College Football Pick'em

The new year is upon us and so are the BCS bowl games.

As I write, USC dominated the Rose bowl bombarding Michigan 32-18. This should silence all Michigan fans.

No more bickering on how the second best team was denied a chance to play for the national championship and how Florida sneaked in and blah blah blah ...

Imagine the backlash that would have been if Michigan beat USC and Florida lost to the Buckeyes by more than 3 points. Thank God we don't have to see that day.

This year, like every year I played the College Football Pick'em. Though I was intent on being more serious this year, I still missed Week 1. It's fun to do the predictions every week. The point spread makes it tough though.

I did ok this season. Could have been much better. I am planning on doing some betting starting next season. Wish me good luck.

College Football is real fun. Looking forward to the next regular season and of course pick'em.

Phishing Protection

IE7 and Firefox 2.0 have good mechanisms built into them to protect the unwary/casual user from phishing attacks.

Whenever I receive emails from financial establishments, I am extra cautious on what I do with them. I would rather type-in the url than click on some link in my inbox unless it has some state information on the url. In those circumstances, I double check to verify where the link actually takes me.

One of these days I received an email in my yahoo inbox supposedly from Chase. I recognized it right away as a phishing email.

I would generally delete the mail. But with the advertised phishing protection mechanisms of both the browsers, I thought may be I should test to see how these fare.

.. and both of them already had the link in their phishing databases. Responses are below.

FireFox


IE


I submitted the link to Phishtank some days later, but the site had already vanished and was unverifiable.

So guys, always beware. Help yourself by being cautious.

To learn more about the actual implementation, click here for IE and here for Firefox