Email is not dead, but it is not private either

Get Smart Privacy Bubble

“I have the impression my email is being read”

I have lost count of the times this exact phrase was repeated to me.

What makes email users assume that their emails and accounts are private if the protocol doesn’t ensure anything related to privacy when they press the compose button?

People tend to assume something private as long as the communication is established in a binary relation. Users don’t assume emails to be private in group emails but they fall back to this mental illusion when emails are being sent to one person alone. Worse: when the emails go back and forth in a “chat” style, people feel like they are in an intimate conversation that no one will ever find. THINK AGAIN.

Also, users assume that their emails accounts are safe from prying eyes. That no one is able to read what they’ve written and that keeping a good password is all that is needed for privacy in email. DON’T THINK YOUR EMAIL IS SAFE. Your company is the owner of the email server. Assume every email you send and receive as public communication.

Start treating email as a conversation held in a PUBLIC SQUARE with people walking by. 99% of the people will not listen to a single word of your conversation, but some will, and some will use that information AGAINST YOU.

If you are in a public square and you need to talk “privately” you need a code. A cypher that only you and your counterpart know and can use. In email the only way to be sure YOUR COMPANY (or the police/dictator/google/ad company) DOESN’T READ YOUR EMAIL is to use encryption — PGP, or GPG in it’s open source implementation. USE IT, LEARN TO LIVE WITH THE HURDLES OF ITS DAILY USE. Only then can you be assured of not being pried of your privacy rights like a PIG IN A SLAUGHTER HOUSE.

Using PGP is not straightforward I concede to that — but many things in life aren’t — and you cannot send a secure email to someone that doesn’t want to setup a PGP public/private key. But you can incentivise more people to use start using it. FIRST STEP TO SOLVE A PROBLEM IS TO RECOGNISE YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.

Add a line like this to all your email signatures:

PLEASE TREAT ALL EMAILS YOU SEND AS PUBLIC
IF YOU NEED FULL PRIVACY USE PGP ENCRYPTION
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
MY PUBLIC KEY/ID IS 517F6E08

More people think that their communications aren’t safe. They need to be protected from eavesdroppers while speaking in public squares. We don’t need Get Smart’s privacy bubble, but software exists that allows us to ensure high levels of privacy. We just need to stop being LAZY.

AppleScript: search clipboard text on sixhat.net

AppleScript: search clipboard text

When I’m working on something interesting I usually want to check if I’ve already mentioned it the blog. This script allows me to quickly open a new tab on Google Chrome and search on sixhat.net for a text that I’ve copied into the clipboard.

-- This script is based on a script of Computer World
-- http://goo.gl/CZgIw0
 
set url1 to "https://www.google.pt/#q=site:sixhat.net+"
 
tell application "System Events"
	set myquery to the clipboard
end tell
 
-- changes space to plus using function at end of file
set thequery to SaR(myquery, " ", "+")
 
tell application "Google Chrome"
	activate
	set theURL to url1 & thequery
	open location theURL
end tell
 
on SaR(sourceText, findText, replaceText)
	set {atid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, findText}
	set tempText to text items of sourceText
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to replaceText
	set sourceText to tempText as string
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to atid
	return sourceText
end SaR

You can easily adapt the script for your own use by changing the variable url1 in the conde. If you prefer to use Safari instead of Google Chrome that is also easy to change in the code above.

To use the script you can use the Script Editor (AppleScript Editor in previous versions of OS X) and then save the script in your User Scripts folder (~/Library/Scripts). If you prefer you can also download the applescript and the edit from there.

Anti Ad Blockers NO VISIT Websites list

  1. Anti Ad Blockers are now being used by online publishers as a counter measure to, well… Ad Blockers.  I find this outranging and intrusive.  This is an interference with my private choice of having an ad blocker installed.

  2. If I don’t want to see Ads, I don’t see ads, PERIOD.  I can do it on TV and turn off ads during soccer breaks, so why can’t I block websites attempt to send ads down to my computer?

  3. Imagine if you could’t turn off your TV while commercials where playing?  Or if something imprisoned you in the sofa during the Super bowl break when you wanted to go to the bathroom because you still hadn’t seen a FAIR DOSAGE OF ADS — have you taken your pill today?

  4. Anti Ad Blockers are a kind of SELF-CRYPTO-RANSOMWARE for websites.  Their content becomes locked and unreadable hoping suckers/users will pay for something before checking the quality of the product.

  5. Meanwhile, users will give up on them and move on to the next thing.  Worse.  The next time they see a link to another story from the same website they won’t even bother clicking on it.  Websites that are using Anti Ad Blockers are in reality diminishing the value of their brand, because they are putting their brand in a mental NO VISIT list.

  6. The argument that they need to have some revenue from their work is flawed mainly because no one is asking them for the ads in the first place.  It was the publishing industry that first started using ads with malicious practices of tracking users via cookies and gathering information without users consent.

  7. Television and radio also have their own abusive practices like increasing volume of emission during breaks so ADS SEEM LOUDER and cut through room talk during breaks.  On the web they want to target users using ad blockers as responsible for their loss of revenue.  As if ad blocker users are SECOND-ORDER PIRATES.

  8. A solution to this race is no where to be seen in the near future.  Publishing companies need to STOP INTERFERING with client options and realise that maybe those losses are just operational costs.  Meanwhile maybe users will come up with lists of NO VISIT websites similar to the MALICIOUS SOFTWARE website listings.  The idea being to protect users from WAISTING TIME with companies that don’t respect users privacy.

