In their never ending battle with hackers attempting to gain access to corporate accounts (whether for fun or for profit), Google has announced a new feature for Google App users.

Instead of asking clients to create hard to remember passwords or rely on silly quiz’s to authenticate who they are (which hackers can easily obtain through social engineering), Google is instead drafting mobile phones in their war against hackers.

Today we are changing that with the introduction of a more secure sign-in capability for Google Apps accounts that significantly increases the security of the cloud: Two-step verification. […]

Two-step verification is easy to set up, manage and use. When enabled by an administrator, it requires two means of identification to sign in to a Google Apps account, something you know: a password, and something you have: a mobile phone. It doesn’t require any special tokens or devices. After entering your password, a verification code is sent to your mobile phone via SMS or generated on an application you can install on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone (coming soon) device. This makes it much more likely that you’re the only one accessing your data: even if someone has stolen your password, they’ll need more than that to access your account. (Google Small Business Blog)

Currently this is limited to Google App users, although Google does plan on rolling this feature out to “the rest of us” (which should help make Gmail more secure).

Even better, Google has announced that they are open sourcing this feature, which means other companies (like Yahoo! and Microsoft) can easily implement it for their own users.

Hopefully Google provides a third option for users who lack a mobile phone (as some people have given up cell phones due to the recession), although for now this feature will hopefully make it harder for hackers to access sensitive accounts.

Originally posted on September 20, 2010 @ 12:02 pm

After making publisher friendly changes to their News site, The boys and girls at Google are celebrating the birth of Google News which was ironically unveiled around the same time of the infamous terrorist attacks that rocked America.

Today we celebrate the eighth birthday of Google News. Not long after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we started building and testing Google News with the aim of helping you find current events from a wide variety of global and political perspectives. On September 22, 2002, Google News rolled out to all English-language readers, with a dedicated News tab on Google.com.

Over the years we’ve made thousands of changes to deliver more news to more users—faster, and with enhanced customization, sharing and serendipity. We’ve added video, local news, custom sections, scanned newspaper archives and a redesigned homepage. We’ve grown from 4,000 sources to more than 50,000, and from one English edition to 72 editions in 30 languages. (Google News Blog)

Despite the fact that Google News still pales in comparison to rivals like Yahoo! News, Google has (for the most part) been the center of attention by the publishing industry (who seem to view Google as their personal ATM).

Controversy aside, Google News has for the most part made finding relevant news easier for the masses, and it will be interesting to see how Google further develops the site (which shows no sign on slowing down).

Originally posted on September 22, 2010 @ 1:49 pm

If their was one “social network” I hated most it would have to be email.

Despite the advances of Gmail over the years, more often than not I would be flooded with messages (between 100-200 daily) that while were not spam, were nonetheless annoying.

Fortunately it looks as if our Google overlords were just as frustrated as we were, and have launched a new beta feature called Priority Inbox which should make life easier for those on the go.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules. (Official Gmail Blog)

While there are a few kinks to work out with the system (as it sometimes marks emails I loathe as “priority”), this one feature alone has brought me back to my inbox instead of relying on Facebook for the important messages.

Although this one feature will probably make Gmail the preferred email service for GTDer (or Get Things Done), I wouldn’t be surprised if Google’s rivals mimic this upon their respective email platforms.

Originally posted on August 31, 2010 @ 12:56 pm