Related link: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,967482,00.asp

With the Internet being increasingly used by spy agencies to check up on normal law abiding citizens… has the time finally come to re-examine encrypting your email?

The most ’security conscious’ email I think I’ve ever sent was an account password that I knew the recipient was waiting for on their end with strict instructions to change their password the moment they logged in for the first time. I’d have encrypted that if the user used encryption, but of course, as usual, they didn’t. Oh well, and over the wires the password went and was vulnerable for three and a half minutes.

But the spooks are now coming out in full force.

I still don’t have anything worth their time to pore over, but just the same I don’t like people poking around my desk so why would I sit on my thumbs while spooks comb my email for words like, “Great Satan”, “carbomb” & probably “mp3s”. Seriously.

There is one problem that I perceive with encrypting email & I could be terribly wrong, but if no one bothers to encrypt their email doesn’t the encrypted stuff stick out? I’d wonder if it’s a better idea to go un-noticed swapping tuna salad recipes in world wide anonymity than to have the NSA’s mind controlling, laser equipped, secret underground, ten story deep beowolf cluster of ten million nodes hell bent on figuring out how much mayo I use? 1/2 cup or 3/4? NSA spooks want to know!

I’ve installed and used gpg before & it’s pretty well the de facto standard of encrypto-nerds everywhere. I’ve never bothered with it much past the curiousity of seeing what it does & I see an encreasing amount of people signing their email with ‘keys’ proving the authenticity of the sender, but it’s been a hassle to use as it introduces just one more step in sending email. Not to mention you need a saavy recipient for it to be of any use.

But, that was then. They really are after our communications now. They openly admit it.

Maybe it’s time for another look and for pregnant pause to think about encypting your mail.

A donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) couldnt’ hurt either.

Quick Links:
GnuPG & the GnuPG Manual

MacGPG (possibly pre-installed on OSX???

Sente GPGMail gpg integration for Mail.app on OSX

Are you considering giving your email the big “E”, encryption? Do you have any other good encryption links? Is it futile?

Related link: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-ivesr.html?ca=dgr-lnxw02Er…

An excellent interview with Eric Raymond is now on IBM’S Developer Works, but one part in particular cuaght my eye.

dW: In your draft of The Art of Unix Programming, you talk about the Macintosh community and how the Macintosh community is merging, in a way, with the UNIX community. Are there projects where you’re actually seeing that happen?
Raymond: I don’t say that in the book and I wouldn’t put it that way. I would say that the communities are looking at each other’s stuff and beginning to learn some things.

dW: So are there shining examples of this kind of convergence?

Raymond: Well, I have one good one. There’s an audio editor called Audacity that I use as a case study in my book, which I think is a brilliant example of how you take the Macintosh ideas of discoverability and interface transparency and move them into a UNIX environment without losing the UNIX virtues in the process.

dW: The other thing that struck me about your book is that you talk about some of the problems with UNIX design. What do you see as the most pressing problems? And what do you see as the problems most likely to get solved in the near future?

Raymond: The most pressing problems that UNIX has right now, in my opinion, are not technical problems. There are technical flaws and gaps in the UNIX design. These are things that the hacker community can address. These are the sorts of things that we’re very good at addressing over time.

I think one gap that has been repaired quite recently is that file attributes are now part of the 2.5 Linux kernel. I went back and forth on this for years, but I now think that I understand that file attributes are extremely useful for a GUI environment. Basically, the reason is that there is a class of properties — things like “where is this application located on this desktop?” for which you want to be able to associate data with those applications — that have exactly the right semantics for file attributes. That is, they are persistent through user sessions, but not something you want to save in a tarball or export over the wire. And that’s exactly the kind of persistence that file attributes tend to have. So I think that’s one gap. I think we’re going to be able to do things that are equivalent to what the Macintosh resource fork does through the new file attribute feature. …
So Eric Raymond says that meta data or, as he puts it, file attributes, are important. Just as Mac OS X drops support for such meta data. So the Linux community learns this from Mac OS X, but where did OS X learn no meta data from?

So what role should meta data play in a modern OS? Does Mac OS X need it?

