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Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Mint seems to have some security issues with email (also how to delete your account)

This whole thing started out with me getting a couple emails like the one above (and reproduced here) it was kinda weird because just the other day i had gotten a strange alert about some school lone I never had and now apparently im looking at a weekly update of someone with $184,559.95 in assets. Kind bad because with all these cool charts and graphs i had given them authorization to pull all the line items of my spending from my bank account. Was my information just floating around in someone else's email inbox? Well looking who the email was addresses to it all looks right and has my correct address so i just went ahead and went into the settings and confirmed the deletion of my account
looks something like above, I was getting tired of the service already... it never updated as frequently as I thought it should and I like to know where my data is going. The only thing I can think of is its some fake accounts and its done to increase traffic to the site as people check whats wrong... anyways its broke and im removing my name from the hat. It did say all my data would be deleted in a few hours, that gives me some peace of mind. Has anybody else seen this wierd behavior? What are your interactions with mint.com?

oh and almost forgot... heres a screenshot of my emails from mint... the highlighted ones are from accounts that aren't mine and below that is the email about a deposit in a account i dont have after I had canceled my account a day earlier




Sunday, November 14, 2010

Microsoft Choice Guard: a BHO for Search Engines

I wanted to do a quick rant on this thing i found when i was installing some Microsoft stuff... i found out theres this cool new software Microsoft is putting out to help us manage our default search provider

Microsoft Choice Guard

So from what i can tell it locks in the search engine and keeps other programs from changing it... now it really does piss me off whenever firefox or chrome start asking to change the default browser but default search engine? i mean cmon, what will it really be used for? keeping bing in its place when someone tries to change to something thats not Bing

Microsoft Choice Guard is a small piece of software that's downloaded during the Windows Live installation process to carry out any changes that you choose to make to your browser settings. If you choose to change your default search engine, Choice Guard looks for any programs on your computer that might interfere with this process and works around them to let you change your default search engine. Choice Guard does this to help ensure that choosing your default search engine is as easy as possible.
The copy from their help page is above... seems like i cool tool doesnt it? i mean who wouldnt install it? I think its crazy that microsoft would put out such a tool but hey they want to keep that .1% search share they bought from yahoo