American Idol Season 7 is on and the Final 12 have been just announced. However, that is not what I’m gonna discuss here. American Idol has been associated with iTunes or vice-versa since this season. And this has actually spawned a business of its own. Take a look at this example. The contestants perform a song of their choice based on a particular theme. It was the 80′s theme during the Top 16 week, and Jason Castro performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. Simon Cowell announced that Jeff Buckley’s version of the same song is his favorite. Now here’s the business. Not only did Jason Castro’s performance hit the high note on the iTunes download charts, but it also brought Jeff Buckley’s single to the limelight. It features now at no.2 of iTunes download charts, and no.1 is another Idol performance, David Archuleta’s rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine”. Music from Idol is available for download on iTunes for 0.99$ and Videos for 1.99$. Apple should actually be very happy with the association with Fox Network’s Star Reality TV show which has not only brought more music to the catalog, but also brought old tracks back to life. And who’s the winner here- Apple for sure!!!

I am proud of my GMail which has a very sensible Spam Filter. But this time it was Firefox which saved the day for me. Not that I didn’t know it, but it doesn’t hurt to praise Firefox. I received a mail from alert@hdfcbank.com ( HDFC is one of the most established banks of India) with the Subject Line reading:

HDFC BANK ALERT. The mail surely looked like a spam, but was surprisingly in my Inbox. What it had to say is shown in the pic below.

The Link shown here (netbanking.hdfcbank.com) actually redirects to a marcharbel’s org site, which I’m not going to link to.The site has been disable by now, but just tried hitting it (in Firefox) and was pleased to see the results. Here’s what happened.

Hence proved, Firefox rules. Public Service Announcement: Please enable your status bars for your browsers. For any suspicious URLs given in mails, please check the actual URL to which the link provided in the mail is actually pointing it. It appears in the status bar when you have the mouse over the link. Best Security practice: Never reveal financial details like bank account no, User ID, password, PIN no, DOB, personal details in mails. And yes, if you feel any sort of suspicion, it is best to Google for it first. There are scores of websites providing information on such scams and all of them are indexed by Google. Until next time, Surf Safe!