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Gmail delivery errors divulge confidential information

In the last two weeks, my Gmail account has received messages from the Methacton School District in Eagleville, PA, referring to the upcoming "Body Worlds Exhibition at the Franklin Institute," from a headhunter about an opening for a National Sales Manager at a manufacturer of "Quality Central Heating Appliances," and from the Mystery Guild about changes in the service's delivery policies.

I've never been to Eagleville--though it sounds like a lovely place. I have absolutely no interest in being anybody's sales manager. And despite my affection for the works of Raymond Chandler and … Read more

Clean your computer's clock

This program, like many others, promises to clean your Registry, make your computer run faster, and, if you're lucky, do your dishes, too. At least when it comes to cleaning your Registry, Advanced Registry Optimizer seems to do a pretty good job.

The scan process was easy to initiate and was done in about 3 minutes, although don't forget that the scan time depends on the computer system. A smart-looking row of five tabs and their labels makes navigating the program options stress-free, and the lack of lag on the system was much appreciated. The user interface has … Read more

Winner or sinner?

Some of us here at the lab think there needs to be a "Netologism," a new Internet word, for registry cleaners, something that encapsulates their controversial, let-the-user-beware nature. You may know the species: They generally offer a free download and/or system scan, which identifies "problems" in the Windows Registry that they will fix, if you buy the full version, which is usually around $30. If you pay up and just let it do its thing on your registry, there's a darn good chance you'll boot back up to a sick machine, or your … Read more

Hungry fail whale eats up Twitter lists

Something has been rocking the boat over at Twitter, where stability issues on Monday afternoon caused the company to temporarily take down Twitter Lists, a popular and relatively new feature that lets members group Twitter accounts into categories.

"We began experiencing a very high rate of errors and we are working on the underlying problem," a post on the Twitter status blog read. It was later updated saying, "We are now recovering from this unexpected downtime. The Lists feature is temporarily unavailable as we diagnose the cause of the outage."

Many members had reported sightings of the "fail whale,"Read more

iTunes error 414; Downloading of multiple iPhone Apps not functioning properly

Some users, when attempting to download several iPhone Applications, receive the error code 414 and are not able to download them. The error seems to particularly affect users with more than a few downloads to complete. Most users in this Apple Discussions Forum thread report needing to update upwards of 20 Apps.… Read more

Twitter issues mulligan on new 'retweet' feature

It was a controversial new addition: Twitter had just started rolling out a new feature that built "retweets," a user-created way to quote other tweets, into the main Twitter application. But on Wednesday, plagued by errors, Twitter appears to have pulled the feature for further maintenance.

A post on the Twitter status blog late on Wednesday morning reads that it was "working on (a) high number of errors." The Next Web dug up some discussion from Twitter's developer IRC channel and found that "retweet is temporarily unavailable while we deploy a bug fix." … Read more

iTunes 9 Issue: iTunes Music Store error (-19) when downloading iTunes LP content

A growing number of users have reported the iTunes Music Store error (-19) when attempting to download the new iTunes LP content from the iTunes Music Store. Other downloads seem to be working fine, but the iTunes LP titles are where the problems exist. This thread in the Apple Support Discussions describes the issues and many of the attempted fixes.… Read more

Update: iTunes 9 Error: iTunes Store requires Safari 4.0.3

Update: Apple has released this knowledge base article addressing this issue. The iTunes 9 iTunes Store will not work with developer's copies of Snow Leopard. In order to access iTMS, users with developer's builds of Snow Leopard must upgrade to retail release versions.

Original Post: The excitement of downloading iTunes 9 yesterday quickly faded as I encountered a strange error. What started as curiosity over the new look of the iTunes Music Store soon became a still unsolved battle with the following error message… Read more

The 404 394: Where The 404 gets a 404

On today's show, it's the last day of the Becks Beer sponsorship, so we end on a high note. Joining us in the studio again is Caroline McCarthy, bringing her wit and charm, and we also have Timothy Geisenheimer, who always has something clever to say. So apparently, CNET broke during today's live stream, which is why some people are getting 404 error pages when they visit our Web site. Today's Audio Draft is sponsored by Becks Beer in Conjunction with Last.fm, a subsidiary of CBS Corporation, 5000 XP GTS, is a rising European pop-rock star, Paolo Nutini.

After featuring mostly Indie bands, we're going to bring in some pop from across the pond. Paolo Nutini has a surprisingly sultry yet mature voice for a boy of only 22 years old! Trust us, you'll get knocked off your feet when you hear a dulcet voice come out of what seems to be a skinny Scottish kid. On today's show, we feature two songs from his album Sunnyside Up. The first is "Coming Up Easy", which is a nice tune about waking up in the morning to your significant other. Rounding out the show, we finish with "Candy," a slow-going song about getting some "sweets" from your lover before they leave. Yes, Paolo Nutini is "geting-down" music.

The Semi-Weekly Audio Draft has become so popular that we're going to list our previous picks so you can find the great, new musicians we're featuring here on The 404:

Paolo Nutini Koufax Why Priscilla Ahn Mayer Hawthorne The Hold Steady Grizzly Bear Matt Pond PA The Twilight and the Sound

On top of some great music, we have some great stories on today's show. At the top of the show, we discover the coolest invention ever: the dissolvable bikini! We wonder why it took so long to create this! All this is courtesy of Tim Geisenheimer's German descendants. It might be something you should give your date if you live in New York City! According to Forbes.com, NYC is the best place to live for singles. Caroline really disagrees, but that probably has to do with the fact that women in their 20s outnumber guys by a heavy margin. Wilson loves this, but bemoans the fact that a lot of these ladies are always trying to find the next best one.

In more technology-related news, AT&T and Barnes & Nobles have announced free Wi-Fi in their coffee shops. Sounds like a great idea at first because we've all hated paying $12.95 for an hour of Internet access, but imagine all the start-ups and college students crowding what used to be a nice place for conversation. Also, Twitter and Facebook are coming to Xbox 360, while we don't really have any interest in Twittering while we're playing Resident Evil 5, we kind of hope we can hook up with other gamers through Facebook Connect. Finally, there is a movement that we can all jump on! David Pogue's campaign to bring back the "BEEP", rather than the freakin' 15-second long voice mail message that we all love to hate. If we can call you from our phone, we know how to leave you a message!

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