Today Google posted some news on their blog, along with the release of their Transparency Report, which shows increasing requests from the government for private user data. In fact, the report shows that, of all the governments in the world, the U.S. leads the pack in personal information requests.

If you, like many, have been using Amazon.com for some of your Christmas shopping, then your account may be vulnerable to a scam using your order number that is genius in its execution, and uncovers some of Amazon’s failings in inventory control. It all comes down to the individual order numbers assigned to your orders. Those order numbers are for sale, along with the corresponding email address (as in your email address), and scam artists are using that information to get duplicates of your orders sent to them.

The Iranian government has blocked Gmail and Google until further notice. In an announcement, that included sending a notice to citizens via text message, government officials stated that the services would be filtered, and indeed it appears that, while Google is accessible, it doesn’t actually work for searching purposes.

In the past we’ve shown you how to create a foreign language filter in Gmail, and we’ve shown you how to have Gmail automatically delete certain spam without your having to sift through it. But we have finally figured out the holy grail of beating the Gmail spam filter into submission: How to have Gmail automatically delete foreign language character spam – for example spam in Chinese, or spam in Japanese. It seems that there should be a way to tell Gmail “I will never receive legitimate email in Chinese or Japanese (or Korean or Russian, etc.), in Kanji or Hanzi or Hanja or other logograms, so always delete it” but there is no built-in way. But there is a way to have foreign character spam automatically deleted by Gmail, and we have discovered it, and here it is.

How often have you wished that instead of having to slog through all the spam in your Gmail junk folder, you could tell Gmail to automatically delete your spam – or at least the portion of it that you know is spam? Well, you can! Here’s how!

Oh how we have longed for this day! After we made the switch to the iPhone, after being staunch Android fans for so long, the thing that we missed most about Android was apps like SMS Backup, which automatically forward your text messages to your Gmail account. This means that if you are at your computer, and not by your phone, you still get your text messages. It also means that you can maintain an archive of your text messages, if you like. This function has not existed in any app for the iPhone, and in fact we tried having it developed on our own, and ran into obstacles at every turn (mostly restrictions by Apple). But now, at last, we have our beloved SMS backup to Gmail function back, on our iPhone, and we are very happy campers.

Gmail appears to be down, world-wide, for many users. We are not clear as to what the specific issues are at this point in time, but it does appear that this outage is affecting thousands, if not millions, of Gmail users. Users who are affected are receiving the same error, “Temporary Error (500) We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.” First reports of outages began appearing at approximately 11:30EST.

Frustrated about the amount of spam you receive in foreign languages? Be it Russian, Japanese or other Asian language; or Kanji, Hanzi, Hanja, logograms, pictograms, Cyrillic or other characters, foreign language spam is frustrating. And it’s all the more frustrating because if all foreign language email that you receive is usually spam, as is the case for many people, then your spam filter should have a way to tell it “All email not in English (or whichever your native language is) is spam.” Now, if you use Gmail, there is a way to do it (and even if you don’t use Gmail as your primary email program, you can use Gmail as a spam filter). Here it is.

Microsoft Hotmail, the world’s largest email provider, is better at blocking spam than Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail, according to a study released by the independent research firm Cascade Insights. The study only tested these companies – the so-called big three email providers – and was sponsored by Microsoft, which funded the research to combat their bad reputation for allowing loads of spam into users’ inboxes.

Several email providers that normally compete with one another, like Google Gmail and Microsoft Hotmail, have teamed up in an effort to better protect email users from spam and fraudulent messages. The new system is called DMARC, short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. With a united front, the war against spam may have a powerful new weapon.

If you find that you have to change your Gmail password, you would think that it would be really easy to update your Gmail password on your Android phone. And you would be right. The problem is, it is not at all obvious how to update your Gmail password in Android, and there is no way to reset your Gmail password in, say, the Gmail account settings on Android. So how do you change your Gmail password on your Android phone? Here’s how.

It can be a pretty scary thing to log into your Gmail account and be met with a blazing red banner that says “Warning: We believe your account was recently accessed from:” followed by a geographic location that you decidedly aren’t, often a place such as Russia, Poland or China, and that followed by the options “Show details and preferences” and “Ignore”. Usually you can be certain that at that moment, the first thing you need to do is change your password, because your account was almost certainly hacked or otherwise compromised. However, that’s not always true if you get a warning of a remote access in the U.S., such as “We believe your account was recently accessed from: United States (CA).”

With all the hoopla over Google+ – what with some calling it the Facebook killer, and all – it is interesting to us to note that nobody has yet stopped to question what sort of advantage Google has over Facebook by being able to data-mine all of that email that flows from Facebook to its users, via…Gmail.

Three researchers in Germany at the University of Ulm have discovered a massive security hole in Android – so big, in fact, that it affects at least 97%, and as many as 99%, of all Android users. The researchers, Bastian Könings, Jens Nickels, and Florian Schaub, have discovered that the security flaw allows anyone who is sniffing around your connection on an unsecured wireless network to acquire your Google authorization credentials from a specific token (the authToken), giving them access to your contacts, your calendar and, well – really any application that authenticates you by using your Google authorization credentials contained within that authToken.

As promised, here are our impressions of the new Android Sidekick, the first Sidekick with a touch screen, out this week from T-Mobile. The first thing to know is that this is one sweet phone, with the always-superlative Sidekick keyboard, which blows all other slider QWERTY keyboards out of the water, and blazing-fast 4G. There are already a few standard reviews out there – this review is the ‘other’ review, with missing tidbits and tips not found in those other reviews, like why is Gmail not syncing on the Sidekick 4G? And where is the flash on the 4G Sidekick? And does this version of the Sidekick still have those auto text macros (automatic word replacement) built in?