Brave Tech World

November 9, 2006

THU 9 NOV 2006

Orkut/Google sucks! How do I cancel my account? By Marcelo

 

    Every time I need to contact Google for whatever reason I know I won't find an email address, I might or might not find a form, and it will be a long and painful search for that info (ironic that Google has a mission of organizing all the information on the world).

 

    Somebody signed up to Orkut using my email address. I received a link to confirm the email address, once I clicked on the link on the hope that I could say "Cancel this", I just got a message saying "Congratulations, your account has been activated."... What? No, no!

 

    Ok, that is easy, I have the email, go there and click to delete the account. Well, if it was that simple. Orkut has a clearly marked link to delete account, I click on it and I can't do it because I don't have the original Orkut Username and Password. I need them to link them to my Google Account and then delete the Orkut profile.

 

    I do have a Google Account which I can sign in to Orkut, but I can't cancel the Orkut profile because it was created with a Username and Password.

 

    S.O.B.

 

 

   

THU 9 NOV 2006

Outlook RSS Reader: Impossible to detect. By Marcelo

 

    Microsoft Office just RTMed this week, which means in a couple of months people will be buying them on stores and it will come installed on their new PC.

 

    The great news is that Outlook 2007 has embedded support for RSS. This is a super easy way for people to subscribe to their favorite blog/site without knowing a thing about feeds. Great news.

 

    The bad news for blog owners, developers and marketing people is that you won't know when a user visiting your site to get a feed is using Outlook 2007. That sucks!

 

    I found this post from Michael Affronti, a PM on the Outlook team, who gives some lame excuse why they cannot change the "user agent" string for those requests.

 

    Argh!

 

 

THU 9 NOV 2006

AOL Search code exposed. By Marcelo

 

    It is not always that you find a major website built by serious developers exposing an ugly call stack to their users. But AOL did it for me:

 

javax.servlet.ServletException: TEA: Length of String s is not a multiple of 8.
com.aol.search.mvc.DecryptQueryServletFilter.doFilter(DecryptQueryServletFilter.java:112)
com.aol.search.mvc.TestbedServletFilter.doFilter(TestbedServletFilter.java:104)
com.aol.search.mvc.UserAgentBlockFilter.doFilter(UserAgentBlockFilter.java:218)
com.aol.search.msrp.filters.RequestIDOverrideFilter.doFilterInternal(RequestIDOverrideFilter.java:82)
com.aol.search.gsp.filters.AbstractConfiguredServletFilter.doFilter(AbstractConfiguredServletFilter.java:160)
com.aol.search.mvc.LoggingServletFilterBase.doFilter(LoggingServletFilterBase.java:94)
com.aol.search.gsp.filters.LogonTimestampServletFilter.doFilter(LogonTimestampServletFilter.java:94)
com.aol.search.mvc.UserInfoRedirectFilter.doFilter(UserInfoRedirectFilter.java:242)

    All that I did was to change the "encquery" parameter to a normal string. I wanted to see what type of encoding they were using. Apparently the do some cryptography because the function was called "DecryptQueryServletFilter". Why the heck would they cryptograph this value?

 

    How are websites owners supposed to know what people are looking for on their site if the referer is an encrypted string. If Google had done that from day 1, AdSense and SEO would not exist today.