Blogging

Without fanfare, Apple has apparently added antiphishing to its Safari 3.2 release.

The new version of Safari, which was largely a security update and released last week, includes a new configuration option saying: “Warn when visiting a fraudulent website”. It is configured to be on by default. So far, Apple is not talking about the enhancement, nor is there any documentation on the Safari site.

CNET tested the updated Safari 3.2 for Windows on various newly reported phish sites listed on DSLreports and PhishTank, and found none produced a warning. It could be that the phish sites being tested were not yet reported to the Google database or that the antiphishing update hadn’t made it locally to our Safari browser for blocking.

According to Ryan Naraine at ZDNet, the alert displays standard language. It also includes two links, one to Google’s explanation of a phishing site, the other to a Google Report an Error page.

Apple uses standard language when blocking a suspected phishing site.

(Credit: ZDNet)

Apple is the last of the major browser vendors to offer antiphishing protection.

Microsoft uses its own antiphishing and anti-malware tool for Internet Explorer; Mozilla uses a combination of tools, including Google, for Firefox; Opera uses Haute Secure to provide bogus site warnings to end users; and Google uses its own antiphishing technology within its Chrome browser.

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Safari 3.2 includes antiphishing tools

You2Gov, a political communication site, announced Tuesday that it will start offering its “Direct Democracy 3.0″ service to organizations and businesses that want to add social-networking features to their Web sites and allow visitors to contact their elected officials, as well as form online communities around issues, and stay up to date on relevant topics.

“We just watched the Obama campaign masterfully use the Internet to raise record amounts of money, energize supporters, educate the public about the candidate, and get out the vote,” said Alan W. Silberberg, CEO of You2Gov in a statement. “In ‘Direct Democracy 3.0,’ organizations have the same opportunity to use technology to more effectively work with their members and customers.

“Social networking and online advocacy tools change the entire dynamic for organizations by making advocacy simple and providing an online destination that members want to return to regularly,” Silberberg continued. “This is the future of communication.”

According to the company, any Web site that deploys its “Direct Democracy 3.0″ tools will be able to feature a bulletin board to communicate with members, a calendar that anyone can add events to, updated news and videos, a legislation research center, a place to send letters to elected officials, and a back-end management program to maintain the network.

The premise may sound fine, but You2Gov has come under fire recently for not providing users with the kind of service it promised. According to Webware’s Bob Walsh in a review of the service last month, You2Gov isn’t delivering the experience it claims to offer.

“The idea–the ability to send e-mail or Skype call your elected congressman with a click, catch up with the latest political feeds from various news orgs, and do the social thing–is good, but the execution so far is poor,” he said. “When I tried to send one of my senators an e-mail, I got a cryptic error message. There are other flaws throughout the site as well.”

Granted, You2Gov’s “Direct Democracy 3.0″ will be on partner sites, but if the experience is similar, the company may have trouble coaxing Web site owners and users to its service.

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You2Gov offers services to partner Web sites

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Enterprise 2.0 in the financial sector and how it could have saved the banks (maybe)

So maybe YouTube’s business model won’t be so dependent on advertising after all. In a post on the official Google blog entitled “I Clicked To Buy, And I Liked It” (a nod to singer Katy Perry), the company detailed a new “E-Commerce Platform” strategy that encourages the purchase of music, video, and games on the video-sharing site.

The first step in the roll-out of the E-Commerce Platform is now live for YouTube users in the U.S. It’s a simple affiliate partnership with Amazon MP3 and Apple’s iTunes Store, much like the ones that streaming-music sites like iLike and MySpace Music already have in place: YouTube will be adding purchase links to the digital music retailers for music videos that were uploaded by participating record labels (right now it appears to be limited to EMI Group). This also extends to the Amazon download of the Electronic Arts game Spore, with more game downloads coming down the road.

Over the next few months, YouTube’s E-Commerce Platform will not only expand beyond the U.S., but it will also add more partnerships in the fields of television, film, publishing (e-books, perhaps?) and beyond.

“Our vision is to help partners across all industries–from music, to film, to print, to TV–offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos,” the post on the Google blog explained.

Affiliate partnerships give Google an additional source of revenue for YouTube, which it acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006. Until this point, YouTube had generated revenue strictly through advertising–and it hasn’t exactly been a smash hit. Now, of course, the question is just how much affiliate sales can pull in as an alternate revenue stream.

The news comes on the heels of Google’s announcement that it would be venturing into in-game advertising.

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Google introduces YouTube click-to-buy

E-mail and RSS feed improvements top the list of changes for Opera 9.60, moved out of beta today for Windows and Mac. As noted when the 9.60 beta came out last month, this version of the free browser offers up a multifaceted ”low-bandwidth mode” for Opera Mail and tweaks to the RSS reader.

Updates to Opera Link let users synchronize even more settings.

(Credit: Opera)

The feed preview rolls into Opera’s RSS management a standalone RSS app feature so that users can preview feeds before subscribing to them. The low bandwidth option for Opera Mail, also called M2, does different things for different kinds of accounts. Accessible under the Mail option on the Menubar, POP users will see messages truncated to the first 100 lines of a message, while IMAP users will find that it restricts downloads only to new messages. Both strip out attachment downloads unless otherwise specified.

Both accounts will also benefit from the new Follow/Ignore option. Ignore sets a contact’s e-mail to never download, and Follow does the opposite, always downloading messages from a specific contact. Ignored contacts’ messages are not deleted, just left on your server. Users are expected to manage their own account size limits, though.

Further improvements have also been made to Opera Link, the browser’s synchronization service. It now supports synchronizing typed history and custom search engine preferences. This means that if you’ve typed something into the search or location bar, you can now sync it to any computer that you’re using.

The full changelog can be read here.

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Opera 9.6 focuses on neglected features