Tim Hardy

In the process of migrating my girlfriend’s email to a new account, I ended up downloading several messages more than once. Fortunately cleaning the mess up took only moments with the Remove Duplicate Messages Thunderbird Extension. It’s an excellent tool.

I migrated her email to mailsnare. I’ve been using their service for several years now with no trouble at all and have set up accounts for a number of friends all of whom are equally satisfied.

They offer IMAP which lets you file your messages in folders and have exactly the same folder structure and messages available whatever machine or client you use to view them. I don’t know how anyone manages email without this - in fact, given most people’s overflowing inboxes, I’m not sure they manage at all. You don’t need to be a “Getting Things Done” fanatic to appreciate the value of keeping your inbox clear of clutter and your old mail filed and accessible wherever you are.

IMAP also allows server-side filtering of email into folders which is a huge bonus if, like me, you sometimes check your email over a slow, costly connection such as a mobile phone and don’t want to waste time and bandwidth on email newletters you can read at home. Filter them off with a rule and just get the important messages in your inbox when on the road.

Again, having the rules on the server means that you don’t need to waste time and risk errors duplicating your mail filtering rules on each machine and client you use.

Changing email addresses is a painful business. Mailsnare makes it easy by letting you integrate other email accounts into your new one seamlessly, using fetchmail to suck in mail from other POP3 and IMAP accounts. I kept my old address running for two years after making the switch and had mailsnare check it for me and filter the mail into an “old account” folder until I was finally sure I’d re-educated even the slowest of my contacts to note my change of address.

Mailsnare’s spam filtering is also excellent and highly configurable, with a whole range of options including black-, white- and graylisting available. Other goodies include two different web-based interfaces to your mail, wap access, the ability to use SSL and the option to use your own domain name.

Have you guessed that I really love this service? I’ve tried several email providers - including hotmail, yahoo, various isp offerings, the defunct geekmail, fusemail, gmail and fastmail - and in my opinion mailsnare is the best. If you’re looking for an easier way to manage your email, I’d recommend you give them a try.

(Disclosure: I am a mailsnare affiliate which provides a minor compensation for the unpaid work of setting up accounts for friends.)

Two weeks ago, one of my credit cards was cloned.

I pay for my internet connection using that card so, after cancelling the Visa, I tried calling Bulldog Broadband to update my payment details.

No one answered that day or the next or the next or …

This morning I held from 7.50am to 9.40am. Finally I hung up and called their sales line. The phone was picked up within two rings.

The sales person, however, was obnoxious when he realised I was an existing customer and hung up on me.

I called back and demanded to speak to a manager.

She apologised, took my new card details and promised to have my account updated with the correct details. It took less than 30 seconds. Too bad I had already wasted close to 20 hours listening to hold music in the last fortnight.

So, if you are struggling to get through to Bulldog I advise you to call their sales line instead of their Customer Service, Technical Support or Finance departments, none of whom ever answer the phone. It’s 08000 15 16 17. Be assertive.

Any company that cannot be bothered to properly staff its Customer Support areas deserves to have its sales lines tied down with non-sales issues. If this starts hitting them in the wallet by preventing new sign ups then maybe they’ll do something about the problem.

If you do not have a Bulldog account and are tempted by the adverts - resist!

Mary Hodder summarizes and comments on discussion about the effects of rankings on weblogs:

Whenever there is a measurement, a power law develops where those at the top sit and the rest bend their behaviors toward them, trying to attain top status they don’t have. Link counts mean people change their behavior to get more links. It’s not the spammers I fear, but us.

But if we get rid of rankings, and instead see topic based communities with long standing conversation, can we get out of some of that power law dynamic? I’m not sure. Maybe not. Maybe we must simply refuse the metrics all together. I think it’s an open question.

Women are not fairly represented in the most popular weblogs and I note, with shame, that my own blogroll these days is almost exclusively male. When I first started weblogging in January 2001 perhaps a third of my regular reads were from female webloggers. What is now called the blogosphere was pretty evenly mixed.

I took a long break from running a public weblog (switching to a private one to keep track of links that interested me in the way I use del.icio.us now) and when I returned with this present one the medium seemed very male.

I really welcome the attempt she’s championing to move away from a “top lists” approach where new entrants to the scene link to the current favourites in the hope of a link back thereby reinforcing the A list’s dominance. There’s a post-Cluetrain self-congratulatory air among popular bloggers that conveniently ignores the fact that they, like the old media they deride, tend to treat their readers as passive consumers.

Creating tools that flatten the curve and build communities of interest will enrichen everyone intellectually and emotionally (although a few may find their Adsense revenues declining).

The real problem is scaling attention. Readers have limited time. As more and more blogs are available, it will become harder and harder to find and discover the gems buried in all the noise. We need to help readers focus, filter, and prioritize.

The real problem of scaling for growth of the blogosphere is not scaling the tools, but scaling the readers.

(Gred Linden: On the State of the Blogosphere)

You can’t grep an mp3 nor speed-read a QuickTime file. If filtering signal from noise is difficult in text-based blogs that can be parsed with well-established tools, think how much harder it is to find good content in podcasts and videoblogs, the content of which is not (yet) machine-comprehensible. Until speech-to-text synthesis improves, the only answer is for aggregators to analyse users habits and suggest feeds based on current subscriptions.

