Want to find out if there is a Google service outage or Google service disruption, or if a certain Google service is down? While Gmail is down more often than some of Google’s other services, other Google services also experience outages, and wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to check on the status of all of the Google services at once? Well, there is just such a one-stop shopping status checker, and it will show you the status for Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Drive, Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets, Google Presentations, Google Drawings, Google Sites, Google Video for business, and even Google Groups, Google Admin control panel / API, and Postini Services!

If you have suddenly found yourself receiving oodles of spam as a “member” of a Google group for which you never signed up, well, you’re not alone. This tactic, while not new, seems to be experiencing a resurgence, as newly minted spammers discover that you can force-subscribe someone to a Google group, and all posts to any Google groups to which they have been subscribed will end up in their email inbox. A perfect example of this Google Groups abuse is the Google group “All About Ads”, which appears to have been created by spammer Jyotish Khanna, and which can be found at
http://groups.google.com/group/all-about-ads and, of course, in the inbox of unsuspecting targets.