Can you trust download.com?

Was reading about the Security Fix for PuTTY dated Feb 20, 2005, I stumbled upon this on their download page:

2004-12-23 Trojan PuTTY installer circulating

We've been alerted to a trojan PuTTY 0.56 installer that was posted on CNET's download.com for about a fortnight (now removed). We are informed it installed various spyware.

The file length was 509860 bytes (much shorter than any installer we've ever released) and the md5sum was 49550e478e9dd008998c2c5294a884c5.

We'd like to take this opportunity to encourage everyone to verify the signatures of PuTTY downloads before executing them. Details are on our Keys page.

Another solid proof that you cannot trust downloads.com and similar sites. Not that they wrote the program, they are just storing it to be downloaded, but still Spyware gets inside there copy. Whew...!!

Adblock options explained...

Gathered the following mostly from the forums.

Obj-Tabs:

This would place a translucent tab next to Flash movies and similar Objects, which can be clicked for blocking.

Collapse Blocked Elements:

Adblock will remove the space left where the blocked Object was.

Check Parent Links:

Adblock will also filter on the URL the ads point to, and not only their own URL. That is, the objects from a blocked server will also be blocked when this option is enabled.

Site Blocking:

If enabled, it will display Blocked Sites. If disabled, it shows the site in your filter list, but will not display any Objects.

See this for more info.

Gmail Down?

Tue Mar 1 12:43:53 EST 2005:

From the looks of it, incoming mails are not working at gmail. I could send out emails, but have not gotten the replies -- realised this when I called them up.

This is from the web interface of gmail.

Anyways, Gmail is in Beta, so cannot bitch about this aloud.