Related link: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/03/25/safari.html

The new “great debate” among Mac users is indeed Safari vs. Camino. Most (if not all) power users were using either Chimera or Mozilla before Safari came along, but now that Apple has released it’s own browser the choice isn’t clear. Giles Turnbull covered both them in his recent article, but I have a few things to add to what was said.
Tabs are a very important part of any browser to many users: Safari does have tabs unofficially, and no doubt will in it’s next official release. The tabs in Safari v67 are better than Camino’s for several reasons:
They align to the left side of the window
They have their own close tab “x”
They don’t overflow in a new window
They have their own network busy indicators
Points for Safari: I don’t think Safari’s lack of Tab Groups is likely to hurt it much, since most of us who need to check that many pages at once will use an RSS feeder of some sort. I also don’t think Camino’s on-the-fly text encoding altering is likely to attract anyone to it much.
For Camino: Camino does indeed start up faster than Chimera. Camino also gets points for the ability to remember web form passwords.

That said the race is almost neck-in-neck. Aluminum vs. Aqua isn’t an issue, since both browsers can use either. The bookmarks managers are quite different, so that may factor into some decisions. For now, I’m using Safari v67. If it was a choice between Safari v60 and Camino, I’d choose Camino.

So what browser do you use? And why?

Hello world. OK, I’ve done my part to keep tradtion alive. Thanks to the O’Reilly Network team! Look forward to many more brilliant musings…

Related link: http://www.mac-mike.com/archives/000092.html

“Apple Terminates Safari Seed Program”

What they actually did was choose to take pity on the poor sap who ended up downloading a buggy, unfinished, app turd.

Seeing that ’seed’ releases were popping up for use by Joe Normal, Apple has choosen to stick to ‘public-betas’. This is a code word for ‘not totally shoddy’.

I wish other open source OS distributors took as good a care as Apple is here when they decide what to include in their distribution releases.

Daring Fireball explains more.

Do you think Apple should continue the seed program???

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2885

A couple of weeks ago I asked O’Reilly weblog readers to weigh in on their thoughts on using Adium vs iChat as their AIM client. There were opinions that went both ways. Here’s a sample:

“iChat is basic but has filesharing, and is also well integrated with other iApps. In Mail, you can see who’s online, which is handy if a chat would clear up the query faster than exchange of email.”

“Adium is amazing - built-in logging and log searching, tabbed windows for chat, very sturdy… the only place I think Adium is a little clunky is in adding new users, where it’s a bit more difficult to do than with iChat.”

“Adium: completely noninstrusive. It lets you do other things while chatting and still know whats going on. If people come on/offline or someone messages you, it will show up nicely on the dock icon, using 0 percent of your other precious screenspace. Also, while you are chatting, you can close the window and come right back to it without losing you’re chats. Works well while doing lots of stuff and being able to keep on top of instant messaging.”

“The one killer feature on a portable is that iChat can tell when you sleep your machine, and tries to reconnect when you turn back on. It also seems to detect when you connect to an Airport network, and tries to connect then. Adium, unfortunatly, doesn’t know how to deal w/ the frequent disconnectes, etc.”

“… used Adium for at least a couple of months before Apple’s iChat came out, and for the most part I had (and have) been totally content with Adium. Its interface is clean and simple, and I find the tabbed conversations to be immensely easier to manage than separate windows. While I occassionally yearn for file transfers, buddy icons, and better access to profiles, I use it to chat, and that it does flawlessly (well…close enough for me).”

“Instead of doing a comprehensive comparison, I’m going to highlight one main issue: the idea of Adium being the power user’s preferred choice. I would consider myself a power user (I’m a programmer and designer by profession, and I make great use of the unix-like features in OS X), but after using both clients extensively, I finally decided to go with iChat. It was a tough decision.”

That last comment sums up the whole of the opinions on the two clients if you read through all of the comments. Both are good, but for different reasons.

Adium seems to be the power user’s choice seemingly for being unobtrusive and handling many chat sessions at once. iChat integrates with other iApps and handles the wireless and power settings for which Apple’s portables are known for.

Overall, I’d have to say that the majority of users seem to weigh in as power users and that I’d declare Adium the winner in this bout. Oh, Adium and Josh Lee, winner of the book.

