Another crazy feature from Gmail. I’m gonna give it a try this week.

This is a crazy feature of gmail. Its designed to help you avoid embarrasment just in case you get drunk, emotional and then login to Gmail and decide to express your feelings to your boss or whoever. Fairly easy to setup. Go to settings -> labs and enable the option. Then select the times when you are most likely to get emotional / drunk / etc, and that’s it. When you hit send, you’ll have 60 seconds to answer 5 mathematical questions. If you get them wrong… it’s “water and bed for you”.

Found this cartoon on the net and just had to post it!

In his post [Link], Brandon writes that the vulnerability has caused some people to lose their domain names registered through GoDaddy.com. Without posting the full exploit, here is the key as Brandon explains it relies on obtaining the variables that represent the user name and “at”:

When you create a filter in your Gmail account, a request is sent to Google’s servers to be processed. The request is made in the form of a url with many variables. For security reasons, your browser doesn’t display all the variable contained within the url. Using FireFox and a plugin called Live HTTP Headers, you can see exactly what variables are sent from your browser to Google’s servers.

After that, an attacker just needs to identify the variable that is the equivalent of the username.

“Obtaining this variable is tricky but possible,” he writes. “I’m not going to tell you how to do it, if you search hard enough online you’ll find out how.”

The “at” variable can be obtained by visiting a malicious Web site, writes Brandon, who suggests that Google make the “at” variable expire after every request rather than after every session.

To avoid being a victim of the vulnerability, users should check their filters often, Brandon suggests. Firefox users can download an extension called NoScript that helps prevent these attacks, he said.

I noticed the colors change in Gmail yesterday evening while checking email. Today morning there was a big graphic at the top. Seems Gmail has introduced themes. Very interesting. Hope they come out with more of these themes.

Google has released video chat [Link]. This is real cool. I’ve been using GMail and GoogleTalk since the last few months and I like it. Its simple and it works. This should come in real handy.