Driverless bus trial in Netherlands

An electric, driverless shuttle bus has taken to Dutch public roads on Thursday, rolling six passengers along a 200m stretch of road in the first trial of its kind worldwide. — in the guardian

And this is not really much, but it is a start, although I think that having self-driving mass transit buses is going to take longer to be accepted by users than private self-driving cars. The main reason being that in the former responsibility for what happens is more diffuse. Who can take over in the case of a problem? In a self-driving car the owner ends up being accountable for what happens.

And there’s also the devil aspect of having mass transit systems being self-driven: dismissing the driver will send thousand of professional drivers to unemployment, while in the private car realm you wont see that impact.

A rádio na internet, novidades podcast

Mulher a ouvir um podcast

De repente são como cogumelos e os podcasts nacionais estão a aparecer um pouco por todo o lado. 2015 está realmente a ser pródigo em novidades sonoras. Eis alguns que me chamaram a atenção nos últimos dias e que estão ainda nas primeiras edições. Boa onda!

Um pesquisa pelo iTunes permite verificar que a oferta nacional de podcasts aumentou consideravelmente nos últimos meses. Há naturalmente muitos patrocinados por profissionais, mas há também muitos feitor por amadores com a paixão da rádio. E a qualidade é cada vez maior. O futuro da rádio é digital, o futuro da rádio é democrático (até que os misóginos dos governos decidam taxar a opinião e a arte).

Replacing a Toshiba Satellite A100 Hard Drive with an SSD

This is a step by step on how to replace the internal hard drive of a Toshiba Satellite A100-376 with a stock off the shelf SATA SSD drive. In my case I chose a Kingston 240GB ssdNOW V300 that is in the sub 100€ price point. But if you shop around you might be able to get the SSD even cheaper.

Here we go: 5 steps to install an SSD.

1 – Prepare the windows partition by cleanig it and defraging the Hard drive using your preferred tools.

2 – Clone it using the Clonezilla Live CD (great little tool)

The Toshiba Satellite A100 is an old machine, but still very capable, and most important it is VERY EASY TO UPGRADE. You just remove the screws, pull the tab and the hard drive is disconnected. Perfect.

3 – Remove the Hard Drive

4 – Install the SSD

5 – Reboot.

If you only use Windows, then check the Disk Management to format the extended space for extra space.

If using other OSes (like… Linux maybe) then use the gparted live cd to resize partitions so you can use the entire disk.

In my case I’m using Linux Mint along side a windows partition (YES, WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED?). After resizing I could not boot because grub could not find the partitions (DAMN MACHINES). THIS MEANS I had to boot from the original Mint Live CD and reinstall grub following the instructions on the Mint community website!

sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sdX

In my case X was “a” and Y was “6”, replace your according to your drive… be warned. Use fdisk -l to find out.

and after rebooting into my Mint I just entered into the terminal

sudo update-grub

to be sure that Mint it was! With SSD prices coming down, there’s no reason to still be using the old hard drives.

Driving Cars or Letting them Drive You. How? TL;DR

Google Self-Driving Car

People should, very much, be concerned. There are a lot of questions we should be asking about self-driving cars (Will they be privately or publicly owned? Both? Will nonautonomous vehicles be banned? When? How will we secure them from hacking and viruses and malware and plain old-fashioned bugs? How can we preserve our location privacy? How will they operate in disaster and evacuation scenarios? How will they be insured? And purely in terms of Google, if it isn’t getting into the manufacturing business, and given that it doesn’t operate purely altruistically, how does it intend to turn a profit off of this highly expensive research project it has embarked on? What will it track? What will it monitor? What will it do inside those cute little cars?), because autonomous vehicles will become a pervasive technology and we should always interrogate things that will transform our society before, rather than after, the fact. Mat Honan at BuzzFeed

This is a long story — but good read — about the self-driving car and its possible adoption by society. Right now the self-driving car is just a lab experiment. A pet project that is increasingly becoming big. IT WILL BE the next big thing. But it will be THROUGH a SLOW revolution, one that grows on us slowly because while the technology is “almost” there (and almost might be a long distance away), society isn’t. What we’ll probably see is a generational transformation, where slowly technology will trickle down from these projects and will be adopted by everyday cars (that by then will be very futuristic!).

Second Life Abandoned Virtual Realities

There is something strange about online entities, be it blogs, virtual games, moocs, or vles. There’s something ethereal about all those entities. Because they will fade away quickly as they were praised. They have a lifetime so short that some users are still hanging to those entities while the servers are being shut down. An example is Second Life islands. How many abandoned places are still there in Second Life. Ghost of 2007 gold run. Who is paying for them? Some of these places were never really popular. The virtual worlds were sold by the companies that promoted them to suckers that spent much real money to buy virtual goods, islands and services.

Second Life is only an example, but you can clearly imagine the same thing happening to other worlds like WoW or Minecraft. Obviously right now they are highly sought and present users might say that they don’t feel that the online entity is going to disappear. Are really you sure about that? Second Life was a pain. A evolved IRC for finger and imagination impaired people. I never liked it, but just 8 years ago everybody was writing about it (me included saying how bad it was (in PT)).

The moral of finding all these abandoned places in the virtual worlds is that there always some Bullish movement sponsored by companies that are real Bears. Be careful where you place your online bets. We really need an Internet janitor.