All your private and confidential emails are stored in your Gmail mailbox but are they secure? Can a Google employee working on the Gmail product read your messages?

In theory, the answer could be yes. Christopher Nguyen, who was earlier responsible for Google Apps operations at Google, shared this on Quora:

A small number of GMail related engineers have access to the servers as a matter of necessity to do their jobs; a very small number of people actually access the contents as a matter of necessity to do their jobs, and even then, almost always only the associated metadata.

The rest have to file a request and justify any access they ever need, which is extremely rare. All have to sign paperwork re users’ privacy at the risk of dismissal & legal action, knowing that whatever they do is discoverable. And ultimately, an internal culture of respecting users’ privacy helps keep one another in check.

Google also serves contextual text ads in Gmail and these ads are triggered based on the content of the email message that your currently reading. Obviously it is the bots that are scanning your Gmail messages for relevant keywords but Microsoft, with a hope that some Gmail users will shift to Hotmail, is using this point to target Google on privacy.

Some email services, like Gmail, actually read the contents of your mail (both sent and received, even if you aren’t a Gmail user but just sending to someone who is) in order to decide what kind of ads to serve up to you. They may call it “scanning” and attempt to equate it with less invasive activities like “checking for spam” but it’s quite different. For you, and the people you send mail to, it’s not spam, it’s personal.

Microsoft has also released a video, titled the Gmail Man, highlighting this Gmail behavior. Microsoft uploaded the video to YouTube, a platform owned by Google, and it isn’t therefore surprising that the video has garnered more dislikes than likes – after all, most YouTube users are also Gmail users and they aren’t buying Microsoft’s argument.

Related: Find if your Email has been Read

This story, Can Google Employees Read your Gmail?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/02/2012 under GMail, Tech Notes.

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Amazon today launched Junglee.com in India today and, in its current form, Junglee is more like an online marketplace where you can quickly compare prices of books, electronics, music, apparel and other products offered by hundreds of online and offline retailers in India.

Several shopping stores in India – including Homeshop18, India Plaza, Shoppers Stop, Fabindia, Microsoft Store, Future Bazaar and many others – have added their product catalogues to Junglee so it becomes a little easier for the consumer to research product prices from one central place.

Is Junglee Cheaper than Flipkart or Infibeam?

As you may have noted, the two most popular shopping sites in India – Flipkart.com and Infibeam.com – are both missing from Junglee.com. These sites might have better deals to offer than Junglee so I have a written a simple bookmarklet that lets you compare prices of books on Junglee.com with that of Flipkart and Infibeam in one go.

Is Junglee Cheaper

To install the bookmarklet, simply drag the “Is Junglee Cheaper” button from this page to your browser bookmarks toolbar. Then open any book page on Junglee.com and click the bookmarklet to instantly know the price of that book on Infibeam and Flipkart.

The first version of the bookmarklet works for books only though I might expand it to other product categories later. Here’s a quick video that demonstrates how the Junglee bookmarklet works.

This story, Compare Junglee Prices with Flipkart and Infibeam, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/02/2012 under Amazon, Bookmarklets, India.

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If you are to a buy a product from Junglee, you don’t buy it from Amazon.com (probably because of the FDI rules in our country) but will be redirected to the seller’s website. The seller is responsible for the shipping, they may have their own refunds and returns policies and each may offer a different payment mechanism.

Also see: Compare Junglee Prices with Flipkart

Amazon in India

Thus, at this time, Amazon in India is mostly looking like a comparison shopping engine. There’s no universal shopping cart (you cannot buy products from multiple sellers in one go) though you can use your main Amazon.com credentials to log into Junglee.

I am still quite happy with this development though as it highlights the lesser-known online merchants in India and one can always use Junglee to get a better idea of the price of a product. It may not have an immediate effect on the business of Flipkart but going forward, that could change.

Full credit to BGR and MediaNama for breaking this story.

This story, Amazon Online Store is Live in India, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Amazon, India.

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The same j & k keyboard shortcuts can be used for navigating items in Google Reader, for moving between tweets on Twitter.com, and it even works with Tumblr.com.

So why do developers commonly assign the k and j keys for moving up and down respectively and not any other key combination?

When Bill Joy created the vi text editor for Unix, he used a ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard didn’t have any dedicated arrow keys (see illustration above). Instead the keys h, j, k and l were inscribed with arrow symbols and these keys, in combination with the CTRL key, were used for moving the cursor on the screen.

