Online Services | Technology Blog

Paypal anti-laundering safety regulations

December 2nd, 2008

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I have been an active Paypaler for a while now, and I was surprised when Paypal sent me a letter asking me to verify that indeed I am not laundering money. Do I need to send photos of my apartment so it is apparent I do not have a printing press at home?

Nope, I needed to send some ID and utility bills. The process was fairly simple, I took a photo of my phone bill, my AmEx report and both sides of my National ID. In the Paypal documentation they say a phone bill is not ok, but since my apartment is not on my name I don’t pay bills per se. Nevertheless, I sent these all off.

After some mucking about (the form was not the best), Paypal accepted these documents and this, as a lot of government and verification processes puzzles me a bit. I mean I could’ve Photoshopped all that right? Unless they actually checked with my government and bank and carrier service, which I’m sure they didn’t, they replied in like 2 days, they can’t be truly sure.

Filtering News By Keyword

November 29th, 2008

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Having subscriptions to hundreds of RSS news feeds can sometimes mean news overkill. This is especially true for times when a big new application or service gets announced because these usually get picked up by more than 20% of all the tech sites out there. News Filtering - or keyword filtering - describes the process of monitoring selected news sources and becoming active when a keyword was discovered. The action can be positive or negative depending on the configuration done by the user.

One prime example where keyword filtering can be useful is a website that several authors write for. If you are only interested in one author you could use the author’s name as the keyword so that only the author’s stories land in your RSS reader.

Notify.me has been mentioned on nearly every tech blog out there in the past weeks. It is basically a keyword filtering service that monitors RSS news feeds and informs the user of posts that match the selected keywords.

Access Blocked Websites By Email

November 28th, 2008

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Many companies, schools or universities love to block popular websites. A large proportion of computer users however start digging around to find ways to overcome the block instead of concentrating on work. Many make use of web proxies to access blocked websites. Proxies however come and go rapidly and get blocked very fast as well. This means that the user is spending some time of his week hunting for working proxies that will display the website that has been blocked correctly.

Rediff has announced a new product that is promising to be an alternative. It is basically an email service that can send back html emails to the user. The user initiates the process in his email client by sending a specifically crafted email to the WebinMail service which will render the requested webpage and send it back to the email account as a html email.

WebinMail states that the service is currently only working in Microsoft Outlook or Blackberry devices but it did work fine in Mozilla Thunderbird as well and might work fine in most email clients supporting html messages.

Google Reader Essentials Userscript

November 27th, 2008

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Helvetireader is a minimal Google Reader interface theme supplied as a userscript that turns Google Reader into an optimized feed reader that is displaying only the essentials. It was especially designed to view feeds in the expanded view using keyboard shortcuts.

A userscript compatible browser is needed for the new interface theme to work. Long time users of Google Reader will need a few minutes before they grow accustomed to the changes. Many would call them drastic and some might say that it is to minimalistic.

At its ore lies a CSS file that can be used to customize the display further to suit individual needs. The main advantage of this userscript is that it puts the focus on the feed items by removing unnecessary buttons and items in Google Reader.

Shrinkomatic URL Shortening With A Twist

November 26th, 2008

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Ghacks author Daniel Pataki is pretty busy these days with all the new Internet websites and services that he is creating. His latest service is called Shrinkomatic. It is an url shortening service with one interesting unique feature.

But first things first. To shorten an url one would simply head over to the Shrinkomatic website and paste the url in the form on the main page. The service creates a unique short url in the form shrinkomatic.com/xyz which will redirect to the original url. This is definitively not the shortest url for an url shortening service but any name that is easy to remember should be fine for most users because that’s what url shortening is all about.

If you sign up for an account you can manage all the urls that have been created with the service. The list does contain a very nice and maintainable overview of the created urls. It also provides access to statistics detailing how many times the link was accessed (url trackin).

Typealizer: What Type is That Blog

November 23rd, 2008

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Online services that tell you things you already know seem to be becoming increasingly popular. Some analyze your browsing history to tell you if you are male or female while others analyze websites and tell you what kind of person you are.

The author’s at Ghacks are Duty Fullfillers according to the analysis of Typealizer. Duty Fullfillers are the responsible and hardworking type that are careful about getting facts right and reluctant to take risks. Rarst on the other hand is a guardian, one of the organizing and efficient type who are attuned to setting goals and managing available resources to get the job done.

Most technology blogs seem to fall into those two categories, think Lifehacker (Duty Fullfillers) or Download Squad (Guardians). Typealizer works best with blogs but it can actually be used on many websites that are not blogs as well. Some websites cannot be processed at the moment including CNN but most English or Swedisch websites and blogs should return a result. (Perez Hilton turned out to be detected as a Thai blog..)