I received a suspicious email today which appeared to come from a Facebook friend. It had a link to a web site and when I clicked it, I was presented with a Facebook login. Now I know better than to enter my login credentials…but I got sidetracked on a phone call, and absent mindedly logged-in when I got back to the computer. The login appeared to fail, but thats when it immediately dawned on me….I just got phished!

Knowing that they probably mined the friends list in order to create new emails, I started looking for a way to alert my friends. This is after I changed my Facebook password of course. But changing the password may have been too late, especially if they had pulled the names and emails at the moment that I tried to login.

Facebook doesn’t appear to have a simple way to send a message to all your friends via email. This is probably a good thing. I would hate to get spam from me friends every day…I will visit Facebook if I want to know what they are up to. But considering that lots of people were soon to receive a spoof email that claimed to be from me, I figured I would error on the side of caution. I created an “event” in Facebook, which allows you to send invites. I tried to make the event so that it would be clearly informational, and not some huge kegger at my house or something. I reluctantly sent the invites to everyone I had ever friended…knowing that this would seem retarded to many of them. But hopefully I saved somebody some grief and aggrevation.

What a joke. I once admired Google for their great approach to usability and open source mentality. However, this new Internet filtering is a disaster. Recently they started flagging web sites as being potentially harmful to your computer. The new Firefox integrates this feature into its browser. Its a great idea gone horribly wrong.

Recebtly, two of my websites were flagged as harmful. After careful review, I found no malicious code…and I certainly didn’t put it there. Just to further illustrate the stupidity of this failed execution, I woke this morning to find that every web site in every Google search, is flagged as harmful. Every site except those who paid for a Google ad that is. The ads work fine…how about that? Go figure, they consider everyone who isn’t paying, to be a hramful malicious site.

This “every site is bad” thing happened on Saturday morning, January 31. I don’t know if this is the fault Firefox or Google, or both…but I am laughing and crying at the same time. It is so blatantly a disaster if 90% of web sites are innaccessible through Google. And yet it affects my sites that people have trusted throughout the years, which is a serious problem. If there is a class action suit in the works…sign me up.

I initially thought this was just Google image searches. I was looking for an image of a keyboard, and every image returned by the search was flagged as harmful. It is not unusual for images to be hosted on harmful sites. Just doa celebrity images search and within an hour you could very likely be infected. Thats why this filtering concept was a good idea…in theory. Unfortunately, I am quite certain that every single keyboard image on the Internet is NOT hosted on a harmful site. Its not until I began searching other keywords, and not just images, that I found the majority of the Google database was flagged as harmful.

I am hopeful that by the time you read this, the problem has been rectified. I also hope that by Google or Firefox solving the problem, my own sites are back on the “good” list where they belong. Somehow I fer that they can’t possible fix this problem entirely. The big guys and the paying players will be given highest priority…the rest of us will likely be left to chance.

Flash gave me this error today and I was unable to find a suitable explanation of the reason online, though it looks like plenty of people have encountered this. Upon further examination I found a way to reproduce the problem. Basically I was sending the same argument twice in a rather lengthy method signature, combined with the fact that I was trying to set the values of an object using “with” improperly (setting the values to the method args out of scope) in the method itself. In the end, it was just sloppy coding, but it is something to look out for.

I will post the code example when I get my stupid blog to format the text correctly, arggghhh!

I am the laziest person on the Web. Now my blog pulls links from my del.icio.us, save as posts in my blog, and push them as tweets to twitter.

This company is in Seattle Washington, and they are a very successful Flash game developer. If I wanted to live where it rains all the time and everyone is wired on coffee, I would send them my resume. Fortunately, there is plenty of work in Chicago.

Smashing Ideas - Death to Boredom. Long Live Fun!