For I am many?

Over the past year there has been on off occurrence regarding my @gmail.com account and I do not mean the recent hacking of it. Now my address is fairly generic but that should not matter as I know the address is mine. Yet, six times now I have received email bound for someone else who has given out my address.

All of which appear to be legitimate emails, no spam messages or anything of the sort. One person was ordering Christmas gifts, another trying to sign up for housing at a college and another had given it to a patrol officer. Just one person doing this would have been odd but nothing bizarre, but so far six and counting?

This is a short and sweet post but I still wonder, has this happened to anyone else?

How to regain your Google account

I recently lost my Google account for a while and everything associated with it. I never realized how ingrained services like gmail and reader were to my daily routine. We put an awful lot of trust in free services that exist in the cloud. Should we? Google, in the end, owes us nothing for these free services and could remove or charge for them at any time.

So what do you do if you lose you access? In my case it was compromised, which makes the situation even worse. Everyone on my contact list received an email that I had taken an impromptu vacation to England and had been mugged. The email had a repeat paragraph and was so otherwise poorly written that I had little worry anyone would actually believe it.

Google provides a few ways to get back into your account if it has been taken from you or you simply forgot your password:

1. You can have your password sent to another email address you specify inside of your Google account. If you have NOT done this yet you need to do so immediately. It is not done through gmail itself. There is also an option to set a security question and your cell phone number so that a code can be sent via SMS. To access your Google Account click here.
   
2. If the above does not work, and likely if the account has been compromised it will not, there is the password recovery form option. This will ask you a series of questions about your account. To access the automated password recovery form, click here.
   

The scary thing here is if both of the above options fail then you are out of luck. There is no one to call and no one to email directly.

If you feel a little more secure about regaining your account if you lose it be sure to keep track of the following things:

1. The email addresses of the top five people that you send email to.
2. Five of the folder/labels that you have created inside of the web interface if any.
3. The date that you signed up for gmail
4. If you use other services such as blogger, docs or reader it can help to know when, at least approximately, that you signed up for those services.

The addresses and folder/label information is especially important. I was unable to get my account back until I remembered some of the folder/label names that I had in my account.

Lastly, when you are logged into gmail at the bottom of the screen there is a line which shows the current accesses to your account. If you click on detail you can see all the recent connections.

Chrome OS Impressions

Like much of the tech community when Google comes up with something new, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I got into "Google Wave" and while I see the vast potential, I have not yet found a solution for it to solve. Now, we have "Chrome OS" which is garnering a lot of attention as you can actually download a very early developers build.

There is a lot about Chrome OS to be interested in and there is also a lot that makes me want to shrug my shoulders and move on. First and foremost, I do not consider this to be an OS, at least not in the traditional sense. If you are interested in installing numerous applications, working offline from the hard drive or many other common traits of a standard computer, then "Chrome OS" will not be for you. However, if you are constantly wired and want a netbook that boots in an instant and give you a window to the cloud it may be the best yet? Possibly. Given that the "OS" will be limited to machines with solid state drives its speed will surely be something to see.

"Chrome OS" will fill a very niche market. I do not believe claims that it will cut into Microsoft's business... at all. I have also not been a fan of the marketing of the netbook to begin with. The devices are very good for very specific purposes. Yet I hear of many ill informed or ill advised people buying them not knowing of their limitations. Many of us on-line are what I hear refereed to often as "inside baseball" whereas we know the ins and outs of the industry. The "Chrome OS" means something to us but to the majority of other people it will not.

Now, admittedly it is still very early on in the development of "Chrome OS" and the versions that you can find on-line now are primitive at best. I would like to point out that you should be VERY careful on where you get your build of "Chrome OS"... very, very careful. Otherwise all you are doing is downloading something that will steal your private data.

The great site GDGT has posted a VMWare image of the OS which you can download by clicking here.

Out of touch

Ladies and Gentlemen I found the following quote here and found it to be a gem. The following is about the best definition of being out of touch. This is a prime example of the OLD way of thinking of controlling content within a walled garden. It is a dead or dying practice.

"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content," Murdoch said. "But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators—the people in this hall—who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph."

Awesome right? Well the article makes an excellent point at what their real motive may be and I think it may be giving them to much credit.

The old ways are done and it is time to adapt or perish.