Google Employees Read your Gmail?

Google Employees Read your Gmail?

All your private and confidential emails are stored in your Gmail mailbox but are they secure? Can a Google employee working on the Gmail product read your messages?

In theory, the answer could be yes. Christopher Nguyen, who was earlier responsible for Google Apps operations at Google, shared this on Quora:

A small number of GMail related engineers have access to the servers as a matter of necessity to do their jobs; a very small number of people actually access the contents as a matter of necessity to do their jobs, and even then, almost always only the associated metadata.

The rest have to file a request and justify any access they ever need, which is extremely rare. All have to sign paperwork re users’ privacy at the risk of dismissal & legal action, knowing that whatever they do is discoverable. And ultimately, an internal culture of respecting users’ privacy helps keep one another in check.

Google also serves contextual text ads in Gmail and these ads are triggered based on the content of the email message that your currently reading. Obviously it is the bots that are scanning your Gmail messages for relevant keywords but Microsoft, with a hope that some Gmail users will shift to Hotmail, is using this point to target Google on privacy.

Some email services, like Gmail, actually read the contents of your mail (both sent and received, even if you aren’t a Gmail user but just sending to someone who is) in order to decide what kind of ads to serve up to you. They may call it “scanning” and attempt to equate it with less invasive activities like “checking for spam” but it’s quite different. For you, and the people you send mail to, it’s not spam, it’s personal.

Microsoft has also released a video, titled the Gmail Man, highlighting this Gmail behavior. Microsoft uploaded the video to YouTube, a platform owned by Google, and it isn’t therefore surprising that the video has garnered more dislikes than likes – after all, most YouTube users are also Gmail users and they aren’t buying Microsoft’s argument.

QR Codes Effects | QR Codes with images | creating QR Codes image mix effect | Embed Images and Make your QR Codes Look Different

QR Codes Effects | QR Codes with images | creating QR Codes image mix effect | Embed Images and Make your QR Codes Look Different

What is the first image that comes to your mind when you think of a QR Code? A confusing maze of black rectangular patterns arranged on a white background?

True, most QR Codes are available in black and white but they don’t have to be that way.

There’s an excellent online QR generator at qrhacker.com that lets you create colorful QR codes and what makes this tool different is that it provides you can option to embed photographs and logo images to your QR codes. You can even edit the colors of individual pixels that form the code.

To give you an example, here’s a QR code made using a picture of Zuckerberg and if you scan the code with an app on your phone, say Google Goggles, it should take you to Facebook.

Tricks for Linux Commands | important commands for Linux Users

Tricks for Linux Commands | important commands for Linux Users | Linux and wordpress | Wordpress Tricks on Linux 



1. Linux comes in several flavors. The following commands will help you determine which Linux distro is installed on your host, what’s the version of your Linux kernel, the CPU model, processor speed, etc.

$ cat /etc/issue
$ cat /proc/version
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
2. Find the total amount of RAM available on your Linux box and how much is free.

$ free -mto
3. The command cd.. takes you up one directory level but cd – will move you to the previous working directory. Or use the command pwd to print the full path of the current directory that you can copy-paste later into the shell.

$ cd –
$ pwd
4. The command history will show a list of all the recently executed commands and each will have an associated number. Use !<number> to execute that command again. Or, if the history is too long, use grep to search a particular command.

$ !<command number>
$ history | grep <some command name>
5. You can remove any particular command from the shell history by number.

$ history –d <command number>
6. If you made an error while typing a command name, just enter the correct command name and then use !* to reuse all the previous arguments.

$ <command> !*
7. Re-run a command but after replacing the text abc in the command with xyz.

$ ^abc^xyz
8. This will list the size of all sub-folders of a directory in KB, MB or GB.

$ du –sh */
9. A better version of the ls command that displays file sizes in KB and MB.

$ ls –gho
10. You can use man <command> to learn more about the syntax of a command but what if you don’t remember the name of the command itself? Use apropos then.

