I had a rather unpleasant experience with PayPal lately where someone transferred all the money from my account. PayPal was not very forthcoming and I do not know until today how this was possible. One of the first things that I did after this experience was to order a PayPal Security Key. I was contacted [...]
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 26
Protect PayPal Accounts With VeriSign Identity Protection Devices
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 3
Send AIM Messages without a software
Most Instant Messengers have one serious disadvantage and that is that they are tied to a specific computer. If you are on another computer that is not your own you most likely will not have access to your Instant Messenger. That’s probably one of the reasons why people love Twitter and other web services that [...]
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: None
Remove viewmgr.exe
A program called Viewpoint Media Player was suddenly installed on my friend’s computer and he was so surprised that he had to call me and ask me if I knew why this program was installed on his computer. I have never heard of Viewpoint before but did a quick search for viewmgr.exe and Viewpoint Media Player to find out that it can be automatically installed with several programs from AOL and other vendors.
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 2
Check Webmail with Mozilla Thunderbird
I received an email after publishing the article about YPOPS that made it possible with all email clients to retrieve and send Yahoo Mail emails. If you are a Thunderbird user you might find the Webmail extension for Thunderbird a better choice. It adds support for more than just one webmailer. You get support for Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Lycos, Mail.com, Aol and Libero. By default the webmail extension and at least one additional component has to be installed to add webmailer support.
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 4
AIM Ad Hack
AIM, which is short for AOL Instant Messenger, is one of the popular Instant Messengers with more than 53 million active users. Only Jabber comes close to this numbers while other popular clients such as MSN have only half of that active user base. One big problem with AIM is the integration of advertisements and bundled software which is not needed to run AIM at all.
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 1
Pricing for AOL Movie Downloads
Aol will offer movie and tv show downloads from Paramount Pictures in their new video portal. Downloads will be sold for prices ranging from $9.99 to $19.99 which suggests that most users will be quite unhappy with the pricing. Amazon Unbox and Apple’s iTunes is offering download in the same price category and every other portal will most likely follow them.
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 1
Updates on the AOL Scandal
Aol released private search queries of 500.000 AOL users to the public. Analysts and Journalists alike are having a busy time analysing the data for various reasons. I was able to identify three different motivations: 1. How big is the privacy breach, 2. Is it possible to identify someone from the queries and 3. analysing the queries from a marketing point of view.
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 11
Anonymized Logs of 500000 AOL users on the net
AOL surely did not think about the immense backlash they would receive from the internet community when they released anonymised logs of 500,000 AOL users at the AOL research website. The file consisted of about 20.000.000 million web queries from about 500.000 AOL users in the course of three months (march to may 2006). The AOL username was replaced by a unique ID, everything else was kept unchanged in the logs.
