Please give it up for 1978seymour , Iccee, YellowFilter, Purrrpl_Haze, ambientlight, pintavelloso, Lalalian, mONKEYbART, swamp_tupelo, hlecuanda, Helen Morgan, moonfever0, Niña Murciélago and sungazing -- our 14 winners in our impromptu colouring contest.
Don't fret, if you entered a photo but don't see it featured here, you might want to check your FlickrMail for a little thank you from the Flickreenos.
I was without a cameraphone for a little while, then got a Nokia N80 was too new to run ShoZu, the handy Symbian app which makes uploading much easier (and runs in the background, handles disconnects/partial uploads, can postpone uploading if you are roaming, lets you add tags and edit the titles and descriptions on your phone, and a bunch more). I ended up losing that N80 and then getting another one and by that time a new version of ShoZu was out and this one ran on the N80.
The new version has an additional feature** though - it grabs the latest comments on your photos whenever it connects to the server. It also keeps a list of recent comments and remembers which ones you've already read.
This has totally changed my mobile Flickr experience. Whenever I get one of those insane Silicon Valley four minute red lights or have a few moments to spare before a meeting starts, I can't help but check for new comments. And every time the star lights up, there's a little treat waiting. Very cool! I can't wait till I can respond and add comments to other people's photos as well!
ShoZu is free and is available to many phone model. Check it out:
** Turns out this feature isn't actually new. It's been around since earlier this year, but you had to manually enable it on ShoZu's site. Because not everyone has unlimited data plans, the ShoZu team was worried about causing their users unwanted charges for more data usage. Thoughtful blokes!
One of the lesser-known benefits of Google Checkout is its ability to help you prevent and fight fraud. In fact, Checkout's first line of defense works to prevent fraud from even reaching you: we proactively filter out fraudulent transactions using Google Checkout's proprietary fraud detection technology.
To help you fight fraud, we developed the Chargeback Resolution policy, which covers all Google Checkout transactions. This policy helps you efficiently manage any chargeback you receive; we even fight them on your behalf. Our team will work closely with you to ensure that you have the best chance of winning a dispute. If you already have tools and systems in place to handle chargebacks, we won't stand in your way -- you retain all the rights to directly contest chargebacks yourself.
An important aspect of the Chargeback Resolution Policy is the Payment Guarantee, which offers an additional layer of protection by guaranteeing payment for transactions that follow best practices in fraud prevention. Transactions covered by our Payment Guarantee are marked as "Covered by Payment Guarantee" on the Order Details page of the transaction. If you don't see this designation on a given transaction, don't worry—it's still covered by the Chargeback Resolution policy.
As a graduate student working on some pretty heavy duty research, I think Google Book Search rocks. Thank you, thank you, thank you. On multiple occasions, I've discovered just enough information here to get the titles, which then propels me to the library where (much of the time, fortunately), I can get the whole text. Case in point: I'm researching marital and sexual attitudes in 17th century England. I type in "shakespeare marriage" and, wham, up pops B. J. Sokol's Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage from Cambridge University Press, 2003. It's *perfect.* Would I have found it without Google Book Search? Perhaps. But I also might have found it much later, and not allowed it to have the impact in my thinking and research it now does. Did Cambridge UP lose a sale? Um, no. I'm a grad student: I live in the freaking library. But they did gain another reference, and a someday sale when I get a tenure track position (fingers crossed). Additionally, they get heaps of good will because I know that they care about getting their catalog into circulation as conveniently as possible. That makes them cool. This has helped me discover information hidden where I otherwise would never find it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Domain names are not limited to ASCII any longer, and as the web is growing more and more domain names now contain characters from other character sets. Such domain names are called Internationalized domain names (IDN), for example http://ايكيا.com is a domain in Arabic for IKEA. IE7 added support for IDN in Beta 2. We listened to your feedback during Beta 2 and we are changing the principles of IDN to accommodate the way customers want to use international characters on the web.
Preventing IDN spoofing by default in IE7 Beta 2
IE7 beta 2 implementation of IDN feature is such that if a user navigates to an IDN URL and if the scripts that are present in the URL are not part of the user’s configured Accept language, IE7 will convert the URL into Punycode and display it in the address bar. IE7 also displays the information bar saying that the website address contains characters which cannot be displayed using the current language settings.
This design makes IE7 secure by default against any URL spoofing attacks containing non-ASCII characters. In order to view a URL in Unicode format the user must have the language specific to that character script added to the browser’s Accept language.
As discussed previously, another IDN restriction for IE7 Beta 2 was that it did not allow intermixing of scripts for a given label (a label is a segment of a domain name, delimited by dots; www.microsoft.com contains three labels “www”, “microsoft” and “com”) in a URL. Also, for a given label IE did not allow mixing of non-ASCII scripts with ASCII. This step was mainly taken to protect users against homograph-spoofing attacks. Consider the scenario where a user commonly browses sites with Cyrillic URLs. If the user gets a phishing email to visit www.paypal.com where one of the ‘a’s is in ASCII and the other is in Cyrillic, the user might believe they are visiting the real paypal which uses all ASCII characters in their domain name. To protect against this spoof, IE7 will detect the mixed characters and show the URL in Punycode rather than misleading the user.
Improving user experience for some mixed script scenarios for IE7
We heard your feedback about how restrictive the feature was by not allowing mixing of ASCII characters with other scripts. For instance, in some locales it is common to have business names that mix ASCII and characters from local languages.
We looked for a way to allow mixed characters in a fragment without introducing the risk of a spoof. The IE team worked with experts from the Windows Globalization team to investigate which scripts can be mixed safely with ASCII characters.
In the Release Candidate build (post-Beta 3), IE will permit mixing of ASCII with certain scripts and will display the URL in Unicode. However, IE still will not allow intermixing of allowed scripts (list given below) within a label, if they belong to different languages, even though the user has added the language containing the scripts to their Accept Languages.
Consider the following example where a URL label contains Hang and ASCII (website for LG Korea)
IE will now display this URL in Unicode for a user who has added Korean language support, since the non-ASCII script belongs to the Korean language set and is now on the allowed list of scripts. However, IE will show the raw Punycode encoding for a user who has not added Korean language support.
Here is a list of scripts that IE will permit to mix with ASCII
In summary, you told us how you planned to use the feature and we listened. We’re very excited that we were able to make this change to allow richer domain names for international sites!
Thanks,
Tariq Sharif
Program Manager