Okay this time its Twitter! People started receiving emails as if it was sent from Twitter and asking them to login to a website which looks like Twitter (in simple words, phishing email). Here is what Twitter has to say about it.

It looks as though this particular scam sent out emails resembling those you might receive from Twitter if you get email notifications of your Direct Messages. The email said, “hey! check out this funny blog about you…” and then provided a link. That link redirected to a site masquerading as the Twitter front page.

If you didn’t look at the URL of this false Twitter page, then you might not have noticed that it was actually just a page on the domain access-logins.com which was also faking Facebook’s front page. We immediately reported the offending domain (and warned our friends at Facebook). The site is now on OpenDNS’ and Google’s reported phishing lists.

Twitter has also added a message on top of their home page too.

Firefox has already started blocking the website. You can read more about it here. Even afte so many warnings from people and Twitter, it seems some one fellow just logged in

I am a great fan of sonyericsson phones. Do you own a sony ericsson phone? Check out the tutorial, I wrote some time back, about changing your default menu icons.

Unlike the first wave of eight-megapixel hot shots, including the LG Renoir, Samsung Pixon and Samsung i8510, the C905 sliderphone doesn’t have touchscreen control or smartphone functionality, but it does work its Cyber-shot credentials hard.

Read the rest of the review here.

Yeah you heard it right! Its Kerala. Temperature goes below zero in Munnar, My home town. Look at the photo of sleet (I am not sure about the exact word to be used . The dew drops changed to ice and covered the grass in front of my house. I had a very tuff time waking up and driving!

I cam upon this interesting post today “Fifty things you might not know about Barack Obama” .Please excuse me this is not a tech post!

• He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics

• He was known as “O’Bomber” at high school for his skill at basketball

• His name means “one who is blessed” in Swahili

• His favourite meal is wife Michelle’s shrimp linguini

• He won a Grammy in 2006 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams From My Father

• He is left-handed – the sixth post-war president to be left-handed

• He has read every Harry Potter book

• He owns a set of red boxing gloves autographed by Muhammad Ali

• He worked in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop as a teenager and now can’t stand ice cream

• His favourite snacks are chocolate-peanut protein bars

• He ate dog meat, snake meat, and roasted grasshopper while living in Indonesia

• He can speak Spanish

• While on the campaign trail he refused to watch CNN and had sports channels on instead

• His favourite drink is black forest berry iced tea

• He promised Michelle he would quit smoking before running for president – he didn’t

• He kept a pet ape called Tata while in Indonesia

• He can bench press an impressive 200lbs

• He was known as Barry until university when he asked to be addressed by his full name

• His favourite book is Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

• He visited Wokingham, Berks, in 1996 for the stag party of his half-sister’s fiancé, but left when a stripper arrived

• His desk in his Senate office once belonged to Robert Kennedy

• He and Michelle made $4.2 million (£2.7 million) last year, with much coming from sales of his books

• His favourite films are Casablanca and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

• He carries a tiny Madonna and child statue and a bracelet belonging to a soldier in Iraq for good luck

• He applied to appear in a black pin-up calendar while at Harvard but was rejected by the all-female committee.

• His favourite music includes Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Bach and The Fugees

• He took Michelle to see the Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing on their first date

• He enjoys playing Scrabble and poker

• He doesn’t drink coffee and rarely drinks alcohol

• He would have liked to have been an architect if he were not a politician

• As a teenager he took drugs including marijuana and cocaine

• His daughters’ ambitions are to go to Yale before becoming an actress (Malia, 10) and to sing and dance (Sasha, 7)

• He hates the youth trend for trousers which sag beneath the backside

• He repaid his student loan only four years ago after signing his book deal

• His house in Chicago has four fire places

• Daughter Malia’s godmother is Jesse Jackson’s daughter Santita

• He says his worst habit is constantly checking his BlackBerry

• He uses an Apple Mac laptop

• He drives a Ford Escape Hybrid, having ditched his gas-guzzling Chrysler 300

• He wears $1,500 (£952) Hart Schaffner Marx suits

• He owns four identical pairs of black size 11 shoes

• He has his hair cut once a week by his Chicago barber, Zariff, who charges $21 (£13)

• His favorite fictional television programmes are Mash and The Wire

• He was given the code name “Renegade” by his Secret Service handlers

• He was nicknamed “Bear” by his late grandmother

• He plans to install a basketball court in the White House grounds

• His favourite artist is Pablo Picasso

• His speciality as a cook is chilli

• He has said many of his friends in Indonesia were “street urchins”

• He keeps on his desk a carving of a wooden hand holding an egg, a Kenyan symbol of the fragility of life

• His late father was a senior economist for the Kenyan government

Source : http://www.millionface.com/l/fifty-things-you-might-not-know-about-barack-obama/

cuil (pronounced cool) is a new search engine. So what’s special about it?

Cuil was started by a former Google employee along with her husband and few other Google alumni. It promises more relevant search results than Google. I decided to give it a try today and to be honest, I was not that much impressed.

I always first search for my name in every (new) search engine. I decided to do the same here so I quickly typed in “Shoban kumar” and hit the search button. To my surprise (or shock!) I couldn’t find any search result which is related to me. Below is the screenshot

I did the same thing with Google and I loved the results :).

As you can see each and every result in the first page is correct.

OK now.. I thought I will give a try with my blog name. I typed in “crankup.net” (note that I typed in my URl and not just the word ‘crankup’). And just as I expected the results were not up to mark. You can see it for your self.

Personally I will rate cuil at 2/10 (2 points goes to the idea as I have always thought that Google dominated the search world and we need some thing new)

Google search is doing a great job in Gmail, Google reader and most of its services. cuil has a long way to go. They should stop concentrating on marketing cuil and make it a better search engine than Google. Giving us a better search is important and better than boasting “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages“.

Lets hope that cuil will improve in the coming days. Have you used cuil? What are your thoughts?

Welcome! I am Shoban. I am a 22 year old computer techie currently residing in Trivandrum, India. I work as as a software engineer for an MNC in Technopark. I also blog at www.codegeeks.net

Want to know more about me? check out the following links.

Orkut Profile : http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=6447488085740613212

Twitter Profile : http://twitter.com/shobankr

Email : shobankr[at]gmail.com