It has been revealed that Google are about to up the Gmail storage to 2 gigabytes up from the previous 1 gigabyte. Not that long ago, Gmail threw the webmail world into chaos by offering a (at that time) unheard of level of free storage. After the announcement, Yahoo, Microsoft and the other big webmail providers upped their own offerings to similar high levels (though my 25MB Hotmail account seems pretty sad by comparison). Now Google will once more take the bull by the horns and increase their limit to 2 gigabytes, which would I imagine, make it the uncontested leader in online webmail storage.

In other Google news, they are currently embroiled in numerous lawsuits with companies objecting to Googles Adsense system using their trademarks as keywords for sale. And this is just after they lost a case in France against a media company that objected to their content being used on Google’s news aggregation service. I don’t understand that at all, Google news sends us a couple of thousand extra hits every month, I don’t understand why a media company wouldn’t want as many people to see their content as possible.

Two new security flaws have been found in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook. The two flaws are classed as “high severity”, mostly because they are allow a remote compromise to take place, meaning that a PC can be compromised from anywhere on the Internet. A remote compromise means that the nasty sorts can then use your computer for anything they like, which can include as spam gateways, as bot machines used to attack servers or just as a means for them to get your banking passwords and such.

Once Microsoft has had a chance to investigate and respond to the flaws, Eeye will provide further details.

WordPress is a very popular Open Source PHP blog software, one which we use ourselves. It comes as a something of a shock to hear that it’s founder, Matt Mullenweg is alleged to have used the WordPress website to game the search engines by containing cloaked advertising words. He was apparently paid a flat rate by Hot Nacho Inc to hide the terms in the pages. While I strongly disagree with his decision to do this, based on the information as we know it currently, I don’t think it should reflect badly on the WordPress blog application itself which is a professional quality piece of software. Google will be removing all of the questionable pages from it’s index as a result of this apparent lapse in judgement.

Google has given Mozilla based browsers like Firefox a little present. Basically when a Firefox user does a Google search, Google will preload the most likely result for you so that if you click on the first result, you will see the page much more quickly then you otherwise would.

Not everyone is happy with the functionality, many believe that it could be a waste of bandwidth and a possible future security concern. I’m of the opinion that as long as they give you an option to turn it on, (and leave it off by default) then it’s a useful additional service to Mozilla users. My own tendency is to do searches based on lists of words, so it’s quite unusual when the first result is the one I want, the result is that this is not likely to be of that much use to me and might waste bandwidth (which is why I’d like the option to turn it on or off.) The prefetch feature isn’t available on non-Mozilla browsers like Internet Explorer as they don’t currently support it.

What I’d like to see, is a Google Firefox extension that works with Firefox and Google’s results page so that checkboxes are put next to each result, you then mark all the checkboxes next to possible positive results and then click a “Open in tabs” button and have all the check marked pages open in new tabs. That would really speed up my search experience.

MySQL have released the 5.0.3 beta of their popular relational database for UNIX, Win and OSX. The latest beta has some features that bring it more in line with commercial database offerings like views, stored procedures and triggers. The beta is due to become stable in the second quarter and you can find more information at the MySQL dev zone. The downloads page, should you wish to try the new beta yourself, can be found here.

There are people with legitimate need to run Windows Server (like the boss will fire you if you don’t). Today Microsoft released Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1). It offers increased security. You should certainly peddle right over to MS and get a copy if you are running their server software. They expect to shortly release a similiar update for their small business server as well.

A couple of articles in the Register and Cnet claim that iPods are targets for bandits in muggings. It wasn’t that long ago that a pair of Jordon shoes (okay I guess it was a while ago) or a Starter Jacket marked you as a target for thiefs. I guess it makes sense that an iPod might be next. What is interesting that two articles from opposite sides of the world “coincidentally” note the same thing. I am wondering, is is a coincidence, or a scare tactic from some unknown source to discourage use of iPods?

Me thinks me smells a rat.