This is one the stupidest spam emails I’ve received in a good long while. So lazy, so completely ridiculous in it’s amount of fearless disregard for any kind of credibility, I just had to post it.

The Internet Website Service wish to inform you that we are having some problem with some Website Service Accounts,due to error code 334409.We have discorvered that in few days from now some account will not be able to access his or her E-mail account.

IN THAT REGARD,YOU ARE REQUIRED TO SEND YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS AND PASSWORD FOR UPGRADING YOUR ACCOUNT.

YOU ARE ADVISED TO IMMEDIATELY SEND US THE REQUIRED INFORMATION SO AS TO ENABLE US IMMEDIATELY UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT.

NOTE:You have to understand that the reason why we are not sending this message from our own private account it’s due to some technical problem we are having right now.Thanks for your understanding.

THE INFORMATION BELOW REQRUIRES AN ACCOUNT UPDATE

1)Full Email Address:
2)Password:
3)Country:
4)Date of birth:
5)First name/Last name:
6)Alternative Email

Best Regard,
Jerry.

Copyright © 2008 The Trustees of Webmail Service | Copyright Complaints

OH NOES!!! The Internet Website Service is getting an error code 334409!?!? My precious email! I must send them all my private information immediately to prevent a possible clog in my internet tube! Maybe I should send them my social security number and mother’s maiden name as well, just to make sure and play it safe.

Help me “Jerry”, you’re my only hope.

I’ve been using Firefox, Ubuntu and Thunderbird for years now and one thing that always irked me was the fact that the “Send Link” option in Firefox was totally non-operational. Ideally, I’d ALT-F - E and bang, a new email would open up in Thunderbird with the page title in the subject and the link in the body of the mail, but no go. Nothing.

This morning, I wanted to email a buddy of mine a link and got to feeling like there must be some fix out there for this, so I did some Googling and after hitting on the sweet search string, I found the answer.

To get Firefox to open a compose window via the “Send Link” option, do this:

1. Open firefox and in the address bar, type “about:config”
2. Right-click within the body of the page that opens and select “New” and then “String”
3. In the dialog box, where it says “Enter preference name”, paste: network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
4. In the next dialog box, enter your path to Thunderbird. Mine is /usr/bin/thunderbird.
5. Hit OK and restart Firefox. “Send Link” should now work with Thunderbird.

Sweet.

I’ve been waiting for an extension like this for years. FireGPG lets you encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify text using GPG from the context menu. Currently, it only works with Gmail, but that’s fine since that’s what I use for most of my important email.

At some point last year, I switched from Gmail’s browser interface to using it with Thunderbird, so I could make use of the Enigmail extension, as well as pull in all my other email addresses (work, domains, spam-pits) in one place and I think I’ll continue to use it, but the ability to just browse to Gmail and not have to copy, paste, fire up a terminal, copy and paste again is absolutely great.

FireGPG currently works with Windows and Linux. OSX is out of luck, but I see on that on the exension’s page that the developers are actively looking for help in porting it. Awesome.

I’ve got a black feeling this morning after reading that the Supreme Court is requiring all US companies to store employee email and instant messaging. It’s fucking ridiculous, not only in burden of cost for companies to store that data, but in the loss of privacy and reality of it’s usefulness.

Anyway you look at it, it’s a punch in the balls for personal privacy. Slap a jock strap on that shit and be a man. Start using encryption. Check out GPG for encrypting email and personal files. If you use Thunderbird as an email client, there’s a real handy plugin called Enigmail that makes phasing in encryption pretty damn simple. For Instant messaging, switch to GAIM (cross-platform), Adium (OSX) or Kopete (KDE Linux). All three have some form of built-in encryption or plugin available. Adium and GAIM both can run OTR, an encryption and plausible deniability plugin. Kopete uses GPG to encrypt and as far as I know, there’s not another client that does that (there’s a plugin for GAIM, but I hear it doesn’t work well with more recent versions).

All these programs are free and open source. If you’re not using anything, I’d suggest you seriously consider it. For web browsing, think about using a proxy, like Tor or if you have the skills or patience to set it up, SSH tunnel to an outside server running squid (here’s a link to how I do it). If you don’t have access to a server like I’ve got, you can run squid on your home computer and connect to it from work. If you don’t have a static IP at home, you can use a free service like No-IP to get access. ISPs don’t like customers running servers out of their home, but if you SSH tunnel it, your chances of getting noticed are pretty nil. I tunnel squid to a remote server I keep and it works very well. I also have Tor installed on all my machines and run it as a server on my remote machine to give back to the network. It’s doubtful you need a proxy for all the web browsing you do in the course of a day at the office, but the option for security and privacy is good to have (not to mention the ability to get around restrictive firewalls).

If you don’t care about all this, so be it. Maybe that’s fine for you. But, depending on who you are and what you do in your life and for a living, you might want to take heed especially if you give a damn about your personal rights and privacy.

