Typo?

Typo is an abbreviation used to denote a typographical error or an error in a typeset. But now it's commonly used to define all spelling mistakes. For bloggers like us, it's a common thing, though we try hard not to do such mistakes.

Photo: AP Photo by John Raoux

Photo: Ken Thornsley, NASA

Look at these images closely. They were taken when the Endeavour space shuttle was taken to it's launch pad today. Look carefully at the banner. Can you see a difference between the two photos? First one says 'Go Endeavor'. But the space shuttle is named 'Endeavour' after 18th century explorer James Coock's ship HM Bark Endeavour. The mistake was noticed & was corrected as seen in the second photo, where the banner reads 'Go Endeavour'.
So typos can happen even at that level? Please bare with me if I have done any...

Let down by a friend...

The first two things I do after returning form a busy days work are, check my email, then check site statistics of visitors to this blog. After doing these two today, I loaded up my blog in another tab just to check whether all is well after the changes I've made to layout during past few weeks.
Nothing was special, or is it? There is a message at the end of the web page from Firefox's NoScript Add-on. That was odd. I have enabled all the scripts from my blog. Still there is another new java script that has not been enabled, originating from my own blog!! See the screen capture below.
As it was not there yesterday when I loaded the blog, I just thought of doing a Google search to get to know more about it.
I was shocked to read the search results. I was shocked more than on that day that I had my blogger account switched (see Blogger busted... & Blogger busted - part II).
My trusted site statistics tracking service, sitemeter had deceived me. Please read this article SiteMeter Installing SpyWare In Your Website?. It seems they have sold the trust we kept on them to a third party. I am ashamed to be associated with them.
As bloggers, most of us rely on site statistics tracking services to keep track of the visitors to our blogs (and of course to other web pages). We check on statistics regularly to see just how many read our sites, what search quarries bring traffic to our sites etc..
But it seems sitemeter had been tracking all our blog readers' web browsing habits with the help from specificclick.net. Thats a bit unethical to say the least.
So please read Things you should know before using Sitemeter. At the end of it you can see how you can remove tracking cookies that have been installed from Sitemeter's partner specificclick.net. If you have visited this blog earlier or have visited another site that used their service, please try block their cookies, as they may have already placed their cookies in your browser.
Dear friends of the blogsphere, if you are using sitemeter, then you are exposing your site visitors to being spied upon. Take care of your valued site visitors!!! I have already...

Blogger busted - part II

The things are getting out of control.

If you haven't seen the earlier post Blogger busted, please read it first.
Today I got an email from the owner of the blog that I talked about in the previous post. It seems he had got stuck in my blogger dashboard. Please see the comments in that post or click here.
Today I could login to my blogger dashboard with out any problem. Well thats a relief...
But not for long... I clicked on my profile to edit some details. Alas, my profile name was different.
It is happeing again. It's somebody else's profile. See first image below. To see the blogs he had published, I just clicked on 'select blogs to display' link. Well the next screen was even worse (second image). It belonged to another person. So now I have access to parts of three other blogger accounts. All this seems to be from Sri Lanka or at least Sri Lanka & India.
Still by clicking link to dashboard from that profile, i could access my profile.
Why is this happening to me? Hope others will not change any settings , if they have access to my blogger dashboard.

Is any of you blogger users out there having the same problem?
I had no problem with this blogger account for years & it seems all these blogger accounts that I have access to are newer ones.
I don't know to whom I should report this to. We have already reported this to blogger support.

Why me? Why is this thing happening to me?
I am posting this in a hurry, because I may not be able to log into Blogger next time.
Hope this will be resolved soon by Google engineers!

Blogger busted...

Today I had the shock of my life when I tried to log into Blogger to put up a new post. When I typed in my user name & password to blogger login page, the blogger dashboard looked bit weird. To my shock there was only one blog (rather than the 3, of which 2 are for testing purposes), & it's name also appeared to be so long Adventures of Scotty White. Then only I saw that the user's email address is different from my one. It was some c*****.s**********@gmail.com (see images below). In this account, I could do some things like put up a new post, change blogger layout, etc, etc. But it asked for user name & password again, when I tried to change important settings like changeling profile info, etc.
Well first I was bit excited to get to somebody else's account by chance, but when I got to know that repeated attempts at logging in to my account took me to this same account, which belonged to somebody else, I was bit shocked.
Well may be it's my destiny to start writing this Scotty's adventure...
Finally I managed to log into my blogger account, but when I typed in the URL to see the Scotty's blog (the other blog I was logged into by mistake), it still appeared as if the author of that other blog has logged in (see 3^rd image below), rather than showing my email address.
I wonder how much our accounts at Google are secure. For it being a free service we can not expect more. And also I wonder whether any body else went through this same experience.