Week in review: Go-go Google

Google ratcheted up the search wars this week by announcing video archiving, satellite maps for the masses, and even help in finding you a cab.

Google will begin archiving personal video clips as part of its ever-expanding search service, according to co-founder Larry Page, who called the move an "experiment in video blogging."

First unveiled in January, Google Video is an engine that lets people search the text of TV shows. The service scours programming from ABC, C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS and the NBA, among others, making broadcasts searchable. People can't yet watch those videos directly from Google's site. Rather, consumers can search on a term to find the TV shows in which it was mentioned, a still image of the video and closed-captioned text of that particular segment of the program.

Google also added satellite technology to its mapping service, allowing people to get aerial photos of the locations for which they are searching. A searcher can enter an address and click on the "Satellite" link to view an area, zoom in or see neighboring locations.

Satellite imaging company Keyhole, which Google acquired in October, provided the technology that allowed the search giant to launch the new mapping feature.

The search giant also added real-time stock prices to its lineup of free offerings, along with a service for locating taxis and shuttles. The Ride Finder service helps people determine which service to choose by displaying the location of various shuttle, limousine and taxi companies' vehicles.

Gone phishing
Google was also busy on the security front, testing phishing protection for its free Web-based e-mail to alert people to potential fraud. When a Gmail user opens a suspected phishing message, the software displays a large red dialog box that warns the user the message may not be from whom it claims to be.

Gmail will also remove all live hyperlinks from suspect HTML-based e-mails to protect people's systems from potentially fraudulent Web sites. The addresses of the sites can still be accessed by examining the original code of the e-mail, a feature that Gmail provides.

While the growth of new phishing attacks has slowed, attackers are apparently busy building more sophisticated traps and using advanced technology to perpetrate online fraud. Last week, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, an online fraud watchdog, reported that the number of phishing e-mails it tracked between January and February grew by only 2 percent.

That figure seems to mark a significant shift in the threat, given that the average growth rate has been 26 percent per month since July 2004. But during the January-February period, phishing attacks also became more sophisticated, experts said, with advances in phishing schemes that use e-mail and the creation of fraudulent Web pages that appear almost identical to their legitimate counterparts.

Meanwhile, police in Estonia have arrested a man suspected of stealing millions of euros from bank accounts across Europe, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald. The unnamed 24-year-old is believed to have infected hundreds of computers with a Trojan horse program to obtain usernames and passwords from them.

Flashpoint for Flash
Macromedia took center stage at the Flashforward2005 conference in San Francisco to promise significant changes in its Flash animation software. Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch described the bells and whistles in store for Flash authors in the company's upcoming release of the Flash 8 player, code-named Maelstrom, and the authoring tool, code-named 8Ball. Lynch also outlined plans for FlashCast, a new system in development to help mobile phone carriers run a variety of Flash-based applications.

Updates due this year in Flash 8 include both interface changes, to make things easier for designers familiar with other Macromedia applications, such as the Dreamweaver Web-authoring tool, and eye candy for end users, which Macromedia hopes will