I sit here pondering what CNN.com’s server(s) load is like as I hit reload every five minutes.

On the front page (link withheld for mercy’s sake), there is the basic equivalent of a webblog. In this case it’s a warblog.

Lots of sites don’t provide rss feeds becuase they’re trying to serve ads or whatnot, but CNN seems a natural for rss feeds since they’re trying to be ‘the’ source for news and don’t have ads except for advertising themselves. Maybe it’s the Pics of Paula Zahn they want people to see?

Off the beaten track rss feeds:

CNN:
http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/15/2315.xml
BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/world/rss091.xml

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2885

Just a quick reminder that the deadline for the Adium vs iChat Battle Royale is up in 24 hrs (March 21st). Regardless of the outcome no attack will be imminent.

Adium, looks to be the favored contender thus far.

Related link: http://osdir.com/Downloads-req-viewdownloaddetails-lid-359-ttitle-AquaLess.html

The simplest hacks are sometimes the most pleasant.

AquaLess will open a file seperate from the terminal in a text editor so you don’t have to open another terminal to read the file with ‘less’.

Nice.

What’s not to like?

Related link: http://osdir.com/Downloads-req-viewdownloaddetails-lid-357-ttitle-The_Contiki_De…

The Contiki Desktop OS:

“Contiki is an Internet-enabled operating system and desktop environment for the Commodore 64….. includes a multitasking kernel, a windowing system with themeable GUI toolkit, a screen saver, a TCP/IP stack, a simple Web server, a telnet client, and a Web browser….runs comfortably in 64 kilobytes of RAM”

Notice, that reads 64 kilobytes of RAM.

Other systems under development include “8-bit Nintendo Entertainment system, PCEngine, Gameboy, Atari 8-bit, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx, Apple ][, VIC-20, CBM PET, Plus/4, Tandy CoCo, Sharp Wizard, Casio PocketViewer, Sega DreamCast and the Sony Playstation.”

I don’t know whether to chuckle to myself or head over to the local antique computer store. I have to say that in the end I think this is pretty cool.

Update: Contiki is also mentioned this morning on /. Looks like I’d better get over to the store before all the C64s are gone.

Are you: 1) laughing 2) loving it 3) all the above?

Adium is an AIM instant messaging client for OS X. Well, so is iChat which comes prepackaged with OS X these days.

I’d like to get users of either application to try the other and report back on the pros and cons of each here.

Play with each app and let’s see what y’all think in a head to head comparison with OS X IM users. Report back here your thoughts on:

• U.I.
• Stability
• Features (lack or bloat)
• Hackability
• Pleaure of use
• and which one you’ll use hence forth

I’ve got a shiny new O’Reilly book of your choice for a randomly choosen reviewer that will be choosen March 21.

*For those who think I may be biased I’m writing this from my iBook which is sitting next to my Linux desktop machine.

Update:I’ve chosen these two apps because they focus on the exact same thing, AIM IM. Perhaps a future, general IM shootout will include a full range of IM apps.

So, what did you think?

Related link: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/2746

You always suspected it didn’t you? Microsoft keeps tabs on all your software.

“…when users run Windows Update. When patches are downloaded, a few kilobytes of data are sent in the opposite direction over a secure SSL channel. Because the data is encrypted a simple packet sniffer can’t be used to see what this data contains. However tecChannel’s tecDUMP utility takes advantage of an undocumented WinInet API, enabling an examination of the data before it becomes encrypted. According to tecChannel, the information sent to Microsoft includes details of all the software installed in a machine, not only Microsoft applications. The latest version of Windows Update Privacy Statement (which dates from last October) states: “Windows Update must collect a certain amount of configuration information from your computer”. This configuration information includes OS version number, IE version number and “version numbers of other software for which Windows Update provides updates” along with plug and play ID numbers and regional settings. But there’s no mention of collecting data on software from other vendors running on a machine. And this software can’t be updated using Windows Update. So why is Microsoft collecting this data?”

I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t a terrible idea. This is spooky only because Microsoft has proven itself untrustworthy time after time, I’d be curious to see if Apple does the same thing with its updates. It’d be ok with me until they show themselves to suspect.

We’re not worthy… We’re not worthy!