LOL.

Image: imgur.

Yesterday, I read in Mashable that big Redmond released the newest beta adventure for their upstart search engine, Bing. I wasn’t originally planning on posting anything about this, because it’s non-news, but it’s been irking me all day.

So what was this release? They’ve apparently come up with a visual search. This idea all on its own isn’t so bad, it’s even novel, and I think it’s worth a shot just to see how it goes, but that’s not the issue here.

The issue is this: In order to use this experimental search, and that’s bold for a reason, you must install Silverlight. Really Microsoft? You want to try to force the most unwanted of all media software in the history of media software on the public just to try an experimental feature for your crappy search engine?

Try it yourself: Bing Visual Search.

In what universe, exactly, is Microsoft living? Becuase it’s certainly not this one. They don’t seem to have the simplest grasp on reality — not one decision they make seems to make any sort of business sense.

I’m glad it really doesn’t affect me personally, since I absolutely shun any shred of the garbage they push as software. That doesn’t mean that I’m not bothered when I see it happen, considering most people do actually use their rubbish. I’ll end my rant now, before it goes all Dennis Miller and consumes the rest of my database.

This vile competition is on the level of tearing a teddy bear out of a child’s arms and then ripping it apart into a pile of fuzzy remains on the spot.

- Rosa Golijan

To sum it up, what could have originally been a great thing has turned into a sick, twisted marketing ploy. Microsoft set up a competition, complete with public, popular voting, to decide which children’s hospitals would receive (and more importantly, not receive) a Microsoft-funded gameroom. Maybe the PR Guru’s who bought and paid for the ridiculously misleading Laptop Hunters adverts have finally lost their minds. Maybe I’ve been right for the last decade and Microsoft truly is just plain evil. Either way, even the most die-hard loyalist can’t deny how wrong this entire endeavor is.

Again, head over to Gizmodo to read the full story.

I’m not about to lie to you. Google Wave gets me so excited that I feel like a schoolgirl. I’ve never even been a schoolgirl before, so that’s an odd feeling. Wave’s like that.

So it’s not difficult to imagine how giddy I was when Mashable posted about Google’s surprise blog update that actually named a date for selective release. It went a little something like this:

In other news: this morning we announced that we plan to start extending the Google Wave preview beyond developers on September 30th. This will take place on wave.google.com rather than the separate “sandbox” instance we are currently using, and we plan to involve about 100,000 users. In addition to the developers already using Wave, we will invite groups of users from the hundreds of thousands who offered to help report bugs when they signed up on wave.google.com.

This got my heart racing. A couple of months ago, wave.google.com popped up out of the ether, with nothing more than a video and a button to request invite. The Internet imploded in the ruckus and I promptly requested mine, as well as included the lyrics to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (in their entirety) in the comment box as a gift. I also unabashedly pronounced my love of the people at Google for what they’d done over the years. If that sounds odd, it’s because they asked people to include anything they wanted in the form, to include creative ASCII art. For the “Massive Dynamic” sort of company they’ve become, the people working there are still just like us. That’s a big reason I support them the way I do.

The imminent release of Wave is extremely nostalgic. I was in the 8th grade when I signed up for an invite to the (then) mysterious and new GMail. It’s surprised me greatly that people still shy away from the service, usually citing worries about privacy. These same users are usually Hotmail account holders. Ironic? I think it is, at least marginally so, considering these people are saying that they trust Microsoft more with their intimate details than Google, which of course leads to a flame-war that I’m not about to step into.

My point is this:

Google has come a long way since GMail was introduced. My friends who said I was foolish for signing up for a new service that saves and catalogues my data were later eating their words. Over time most of the stigma attached to Google’s operation of GMail has melted away, to be replaced by due respect for a truly fantastic email service. A service that ties its users into dozens of other Google developments by using one common login. A common login that can now double as a verified identity to the world’s largest Web-based presence by linking Knol with your Google Profile. I don’t see Microsoft offering this kind of service. Twitter requires that a user be a bona fide celebrity in order to get an account verified. Google only requires that you’re you.

Wave promises to revamp the way we use the Web in ways previously unexplored. GMail changed the way we email, Wave wants to replace it. That may be a little ambitious, considering huge numbers of people will reenact the shyness period that followed GMail. That’s fine, since there are plenty of other people who want in. So if you suddenly feel an urge to jump out of your chair on September 30th and start dancing, don’t be ashamed. I’ll hopefully be doing it proudly at that very moment.

Let’s be honest, Skype is a great service with a valuable chat system built into it, but sometimes it kind of sucks. There’s just no better way to put it, but griping about Skype in general could take pages, so we’re just going to laugh at this beauty of a spam-scam instead.

Main lol Factor: I’m Not Running Windows

The way skype chats work is that the name of the party you’re chatting with takes up the whole menu bar of the chat-window. In this case, the window suddenly looks very official because it’s now (rather ominously) named “Registry Security.” It’s partly what makes this scam so well-engineered. If I had been running Windows, this would have looked similar to an official notice from Microsoft. That’s the first thing they did right when they cooked up this scheme.

The other two parts that make up the Trifecta are the fact that the scammer managed to register a domain that looks extremely trustworthy (updatealert.net) and the well-polished presentation of the scam itself. They actually put some effort into mimicking real malware warnings.

The sad fact is that many people would actually be fooled by this. It looks legit enough for people to suddenly forget the fact that Microsoft wouldn’t contact them via Skype.

Here’s what Norton had to say about updatealert.net

Image: Norton SafeWeb