I’m at my office, sitting in the dark. Earlier today, we were told that our neighborhood was being evacuated (with the added bonus of a police escort, should we refuse), I guess so that the electric company can shut down our area in Manhattan, thus taking some stress of the power consumption. Within a minute or so, that order was rescinded, but we were asked to turn off all unnecessary electricity usage. So, here I am, typing in the dark. I just finished reading an email from a coworker’s friend whose father works for ConEd. Here’s what I have to look forward too:

From: [redacted]
Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2006 2:05 PM
To: Music - New York
Subject: FYI TO ALL

THOUGHT YOU ALL MIGHT WANT TO KNOW THIS INFO…

All-
My friend’s dad works for ConEd - he just called and told her not to ride the subways any more today, as we will likely have a blackout. ConEd is sending all non-essential employees home right now so they can shut down power to their building. From yesterday’s heat, Manhattan has 4 feeders out, putting a big strain on the system. He said in his 30 years working there, he’s never seen ConEd act like this, especially at 10:30 in the morning. He said not to panic, but not to take a chance if it can be helped - avoid riding the subway if at all possible.

Now I’ve lived through enough bullshit in New York to take all these emails with more than a grain of salt, no matter how many people say they know the person who knows the deal and whatnot. I’ve had a slew of imminent terrorist bombing/blackout/dirty nuke “get the fuck out now” emails come across my desk since I’ve been working in Manhattan and not one of them has ever amounted to anything other than wasted stress.

So here I am. Typing in the dark and waiting to go home, be it by train or by foot.

While I’ve known that Gmail uses SSL to log in, someone recently pointed out to me that while my password is sent to Google fully encrypted, once logged in, all pages that I view are sent via http, meaning that all the emails I read and send can be scooped right out of the ether at any open hotspot.

One remedy I found is to manually change the address from
http://mail.google.com/mail/ to https://mail.google.com/mail/
and for that session, you should be using https and all the pages you view in Gmail will be encrypted. Very cool, but I have to remember to manually check this every time I log in. I smoked way too much weed as a teenager. Half the time I don’t even know what day of the week it is. No lie. How am I supposed to consistently remember this?

Looking further, I found this great extension for Firefox that takes care of the problem for me. CustomizeGoogle lets you set a whole mess of options for a variety of Google services. I won’t get into most of the details since they don’t apply, but check them out because a lot of them are pretty cool. One option that is relevant is that once installed, you can set an option for Gmail to always use https by default. Just check off that one option and from that point on, you have worry-free, encrypted Gmail sessions as a default. Pretty damn useful. CustomizeGoogle also lets you set an https default option for Google Calendar as well. Even sweeter.

Unfortunately, Safari, Konqueror and other browser users are out of luck (IE users, you deserve what you get.) with this extension, so unless there’s something else out there, they have to manually check the session every time or set a bookmark using https in the URL and be consistent about accessing Gmail through that bookmark.

A reader who for one reason or another is not able to use RSS feeds wrote to me asking if there was another way to be notified when a new post is made to this site. Ever the intrepid do-gooder, I enabled readers to sign up for email notifications using this fine plugin. You’ll notice that in the lower part of the right-hand sidebar, under Syndicate, along with the RSS feed links, you now have a form to input your email address. If you are able to use RSS, I recommend you stick with it, but if not, you now have another option. Rest assured, daveb will not share your email for any reason and you may unsubscribe at any time. If you do sign up, yet are not receiving the notifications, let me know.

True to his word, daveb has dispatched an email to Pope Benedict XVI. As to who actually reads or responds is anyone’s guess, but rest assured, if by chance any response is received, it will be dutifully posted.

Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2005 11:48:46 -0700 (PDT)
From: “pope_me amadeus”
Subject: Congrats Pope
To: benedictxvi@vatican.va

Hi Pope,

I just wanted to say thank you for being Pope. Maybe people make fun of you because Benedict is your name, but I like Benedict. If I see people make fun, I beat them with a stick. Maybe you should change it to Benny. Pope Benny is cool. You could wear sunglasses. Do you already? I like sunglasses but people tell me I look like a girl when I wear them and I have to beat them with a stick to make them go away.

I read somewhere that you like cookies and cats. So do I! That’s so cool. I really like it when my Mother makes cat shaped cookies. She tells me that she grinds up the neighbors cats and bakes them, but I think she is just making that up to keep me from eating so much. I weigh almost 380 pounds. Many people point and laugh at me saying I am a fat no good lard ass. It’s okay because I hit very hard with a stick.

Well I have to go and clean myself. I will write again soon. Oh, I don’t want to go to hell either. My mom says gluttony is one of the deadly sins but I tell her the doc told me it’s hormonal. I am doing the best that I can.

I will write again soon.

Your number one fan,
Pepe

Here’s hoping there’s a response!

This afternoon, daveb was thrilled to notice that the official Vatican website publishes the email address of the new Pope. Finally, a place to forward all those dirty office jokes, deranged drug-addled ramblings and illucid, slightly threatening and pronographic self portraits.

Granted, there’s likely a cadre of people that filter through the Pope’s email and it’s anone’s guess as to whether he actually responds or even reads them. But hey, fuck it. Daveb’s going to reach out and squeeeze the Pope.

In the meanwhile, feel free to contact him yourself. Email Pope Benedict XVI at benedictxvi@vatican.va.

Remember, Satan is our Lord and Master.

To be continued…