$ apropos <search phrase>
Also see: Print Files on Linux Remotely using Dropbox

11. Compare the content of two text files to see what has changed.

$ diff wp-config.php wp-config.php.old
12. Find lines that are common in any two text files.

$ grep –Fx –f file-A.html file-B.html
13. Compare the content of two directories recursively.

$ diff –urp /old-wp-directory /new-wp-directory
14. Find all files under the current directory that are larger than 10 MB in size.

$ find . -size +10M -exec du -h {} \;
15. Find all files on the system that have been modified in the last 2 days.

$ find . –type f –mtime -2
16. Find all files on the system that were modified less than 10 minutes ago

$ find . –type f –mmin -10
17. Find all PHP files that contain a particular word or phrase.

$ find . -name "*.php" -exec grep -i -H "matt mullenweg" {} \;
18. When copying or moving files, Linux won’t show a warning if you are overwriting an existing file. Therefore always use the –i switch to prevent overwrites.

$ cp –i abc.txt xyz.txt
19. Backup the content of the current folder into a tarball file using gzip compression.

$ tar zcfv backup.tar.gz /wp-directory/
20. Find processes with the highest CPU usage. Then use kill –9 pid to kill a process.

$ ps aux | sort -nrk 3 | head
21. Execute the following command in your Apache logs directory to determine hits coming from individual IP addresses.

$ cat access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort –n | tail
22. Monitor hits from Google bots to your website in real-time.

$ tail –f access.log | grep Googlebot
23. To find all files and web pages on your site that return a 404 error, run the following command in the Apache logs directory.

$ awk '$9 == 404 {print $7}' access.log | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
24. Find the 100 most popular pages of your site using Apache server logs again.

$ cat access.log | awk '{print $7}' |sort |uniq -c |sort -n |tail -n 100
25. Quickly find and replace a string in or more files.

$ find . -type f -name "*.php" -exec sed -i 's/wordpress/WordPress/' {} \;

manage 2 PC by using one keyboard and mouse | multiple computers with one mouse keyboard | Control Two Computers with a Single Keyboard and Mouse

manage 2 PC by using one keyboard and mouse | multiple computers with one mouse keyboard | Control Two Computers with a Single Keyboard and Mouse

Let’s say you have two computers on your desk and, in an effort to save space, you want to operate them all using a single pair of keyboard and mouse.

There are two solutions here. If the computers are connected to the same network, you can use software programs like Input Director or Synergy to operate them with a common keyboard and mouse. In the other scenario where the machines aren’t connected, you can get a KVM switch to share one keyboard and mouse between them.

A Better Alternative – Mouse without Borders
My work setup is quite similar to what you see in the illustration above and I have been using the Input Director software all this while to control the two Windows PCs with one keyboard and mouse. Input Director is reliable and (mostly) works without problems though it does require some understanding of the Master and Slave concept.

Last week, I switched to a new Windows utility called Mouse without Borders and find it so much better than my previous solution. Wondering why?

The best part about Mouse without Borders is how easy it is to set up. You install the utility on all your Windows computers, enter the security code provided by the software and your computers will get linked. This is almost as simple as pairing a set of Bluetooth devices.

Once installed, you can not only use the same keyboard and mouse across your computers in a seamless manner but you can also drag and drop files between them. This is so convenient. Earlier, I had to create shared network folders or had to use Dropbox to transfer files but now I can simple drag them from desktop A to desktop B as if they were on the same computer.

With the Mouse without Borders utility installed, you can also send screen capture of one desktop to another by pressing a hotkey or from the system tray menu. After having used the tool for about a week, I never experienced a crash though I did have problems sharing clipboard especially when the copy operation was done inside a Flash application.

Mouse without Borders can only be used to control Windows based computers. If your work environment involves a mix of Windows, Linux or Mac computers, Synergy could still be the only good choice for you.