The keyboard layouts have changed (they got dedicated arrow keys) but the same j & k keys are still popularly used for moving the cursor up and down inside the vi text editor. And since most developers have their roots in the Unix world, they implemented the same shortcut inside their web apps.

Wikipedia has more details on the history of vi and the HJKL keys.

This story, Why do Gmail and other Web Apps use j & k Keys for Navigation?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Keyboard Shortcuts, Internet.

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After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.

Google’s click fraud detection algorithm may have detected invalid clicks and thus disabled the AdSense account. Jef raised an appeal but the AdSense team wrote a final response saying they were unable to reinstate his AdSense account.

Jef shared his ordeal online (Jan 30, 9:32 PM), Matt Cutts re-shared the story on his Google+ page (Jan 31, 2:36 PM) and the next status update from Jef said that his account has been reinstated (Feb 1, 8:08 AM).

AdSense reinstated my account earlier today, and the ads are now appearing again. Yay! I’m still having a conversation with them about what happened and what we should do to keep it from happening again.

Jef was exchanging emails with the AdSense support team for the past 15 days and none of that worked in his favor. Matt Cutts (Google’s best known public face) entered the scene, the click-fraud team probably did another review and Jef’s AdSense account was quickly reinstated in less than 24 hours.

This is good news for Jef but it does expose a very serious flaw in Google’s click-fraud detection algorithms. An account that was deemed a ‘threat’ to advertisers just few days ago is considered safe again. What changed Google’s mind in such a short duration of time?

There could be hundreds of other honest and legitimate web publishers who have been wrongly banned from the AdSense program without explanation and all they get from Google are these automated replies.

This story, Publisher’s AdSense Account is Disabled, Reinstated Quickly, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Google Adsense, Internet.

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This is helpful is most cases because you can safely avoid writing http:// in your tweets and Twitter will still convert all the included web addresses into hyperlinks.

However, if you want Twitter to display URLs in plain text and not convert them into hyperlinks, here’s a simple trick – just replace the period (or dot) symbol in your tweet with its ASCII equivalent (.) and Twitter would display your message without conversion.

For example, if I were to tweet – “is twitter.com down?”,  the modified tweet will read like “is twitter.down?” and Twitter will show that link in plain (non-clickable) text.

It’s a simple trick but the only problem is that some apps, like the Twitter app for iPad, do no correctly handle ASCII codes correctly but that should get fixed with time.

This story, Prevent Twitter from Auto-Converting Words into Hyperlinks [Trick], was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 31/01/2012 under Twitter, Internet.

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To give you an example, if a blog’s address is abc.blogspot.com and you try opening that page from an IP address in India, Google will send you to abc.blogspot.in. A similar redirection is happening for individual article pages as well.

Original page: http://labnol.blogspot.com/language-translation.html

Redirected to: http://labnol.blogspot.in/language-translation.html

How to Prevent Google from Redirecting Blogs

If you are visiting a blogspot.com blog and Google is redirecting you to the country-specific blogspot.in domain, you (as the user) can prevent that redirection by adding /ncr to the blog URL. For instance, if the blog URL is abc.blogspot.com, the new URL would be abc.blogspot.com/ncr and it won’t redirect to any other address.

The Problem with Redirecting URLs

The above change is applicable only for free blogs that are served from blogspot.com and does not affect Blogger blogs that use a custom domain. Also, Blogger takes care of the redirection part so none of your existing URLs should return a 404.

That said, there’s one significant downside I can think of. All your blog pages effectively have two different URLs now and that could dilute your Google juice.

Site visitors in India will see your blogpsot.in URL while visitors outside India will be served the original blogspot.com URL. However, if another website links to your .in address and a visitor outside India tries to access your blog via that site, they won’t be redirected to your original .com address. And that’s bad for your site from the SEO perspective.

The other problem is that this change will completely alter your social analytics. If your original blog post got ‘n’ likes on Facebook, the new count will be ’0′ since the URL has changed. Thus social sharing sites like Twitter, Facebook and even Google Plus will see that redirected page as a new web page.

A Possible Solution

I have no idea why Google made such an important change in Blogger without even informing their users in advance. Anyway, a possible solution is that you add the canonical meta tag to your blog template and point it to your original .com URLs. Here’s how you do it:

Open your Blogger template, click the Edit HTML button and copy-paste the following code somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags.

