites, video advertising is increasingly becoming a domain people want to explore. Video advertising is increasingly becoming popular and adds a new dimension to the text and banner based internet advertising. Its a very promising new form of internet advertising.

A lot of new methods are being developed for this new form of advertising. One of the most interesting ones is in-video advertising. Imagine advertising a product by placing it at an appropriate spot in the video and allow user to click on the product to view details and purchase it. Or just putting an advertisement on a building shown in the video. The video advertisement technologies are emerging to make all these things possible.

Innovid is one such company which has come out with some great techniques for In-Video advertising creating a brand experience which had not been possible before. They allow you to create videos with user interaction which is super cool. They have one of the most innovative advertising techniques which allows the advertisements to be placed in a streaming video. Check out their gallery for the ad methods they have developed.

Another interesting technology is Zunavision, which is developed by Stanford University and allows advertisers to dynamically add image or video in an already existing video. You just select a surface in the video to place your ad and it automatically adjusts the advertisements with the motion of the video. See the following video which describes how this technology works:

The future of video advertising seems great and can help monetize the video content people generate.

Micro-blogging on Twitter

Friday, May 08, 2009

The frequency of my posts on the blog have been decreasing over time. With all my buzy schedule, its difficult to update the blog regularly. I've recently started using twitter and have fallen in love with this concept of micro-blogging. Its so much easier to just write a line or two than writing a complete post on something you just saw. Its instant, its simple and its fun.

I have had lots of things I thought to blog about but most of them never make it out here because I don't have had the time to post them. But now, whenever I see something interesting, I tweet about it. Its also interesting to get almost instant replies about it. I find it better than the Facebook status updates.

Twitter has been there for a while and is gaining momentum. People have started using it for marketing, job search, networking and much more. There is a lot of spam out there too, but you have control over whom you want to follow and an option to control who should be following you. Your followers are the ones who can read your tweets and you get updates from people whom you are following.

You can follow me on on twitter: @gsmodi. Also, my twitter feed would now be posted on the right column of my blog.