My ideal recommendation tool would include an option to ignore the most popular podcasts, blogs and videoblogs and only suggest those buried deep within the long tail. As more and more people unsubscribe from the A list such filters would help bring them into contact with people who haven’t already grown so popular that they think of their subscribers as an audience rather than as fellow participants in a wider conversation.

Google have just improved their support for wildcards in search, enabling you to search for a phrase with key elements replaced with an asterisk.

Their quoted example Glasgow is the * capital of Europe (sounds like a nice place to visit, huh?) inspired me to try something similar.

Top ten results for google search: “george bush is the biggest * in history” reveal

I’ve wanted this feature for a while (and full regex pattern matching) but now that it’s here my mind goes blank and all I can think of doing with it is making cheap shots, however, I’m confident that this will prove very useful in the near future.

Phil Zimmermann, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, is about to launch a program for encrypting VOIP.

“The PSTN [Public Switched Telephone Network] is like a well-manicured neighborhood, (while) the internet is like a crime-ridden slum,” Zimmermann said. “To move all of our phone calls from the PSTN to the internet seems foolish without protecting it.”

Privacy Guru Locks Down VOIP

Zimmerman was criticised in the wake of the events of September 11 for providing a tool that might be used by terrorists. He believes that this is a possibility but that, overall, the benefits of providing cryptography to everyone outweigh the cost that some may use it for evil purposes. On balance, I think he is right - although living in a city with suicide bombers at large makes me hesitate before coming to that conclusion.

Microsoft are trying to strong-arm the internet community into using their technology as a standard by pushing Sender ID. From November email sent to MSN or Hotmail that does not comply with the controversial method will be marked as spam.

Will this turn Hotmail into a walled garden rejecting mail from users of other systems who refuse to comply?

When does a blog stop being a blog? There’s a lot of nonsense talked about weblogs. Literally, they are nothing more than the product of a certain type of content management system but in practice these products tend to share certain characteristics which has given rise to an assumed definition. We all think we know what weblogs are and from our mutually incompatible, private definitions arise all manner of disagreements.

Weblogs are characterised by short, frequent bursts of writing in which the author reflects on news and opinion elsewhere and shares new discoveries or creations. They are often intermingled with personal opinion, thoughts and feelings that are more typical of a diary than traditional journalism.

The unique appeal of these works originally lay in this personal factor. The way the author invited comment and reflections on his or her posts. The way a community of shared interests could coalesce around a website run by an individual. They way a writer was motivated by passion rather than a paycheck.

And there’s the rub. Success in the field has brought financial rewards.

Many of the famed “A list” of weblogs such as Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Engadget, InstaPundit and Daily Kos are closer to traditional media businesses than the blogs I have been describing above even if they didn’t start that way. They’re old media in new new skins. They’ve lost that charm.

Microsoft can smell the money. Now it too wants to come to the party.

Marcus Ranum set up and managed the US President’s email server (whitehouse.gov) during its first year of operation. No one could doubt his security credentials. In this insightful Security Focus interview he shares his worries about the state of computer security and alleges that “80% of corporate desktops are infected with spyware, 15% of them are infected with keystroke loggers”.

The interview is depressing reading. He’s damning about the current state of computer security and fatalistic about the future.

I believe we’re making zero progress in computer security, and have been making zero progress for quite some time. Consider this: it’s 2005 and people still get viruses. How much progress are we making, really? If we can’t get a handle on relatively simple problems such as controlled execution and filesystem/kernel permissions, how much progress are we going to make on the really hard problems of security, such as dealing with transitive trust?

Before Linux users start congratulating themselves on their choice of operating system, we need to get Marcus Ranum to sit down with Linspire CEO Michael Robertson.

Linux, like Mac OS X, is championed as a secure operating system in comparison to Windows XP that, unpatched, will become infected within 20 minutes of connecting to the internet. Michael Robertson is threatening that reputation. He believes that running as root for daily tasks is not dangerous. Desktop users of his company’s distribution will be doing exactly that by default.

Creating a distro targetted at the less technologically literate that allows them to run as root as standard is a disaster waiting to happen.

Robertson defends himself by pointing out that they do have the option of creating non-root users but anyone who would consider that option is unlikely to be installing Linspire in the first place. It will make for disastrous PR for Linux as a desktop operating system when one of his target audience installs some malware in the near future thinking it’s a sexy videoclip of the latest tabloid pin-up and then wonders how their credit card details got stolen. Does anyone think that people will understand that Linspire isn’t Linux? All distributions will be tarred with the same brush in the popular imagination.

It’s as if Robertson has heard the words “running as root” enough times to think he knows what it means only to reveal a fatal ignorance with his decision. I want to say Marcus Ranum is to Planck what Michael Robertson is to Planck’s chauffer but it is not true. Robertson is a very intelligent man but for some reason he is flying in the face of conventional security advice.

Unix/Linux got to grips with controlled execution and filesystem/kernel permissions a long while ago. Dragging Linux back to the insecure by default model of Windows to make it easier to use seems foolishly short-sighted.

Still it might be nice to have some native viruses for Linux at last. So far, they’ve proved difficult to run under Wine.

IO ERROR explains how you can punish a particular form of bad behaviour.

“The sophisticated link spammer technique in common use now is to use some sort of script to harvest comment forms from a group of sites, then to fill in the fields appropriately, and a few hours or days later, to use a network of open proxy servers to relay the spam comments to thousands — or hundreds of thousands — of sites which use the same type of software. Repeatedly.”

His Bad Behavior plugin is a great first line of defence against automated comment spam. I recommend it.