Update 2: Actually, it looks as though the password hash feature is, in fact, random and not just a security measure. It’s purpose seems to be to break GMail utilities. The exact nature and effect remains to be seen. Several utilities that I use are still functioning fine.

Update: The sky has not fallen. The end is not yet near. Apparently, the graphical word hash is a security feature that you see when you type your password incorrectly several times.

I have not seen this on the servers I log-in to but Fluffy Panda reported on the GTray discussion list:

Gmail has just implemented a new login mechanism, apparantly directly aimed at preventing automatic logins. Now you need to read a deformed word and type it in before you can log on.

The deformation doesn’t look too bad and I think I might bbe able to write some OCR software that can read it 80% of the time but since it’s a new feeature and likely to be changed again fairly quickly I think I’ll wait and see for now.

If the people on this list would email google and let them know that the new login mechanism is A Bad Thing ™ then maybe they’ll just take it away all by themselves.

Very interesting indeed.

Update: It seems Vijay is not giving away gmail invites at all. He is selling them. I suggest he head over to eBay. From this point forward, I will not give people “potentially” giving invites away the spotlight. If you find a comment purporting to give away addresses, understand that they may be scamming. If you wish to give invites away in this forum, you may mail them to me and tell me if you want attribution. Several people have done this and that’s the way it has to be moving forward.

Coming soon, I will be giving away a bunch of invites in a silly little contest. Stay tuned.

Vijay posted the following comments on one of my entries this morning -

btw, posting a “please send me an invite as a comment to this entry is not effective. You must send an email to Vijay.

Talk about stupid people… I had a couple of comment spams get written to Aimless a couple of days ago but I stay on top of comments and removed them quickly. The reason porno hounds and Viagra scalpers use it is for the anchor text in the links… they want PageRank and juice on specific keywords so when you type ‘barely 18′ into Google, they get your business. These first comment spams led nowhere; the spammer was just measuring my response. When he saw how quickly I moved he decided not to spam my comments.

Then today, I get a couple of trackback pings that are obvious spam. Except that Movable Type doesn’t make it easy to remove pings. So, I’m looking at it and thinking this might be a problem. I’ll take care of it later… 5:00 PM hits and the pingbot spammer script starts doing its biz. 50 trackback pings in under an hour, all spam but now I know where to find “MILF grannies doing time.” Sweet. Not.

I had been putting off installing MT-BlackList. Spam just wasn’t that big of a problem prior to today but I ran out and downloaded it and 15 minutes later (setup time not download time) I had it up and running and had removed the SPAM. Now that’s sweet. What could be better?

1. SPAMMERS could fall over dead tomorrow. You know, like a reverse rapture. All the stupid idiots and spammers could die and go spend some time with the man downstairs and we could enjoy earthly paradise.

2. Movable Type could buy this beautiful piece of code and integrate it. There is no excuse not to. In fact, MT is foolish for not doing so NOW. This blacklist by IP feature they offer is a pile of crap. MT 3.0 is such a let down. It’s really MT 2.70 - don’t let ‘em fool you friend. Stupid. Negligent. Criminal.

3. Not much else.

It’s like a red apple sale around here these days! Here are my last 5 invites and please only one per person:

http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b23ddc0c57-9e5651751b-e1df3df2c7
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b23ddc0c57-38d3c412bd-65e114cb44
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b23ddc0c57-e7671d104c-9ef16209e0
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b23ddc0c57-b263a3e949-7d7b4f3068
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b23ddc0c57-499f50a292-be0aacaede

It’s always interesting to see the mental approach people take when faced with a list (as above) of finite length of a wanted good. Should I follow the last link in the hope that no one has grabbed that one yet (this is what happened) or should I follow the first link since any sane person would follow the last? Or, perhaps a middle link?

UPDATE: It has been used.

One GMail Invite -

https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-9dece0d839-54ce57fe95-115877030a

Get it quick.

Developed by Richard Jones, GMailFS is a mountable file system for your favorite Linux distribution. The mounted file system supports most unix file system commands. It builds upon the FUSE Userland file system infrastructure and libgmail, the Python GMail API. As impressive as the utility is in and of itself, it was built in only four days! Don’t try that with C++.

While I fear that the Google gods will frown upon this implementation, this is a compelling use of GMail. Imagine chaining ten or twenty or even fifty GMail account together. Pretty cool.

Scripting Language: Python

Source: GMailFS

This is a little hard to believe but the source is reliable. Apparently, someone had six GMail invites in their account and then one disappeared today. Apparently Google took back an invite that had been granted to a user. Bizarre. Has this happened to anyone else?
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You heard me right! A petabyte. Do you know what it is? Can you wrap your brain around what a petabyte really entails? I have been working with enterprise tape solutions recently and some of those monster tape libraries scale up into the petabyte range. I doubt the average home user and even average business will ever generate that much data but large corporations do and they need to back it all up somehow.
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Mark W. writes –

“I have 10 free gmail accounts to give away. Send an email to: markwoodside@gamil.com if you want one.”

Posted by: Mark W. at August 25, 2004 06:47 PM

Note: I believe his email address should end in “gmail.com”. He left that as a comment on one of the GMail web entries. I figured I would give it a little more prominence. Thanks for sharing Mark!

That brings the total invites we as a group have managed to wrangle together to 17 this week for you. Not bad…

It’s like Christmas these days! Google is letting the invites flow and I got ‘em! Well, I got ‘em thanks to several kind people who have shared the love. You see, Aimless Bob gets no Google love. I have received one invite from GMail over the past week while a buddy of mine stumbled into eight, count them, eight invites over several days. What’s up with that?
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