Google’s tools are once again being abused to send unwanted emails, with attackers now using Google Classroom to deliver spam.
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Google’s filtering capabilities in Gmail are usually excellent at preventing spam from ever hitting your inbox. However, a new variant today is cleverly bypassing those protections by making it appear that your account is the one directly sending the spam email to itself.
Samsung has always been known to include quite a few of its own custom features with its smartphones, and its latest device, the Galaxy Note 7, is no exception. Just like the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge from earlier this year, Samsung has included dozens of great features on the Note 7 and one that you may find very useful is the built-in spam identification services.
The latest iteration of Google+ heavily revolves around Collections and Communities. To help prevent spam and inappropriate content, Communities now have more aggressive content controls and filters that will flag posts. Google is gradually rolling out the new filters to existing communities…
While email may not be perfect and many actually loathe it, it’s still the way many businesses choose to get information out – flight and accommodation receipts, job application responses, and everything else. Google says the amount of mail that you actually want to see that is accidentally sent to the spam inbox is a mere 0.05%. But the company is all about data-driven, incremental improvements, so today it’s releasing a new tool for senders of email to better ensure their messages reach your Gmail inbox.
Google’s Map Maker has been getting hit hard with spam over the last few months, with one of the most recent and widely publicized incidents involving an Android logo urinating on an Apple logo in the middle of Pakistan. Now, the company is telling users of the Map Maker website that the service will be temporarily shut down as of tomorrow, May 12th…
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The failed privacy add-on offered by Google’s domain registration partner
More than a quarter of a million people who had opted to keep their contact details private when registering web domains through a Google Apps service have had that information made public as a result of a software glitch by Google.
Usually when you buy a domain name, your name, address, phone number and email list are all made available to anyone who wants to view them by using a WHOIS lookup service. Most domain registrars offer a way around this, where their details, rather than yours, are listed. The $6/year privacy add-on offered by Google’s domain registration partner eNom failed when the domains were renewed, leaving the customer’s details exposed …
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Instagram announced today that it’s now at 300 million monthly active users, up from 200 million users that it announced approximately nine months ago. The company is announcing the new milestone on its website alongside other update user stats.
In addition, Instagram is today rolling out verified badges for brands and public figures while announcing it’s making a “significant effort to remove spammy and fake accounts”:
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Google announced today that it’s adding a new feature to its spam filtering support in Gmail that will help it protect against possible scams and spam as it introduces support for non-latin characters. Google announced earlier this month that it was adding support for the non-latin characters in email addresses (like accented characters and those written in a script like Chinese), and that it hoped the rest of the industry would follow to offer a seamless mail experience in various languages. Google said today, however, that with the new feature comes the possibility of new scams taking advantage of similarities in characters:
Scammers can exploit the fact that ဝ, ૦, and ο look nearly identical to the letter o, and by mixing and matching them, they can hoodwink unsuspecting victims. Can you imagine the risk of clicking “ShဝppingSite” vs. “ShoppingSite” or “MyBank” vs. “MyBɑnk”?
To protect against these possible scams, Gmail will now block emails with suspicious letter combinations based on an open standard from the Unicode Consortium:
To stay one step ahead of spammers, the Unicode community has identified suspicious combinations of letters that could be misleading, and Gmail will now begin rejecting email with such combinations. We’re using an open standard—the Unicode Consortium’s “Highly Restricted” designation—which we believe strikes a healthy balance between legitimate uses of these new domains and those likely to be abused.
Google says the changes are rolling out to Gmail users starting today.
Earlier this week, Google rolled out Panda 4.0 and Pay Day 2.0. These updates to the search algorithm were touted as being designed to further reduce the ranking of low-quality and spammy content. According to analysis by Searchmetrics, Panda and Pay Day did just this, with websites that offer undifferentiated content suffering in terms of overall ranking.
However, Panda did not just punish websites: various major websites actually increased their rank in Google Search as a result of the change in algorithm. From the study:
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A Gmail bug affecting mobile browsers, the offline version of Gmail and the iOS app may have resulted in users deleting or spam-marking the wrong emails, says Google.
The bug may have affected emails received between 15th and 22nd January. Google is encouraging users to check their spam and trash folders for email that does not belong there.
Via The Verge
YouTube has been getting a lot of backlash since introducing its new Google+ powered comment system earlier this month. Despite some very vocal users not exactly liking the change, Google provided an update on the new comment system last night and confirmed it’s here to stay. In a post on its YouTube Creators Blog, the company explains that it’s working to combat spam in comments and will soon introduce new bulk moderation tools for creators.
Since we launched the new comments experience on YouTube two weeks ago, we’ve received a lot of feedback from creators on the increase in comment spam. While the new system dealt with many spam issues that had plagued YouTube comments in the past, it also introduced new opportunities for abuse and shortly after the launch, we saw some users taking advantage of them.
To combat the users “taking advantage” of the new system, YouTube is implementing the following updates to help with spam:
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Almost 60,000 apps have been removed from Google Play, reports TechCrunch, in a move believed to be in response to the number of apps falling foul of the store’s anti-spam policies.
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[tweet https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/218486102720393216]
When Google announced some updates to Google+ during its I/O keynote this week, perhaps apart from the new iPad compatible tablet version, the most talked about new feature was the Facebook-like invitations called “Events.” While Google calendar integration in the Events feature was supposed to be a big selling point, Google unfortunately did not provide users with control over which invites were added to their calendars. The issue led to massive amounts of spam in the form of notifications and calendar entries—most notably for Google+ users with large followings. Robert Scoble outlined the problem in a Google+ post:
As noted by Scoble, another avid Google+ user, Will Wheaton, highlighted the issue and received a response from Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra:
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In its never-ending battle against annoying spammers who pollute our search results, the Dublin, Ireland arm of the Internet search giant published job openings for spam fighters who are fluent speakers of Arabic, German, Russian and Spanish, indicating the rising spam threat in those markets. The job listing requires would-be candidates to have BA/BS degree, “preferred with a strong academic record”, excellent web research and analytical skills and experience with HTML and working for an Internet company.
If terms such as ‘WHOIS’ or ‘DNS’ mean nothing, don’t even apply as understanding of firewalls, IP addresses and name servers is a must as you’ll be directly impacting the quality of Google’s search results through search quality evaluation. Here’s from Google:
You will be working on the cutting edge of search and the forefront of the web ensuring quality information is provided to millions of internet users, and you will be expected to keep pace with constant change in a fast-paced work environment, bringing innovative ideas to improve access to relevant information on the web. You are a web-savvy individual who is a take-charge team player, as well as a quick learner and strongly interested in providing a better search experience for Google users.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could report those pesky phone calls from marketeers as spam with a single click, just like you in Gmail? If you’re a Google Voice user, now you can because the search monster this morning flipped the switch on the new global spam filtering machine that sucks out unwanted calls before they hit your phone.
And if some go through, the new Report Spam button in the Google Voice interface is all you need to stop the pesky callers who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer from wasting your time. You can also fine-tune the system by automatically redirecting calls, texts and voicemails from any of the numbers in Google’s database directly into their spam folders. To turn on spam filtering, tick the Global SPAM filtering box on the Calls tab of Google Voice settings.
