Here’s a really good reason why you should never use Windows as a server operating system (even if you still think you should use it as a desktop OS). I don’t see a lot of websites crash like this anymore, but when they do they are almost always built using Windows, .NET or the other technology that is best avoided, Java (I won’t get started on that one today though).

In this case, I was attempting to submit a form for a recall on a battery charger that goes with my cordless drill. The server apparently is not working though, and felt the need to give me a stack trace (something that would have been much better off being emailed to a system administrator, who could wake a developer and get the thing fixed. If enough developers are woken up in the middle of the night to fix this kind of thing, eventually they’ll refuse to accept Windoze as a server platform. Ideally, they’d refuse to use it entirely since it isn’t really suitable for anything these days.

Early afternoon on the last day of the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. At 4pm today, in the Beta room on the second floor of the Moscone West building, I’m co-presenting a session describing how Devicescape is enabling Mobile 2.0.

A little bit before their 10pm PDT planned maintenance window, YouTube’s home page was returning an Internal Server Error page. Within five minutes it was back, but it was then reporting that their maintenance had started – still 20 minutes or so before the original time of 10pm PDT. Guess their maintenance team got fed up waiting for the 10pm start and just decided to start a little early…

I have been receiving a steady stream of phishing emails targeting Amazon recently. All of these are basically the same, and contain some particularly amusing sentences. First there is the possibility that they may be in need of copies of your photo ID:

Amazon may also request in an email message scanned/faxed copies of one or more photo ID’s.

Next, if you got this email and you’re not an Amazon customer then you might be committing a crime by representing yourself as one:

If you received this notice and you are not an authorized Amazon account holder, please be aware that it is in violation of Amazon policy to represent oneself as an Amazon user. Such action may also be in violation of local, national, and/or international law.

An interesting way to handle the fact that they may send the email to some people who are not Amazon customers!

Finally though, my favourite of all:

Amazon will request personal data (password, credit card/bank numbers) only on our home site, wich is securely incrypted with SLL.

Must be something new that SLL incryption. Wonder if Amazon has the patent on it too 🙂

More seriously, if you ever get these things either delete then immediately or forward them on to the company’s anti-fraud email address. In the case of Amazon, that address is stop-spoofing@amazon.com. Here’s my basic tips for detecting phishing emails:

1. If it says anything about your account being suspended, it is almost certainly phishing.
2. If when you look at the link in the email it starts with numbers (an IP address) rather than the name of the company’s website, it is almost certainly phishing.
3. If it contains spelling errors, poor grammar or other mistakes, it is almost certainly phishing.
4. If the To line in the email header contains other people’s names/email addresses, it is almost certainly phishing.

If you have any concerns about the email, call the company’s customer support line or look up the address you can send spoof emails to in their customer support pages and forward the email. DO NOT REPLY TO THE EMAIL, OR CLICK ANY LINK IN THE EMAIL.

Yahoo upgraded their beta webmail client at the end of last week, and I’ve been using it over the weekend on both my Linux machines and my PowerBook. It is trying to behave like a native email client and makes extensive use of AJAX tricks to achieve that. Mostly they pay off too, though it can be a little slow to respond at times.

The nice features are the split window style display, so you can see the email message subjects etc in the top half of the browser window, and the current email message in the lower portion. They also provide extensive keyboard shortcuts, so it feels very much like a native mail client (it would be nice if the option to not be reminded about them applied to all, rather than having to be selected for each operation though). Drag and drop of messages into folders is slick too (much simpler than the old drop down mechanism).

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