Someone should check the thermostat in Hades, because I never thought I’d see this day. Google announced this morning that Google Apps, the corporate and public versions of its popular mail, calendar, chat and document software, no longer wear the beta tag.

Since its launch on April 1st, 2004, Gmail has worn the ‘beta’ tag, even after adoption by millions of home and business users and over 5 years of development.

Speculation has been rampant as to when it would finally leave beta status. A five-year development cycle isn’t the norm for almost any software, unless you’re developing ground-breaking, world-changing games, and many mocked Google for using ‘beta’ as a crutch for so long.

It’s about time. Welcome to Release Candidate land, Google. Now, can we talk about integrating custom signatures and mail templates? Love, Ryan.

First it was spammy viral marketers and childish pranks.  Now Twitter has reached the same level of insecurity as everywhere else on the web, as scammers have begun to tweet out malware-ridden links. While this isn’t YATW, these malware makers are hijacking trending topics to push their poison into the wild.

Mashable reports on how scammers have begun to spread links to sites “Twitterbest” and “Zasaden” on the .mp domain. Both host the commonly seen flash codec trojan which prompts the user to allow installation of what is supposedly an update to Adobe Flash player, and in actuality a rogue anti-virus utility, this one going by the name of “Fast Anti-Virus 2009.” The name may sound familiar to technicians on the front lines of virus removal, as it has been used by rogue anti-virus programs dating back to at least May.

Avoiding the bad domains is only half of the battle though, due to the fact that the vast majority of URLs posted on Twitter are via URL shortening services. Without 3rd party tools, there’s no way to tell where these links terminate before clicking them, and the trust instilled in most people by social media provides a sufficiently wide opening through which to ram a trojan exploit.

The upside is that since Twitter is apparently already censoring trending topics, we might be one step closer to finally getting rid of them altogether.

Sometime yesterday, the worm began compromising the accounts of people who clicked on a link to a video on the juste.ru domain. These zombified accounts were then used to post another link to the video. “Best Video: http://juste.ru/?…” tweets began to spread across the twittersphere.

It appears that unlike previous twitter worms, this one doesn’t work off of cross-site scripting (XSS) but instead installs some sort of malware to compromise your account details. Further, it appears to be able to grab Facebook login information as well, and it has begun to propagate on that network as well.

Suffice to say, the only way to stay safe is to be careful about clicking on shortened URLs (there are handy tools to preview the URL before surfing to it) and to fervently avoid landing on the Juste.ru domain. Of course, this is only a stopgap measure, since new malicious domains and malware will be out as soon as one site shuts down.

Avoiding the twitter web interface in favor of a standalone client is a nice safeguard against XSS attacks and may even be been helpful in this situation. Perusing a random sampling of some of the compromised accounts, the vast majority seemed to do most of their tweeting from the web interface, underscoring twitter’s continued vulnerability in the face of these constant exploits.

Since this is happening with such frequency, we might as well coin YATW and use that going forward.

Twitter has already begun temporarily suspending the compromised accounts, deleting the offending posts, and returning them back to their proper owners.

(via Techcrunch and Mashable

Despite having no business model to speak of, the hottest little micro-blogging site on the web, Twitter, is being eyed tentatively by search behemoth Google.

If this is an April Fool’s Joke, it’s a little late to the party.

While initial word made it sound like the negotiations were in the late stages, the current speculation is that talks have merely just begun. Nonetheless, users are atwitter about the news, with opinion divided about whether or not the acquisition would be a desirable or not. On one hand, Google’s incredible server resources could bring an end to the dreaded Fail Whale. The biggest concern is that Google will instantly monetize the service, vis-a-vis some sort of adwords implementation, subscription mechanism, or other method(s).

It looks too early to say at this point what will happen, but after Facebook’s failed attempt late last year, some said it was inevitable that Twitter would be able to hold out against the siren call of money hats.

Yesterday it was announced on the Google Enterprise Blog that Google would begin rolling out Themes support within Google Apps accounts.

Users have been awaiting the Themes feature since they were added to Gmail in November. Shortly thereafter, posts to the Google Apps help section went up seeking an ETA on the addition of the feature to Apps. A ‘Top Contributor’ on the site said then that Themes in Apps “should be appearing sometime later this week.”

Put that on record, folks. November 20th to March 30th is officially the longest week ever!

But it’s nice to finally see the feature. Now we can bask in the glow of Shiny or Summer Ocean all day long!

It was initially my intention to write my first article about hard drive data recovery. Sometimes, though, a battle plan doesn’t survive the initial encounter. It so happens I read Tim Biden’s excellent blog post about online backup, the same day I had a situation with a client involving hard drive failure. I screwed up, and here’s what we can learn from it.
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