New York Senator Charles Schumer has called on America’s largest sites to make the HTTPS protocol the default for their sites in an effort to prevent ID theft when users hop on public Wi-Fi at places like Starbucks and McDonalds.
The Senator says the growth of public Wi-Fi spots is making it easier for hackers to steal info like credit card numbers and passwords for banking institutions.
Says Schumer (via Reuters):
The number of people who use WiFi to access the Internet in coffee shops, bookstores and beyond is growing by leaps and bounds.
The quickest and easiest way to shut down this one-stop shop for identity theft is for major Web sites to switch to secure HTTPS web addresses instead of the less secure HTTP protocol.
HTTP, says the Senator, is a “welcome mat for would-be hackers.” Most major site operators, outside of the banking institutions, use HTTP as the default, even if they do have HTTPS versions.
Result for: reuters
Google has rolled out the beta version of their Gmail Priority Inbox today, a feature that will automatically rearrange messages in a user’s inbox so the most important ones show up at the top.
For now, the feature is “experimental” and may never go fully live.
Reuters says “the motivation behind Priority Inbox is Google’s conviction that the problem of e-mail overload continues getting worse, forcing people to spend much time and effort managing their inbox both for personal and work-related matters.”
Priority Inbox is optional and users can switch it on or off at their choosing.
If you enable it, Gmail will divide the inbox into three sections; the “priority” box for important messages, the middle box for “starred” and “flagged” messages and the final box for everything else.
Adds Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google’s Enterprise unit: “If you’re in meetings and you come back to your e-mail and you have five minutes between appointments and you have 50 e-mails, which five messages do you spend your time on in that window of time?”
“We see this as an ongoing evolution of the focus of Gmail, which has always been around addressing this problem of information overload,” Glotzbach noted.
Result for: reuters
Yahoo Japan, the biggest portal in the nation, has said today it will use Google’s search engine to power its search instead of following Yahoo Inc.’s decision to use Microsoft’s Bing for search.
By teaming up with Google, the venture will control almost 100 percent of the search market in the world’s second largest economy.
Yahoo went with Microsoft after U.S. regulators blocked a deal with Google under anti-monopoly laws. Yahoo Inc. owns about 30 percent of Yahoo Japan.
Additionally, Yahoo Japan will “also adopt Google’s search-linked advertisement delivery system and feed its data to Google sites,” says Reuters.
Yahoo Japan President Masahiro Inoue said they thoroughly looked into both Microsoft’s and Google’s search technology and they found Microsoft’s “not strong” enough for its needs. A main example cited was Japanese language search capabilities.
