It's one of those things that you read about, but are never really sure about: you think "maybe he was doing something fishy, and isn't tellling it straight in the public account of the incident".
So I'll try to stick to "just the facts".
A few weeks ago, I dug up some old book reviews I'd done, and posted to Facebook, and opened a site here:
http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/ as a way of collecting them. Naturally, I also added Amazon referral links, because, hey, it helps feed my reading habit! Last month I got enough to buy two whole Kindle books, so we're not exactly talking about "get rich quick" territory here. We're not even talking about anything remotely close to my day job, for that matter. But hey, if I can get a little bit extra to spend on books, it's nice. The reviews were basically quick notes on books I read. Nothing that I or the rest of humanity can't get along without, but I felt like writing up a little something for myself and people I know on the internet - maybe it'll help someone else find an interesting book to read.
Several days later, I believe on October 8th, I woke up to find my phone was 'not signed in to Google', and, after repeated attempts, wouldn't sign in. Same thing with my Nexus 7. Logging in to my computer, in something of a cold sweat at this point, I find I can't get into Gmail or anything else, either. Luckily, on the computer, Google's system did redirect me to a page where they mentioned suspicious activity, and gave me the chance to reactivate things by sending an SMS to my phone. This did work quickly, and did a little bit to alleviate some of my stress. I understand that locking things down quickly is probably to my benefit as well as theirs in the event of an actual security breach of someone's account: it keeps the attacker from doing any more damage. However, it was sure a bad way to start a Monday morning.
However, the actual 'blog' (sorry, I hate the word!) was still blocked. It too has a form to fill out to prove that you're human. Although: as a computer guy, you'd think that with all the clever people at Google, they would be able to tell from my access patterns to the site, browser footprint, IP addresses and so forth, that...well, I am me. In any event though, they promised to review the blog within two days. So, I waited patiently. A week later, still nothing. Then, the next day, I went back to check on the status, and they had reset the review request: it no longer said anything about October 8th, when I had originally made the reinstatement request. So I filled in their form again, asking to have my blog back. That was yesterday, we'll see what happens next.
As far as I can tell, I did not violate their actual terms of conditions, which say nothing about referral links:
http://www.blogger.com/content.g
Since the people at Google are loth to speak with their users directly, it seems as if one of the best ways of getting support is to complain loudly and publicly about this kind of shennanigan.
And to forestall the somewhat inevitable comments on anything related to Google: 1) Yes, I know I signed an agreement where they say they can do whatever the hell they want and I can f**k off if I don't like it. Try and do anything on line with a major company and not get a contract like that, or for even more entertainment value, try and negotiate the contract with t he company. Good luck. If you don't say yes, you're pretty much on your own; there doesn't seem to be much of a market for "more humane terms and conditions" out there. 2) I know, I know, relying on the Google beast is a great way to set yourself up for a big fall if anything ever goes wrong, because it's impossible to appeal, or pretty much even to talk with a human. But with a limited amount of time in my life, to date, Google has been a pretty good deal. I suppose it's something of a "black swan" situation: everything seems fine until one day WHACK, and Google pulls the carpet from under your legs.
Conclusions?
Well, I hope someone out there can help me recover my content. I wrote it myself, and I would like to save my book reviews somewhere.
What alternatives are there to the Google colossus? Not too many that I can see that are anywhere at all as convenient.
Edit: 2012-10-17: I don't know what did it, but they have reinstated the site. Strange and disconcerting, but I guess things are ok for the time being. Thanks to whoever it was at Google that finally had a look.
So, a couple of days ago, I came home tired after a intense weekend of learning Akonadi and hacking on KDEPIM.
At each meal, we attended 12 people, but it wasn t the same people every time. And a couple of people participated remotely.
Several people, including me, got their feet wet in kdepim & akonadi code. Talks about the future with Qt 6 and Qt 7 and Akonadi 3 were also held in the corners.
Hopefully, others will tell more closely about what they did, including fixing kmail memory usage to not grow until all headers of all emails was in memory and improving the address completion job to help filling in to/cc/bcc fields.
Personally, I started off several times with the same issue. Not doing several synchronous calls from KMail to Akonadi during message writing and sending. On my way, I cleaned up some code and started over a couple of times. And the code is still a work in progress on my laptop. But the most important synchronous call is in that WIP patch now actually asynchronous \o/. There is still work to do on that area though and I hope to get around polishing it and finishing it this month somehow. I currently have function names like second_half_of_generateCryptoMessages and this_function_should_be_renamed .
And next up will Andras Mantia hopefully blog about his accomplishments. And poke some other person for a blog post.
Oh. and if you like developers taking a weekend or so out of their busy schedule to meet up for hacking, please consider supporting KDE by Joining the game
A few days ago I wrote 
This weekend there is going to be a lot happening in Prague - 
Phishing is a fraud technique that consists in reproducing the content of a
targeted website, directing users to it, and recording their credentials when
they log into your website. It is like fishing fish with fake food, only you
phish humans with fake websites.
Well, I have a good news for the phishers: people are using more and more
smartphones, and mobile browsers are making your job really easy.
In fact, many regular smartphone user simply have no way to tell your fake
website apart from the real one.For instance, this is what my bank website looks like in my desktop browser,
and what a corresponding phishing website would look like:
The GNOME infrastructure runs a 
* In case you re not watching my twitter (and other social medias), I ve moved to none other than Bangalore. I m working with 
I'm off to Spain to attend and speak at the 
I have a Macbook3,1 with the following SATA controller:
these are the RC bugs I've worked on during the last week:
My 