<link expr:href="data:blog.url" rel="canonical"/>

The above code is valid for the XML version of Blogger templates but if you are still using the Classic Blogger template, the code is a little different:

<ItemPage><Blogger>
 <link href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" rel="canonical"/>
</Blogger></ItemPage>

With this canonical tag, we are telling search engines that even if they encounter our blog page with a .in address, they should only consider the .com address as that’s the original source.

Also, Blogger automatically inserts the rel=canonical tag in your blog templates so you are effectively adding one additional tag will will appear above the original one in the HTML source. When Googlebot encounters multiple canonical tags on a page, they respect the first one so the generated tag would be ignored.

This is obviously a workaround and am hopeful that the Blogger team would come up with a better solution – one that preserves the Google juice of your blog.

Behind the Scenes

I was looking into the HTTP headers and it looks like Blogger is doing a 302 temporary redirect between .com and .in domains. However, no such redirection happens when you directly access the .in blogspot URLs even from an IP address outside India.

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: http://labnol.blogspot.in/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Tue, 31

<HTML><HEAD>
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
   content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<TITLE>302 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>302 Moved</H1>
The document has moved
<A HREF="http://labnol.blogspot.com/>here</A>.
</BODY></HTML>

This story, Like It or Not, All Blogger Blogs Have a New Address in India, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 31/01/2012 under Google, India.

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Google is now redirecting all blogspot.com blogs in India to a different blogspot.in address.

The change is live in India but Google, according to this support page, is planning to take a similar approach in other countries as well. So a blog like abc.blogspot.com could redirect to abc.blogspot.com.pk for a visitor in Pakistan or to abc.blogspot.sg when viewed from Singapore.

Selective Censorship

So why is Google switching to country-specific blogspot.com URLs? The answer is simple – this gives them the ability to censor (or remove) content hosted on Blogger country-wise.

By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.

For instance, if the Indian government (or court) orders Google India to remove offensive content from a blog hosted at abc.blogspot.com, Google can simply block those pages in India while they’ll continue to be available in other parts of the world.

This looks like a good approach though I wonder if the recent demands from Indian ministers to pre-screen content have forced Google to implement such a solution.

The courts and the other law enforcement agencies in India sent Blogger a total of 39 content removal requests in the first half on 2011 according to Google’s transparency report.

This story, Okay, Here’s Why Google is Redirecting your Blogger Blogs, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 31/01/2012 under Censorship, Google, Internet.

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Got a video channel on YouTube? You might see a drop in the subscriber count of your YouTube channel in the coming days.

Google is doing a clean-up and they’ll remove all closed and inactive YouTube accounts from the total subscriber counts (slide). That is, if ‘zombie’ accounts have been following you on YouTube, they won’t be counted as subscribers anymore.

The YouTube team says that once the subscribe count numbers are adjusted, YouTube channel owners can expect an average drop of 4% or less. You might see a higher drop in subscriber numbers if your YouTube channel has been around for a longer period of time because you’ll have relatively more ‘closed’ accounts in your subscriber list.

To learn more about your YouTube subscribers, go to youtube.com/analytics and check the “Subscribers” link under Engagement Reports. It shows your subscriber count by geography, by date and how your various video uploads have affected, positively or negatively, your YouTube growth.

Subscribe to Digital Inspiration TV on YouTube.

This story, The Subscriber Count of your YouTube Channel Could Go Down, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 31/01/2012 under YouTube, Internet.

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The official release of Firefox 10 may just be a couple of hours away but if you can’t wait, the new Firefox 10.0 installers are now available for download on Mozilla’s FTP servers.

Here’re the direct links to download Firefox 10.

For Windows (15.1 MB):

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/10.0/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%2010.0.exe

For Mac (31.4 MB):

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/10.0/mac/en-US/Firefox%2010.0.dmg

For Linux (18 MB):

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/10.0/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-10.0.tar.bz2

The above links point to the English (US) version of Firefox 10.0 but if you looking to download Firefox in a different language, either change the “en-US” string in the URL to your own locale code or use traverse the FTP directory manually starting with ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/10.0/.

Firefox 9 is a memory hog (at least on my Windows machine) and that’s one area where Mozilla needs to work really hard. Let’s see if things have improved with version 10.0.

This story, Download Firefox 10 from Mozilla FTP Servers, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 30/01/2012 under Downloads, Mozilla Firefox, Software.

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