Author: Eliot

Is Facebook deceiving you?

Here is a really good article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) about deceptive user interface practices.  The funny thing about all of this is that people are missing the most offensive and dangerous part of Facebook’s warning:

So in other words, they’re going to violate your privacy no matter what you do, because your friends are going to divulge your information.  Put another way, you may end up divulging your friends information.  What can you do about this?  Don’t share that much information with your friends.  But you say, “They’re my friends!”  Of course they are, and they probably already know most of the information you would share, anyway.

How to do this?  Go to the following part of the site:

Privacy Settings -> Personal Information and Posts

as well as

Privacy Settings -> Friends, Tags and Connections

Then consider each category.  Here comes another wingdinger: in order to keep something to yourself, either you must remove it entirely, or select “Customize” and then “Only Me.”  You can’t just pull down “Only Me.”

I’m seriously considering being through with Facebook over all of this.

What are your thoughts?  Take the OfcourseImRight poll.

How do you manage your privacy on social network sites?

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Email: I’ve shown you mine. What about yours?

[Now updated to include the obvious missing category!]

So now you know all about my email evolution.  What do you use to Email.  Take the OfcourseImRight Poll.  What works for you and why?

Which Email system do you use?

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Update on Mail Saga

After a week’s worth of effort I’m coming to conclude that Thunderbird is still the best thing on the Mac, which quite frankly is sad.  The Mac pioneered Multimeda, and yet any serious attempt to use Mail as a multimedia UI is met with an obstinate user interface.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, just difficult to use.

On the other hand, I’ve found a very uncomfortable yet okay approach to dealing with Thunderbird’s breakage: have the compose font set to be “Variable Width”.  I can’t stand the font, but it is what it is, and it doesn’t change in the middle of a paragraph.

A few people have asked me why I even bother with a mail UI, as opposed to Web Mail interfaces.  The answer is two-fold:

  • I want access to at least some of my mail off-line.
  • For work I would have to go through any number whoops essentially to establish a WebMail interface that I like that ran under a web server on my laptop.  It’s not an outrageous idea, but it is a lot of work, and it’s a lot of work I shouldn’t have to do.

And so I will get by with Thunderbird, but I do think, as one of my other friends pointed out, that there’s a potential business opportunity for someone who actually WANTS to send multimedia inline HTML.

It’s also time to make a donation to the Mozilla Foundation.  I paid absolutely nothing for the use of Thunderbird and Firefox, and both are still the best things going, in spite of their warts, and let’s face it: I’m a pretty demanding customer.  Are you?

Mail Programs: Time for a Change?

It used to be the case many years ago that I would try just about any E-mail program that came into the market.  To give you some idea, here are some of the mail programs I have used:

  1. MM (TOPS-20)
  2. BABYL (TOPS-20)
  3. Mail (VMS)
  4. Mail (UCB)
  5. Mailx (UNIX System V)
  6. MUSH
  7. Mutt
  8. Elm
  9. Pine
  10. Babyl (GNU Emacs)
  11. VM (GNU Emacs)
  12. Z-Mail (A Program written by Dan Heller based on MUSH, probably the first pseudo-graphical MIME program)
  13. Andrew (CMU)
  14. dmail (written by Matt Dillon)
  15. Some really zippy MMDF mail program
  16. MM (Columbia University)
  17. Outlook
  18. Outlook Express
  19. Eudora
  20. MH
  21. Mozilla
  22. and for about the last eight years: Thunderbird

Thunderbird has been great to me.  For one thing, it’s had a very extensible architecture that has lasted quite some time, with plugins and everything.  For another, it’s done quite well handling the gigabytes of mail that I process.  The filter systems are reasonably flexible and it supported client-side certificates when I needed them.

Eight years for me is a pretty good run.  I am, however, noticing that my trusty Thunderbird is showing its age and I really have run out of time to help (not that I really helped much anyway).  For one thing:

  • Later versions try to index my entire collection of mailboxes (all 50GB of them) and this never completes.
  • The composition component is no longer sufficient to my needs.  It’s not handling fonts correctly when I wish to send multi-media messaging.

And so I ponder a change.  The question is, “to what?”  Apart from all of my needs above, I have one more need: to be able to migrate from what ever I migrate to.  This probably isn’t a problem, because one can always use IMAP copying in the worst of cases, but that can be slow.

First task, of course will be reducing what I can to ease transition.  Wish me luck and do let me know what mail program you like, these days.

The Answer Key to Bearded Hippy Bingo

According to my notes from the program, here are the answers to who is in this picture:

Row 0:

Rick Adams, Eric Allman, Ken Arnold, Fuat Baran, John Bashinsky, Steve Bellovin , Michael Berch, Scott Bradner, Keith Bostic, Dave Borman, Geoff Peck, Jeff Poskanzer, Chris Torek

Row 1:

Russell Brand, TP Brisco, Pat Caruthers, Bill Cattey, Donald (Brent) Chapman, Greg Chesson, Bill Cheswick, Don Coleman, Hugh Daniel, Owen Delong, Dorothy Nelson, Rehmi Post, Paul Pomes, Paul Traina

Row 2:

Judy DesHarnais, Marc Donner, Mark Epstein, Erik Fair, Paul Evans, Tom Ferrin, Donnalyn Frey, Mike Gallaher, John Gilmore, Ed Gould, Paul Graham, John Quarterman, Paul Vixie

Row 3:

Chris Guthrie, J. Storrs Hall (JoSH), Dan Heller, Kee Hinkley, Brian Holt, Peter Honeyman, Don Hopkins, Mark Horten, Andrew Hume, Ole Jacobsen, Elaine, Richards, Mary Riendeau, Rob Warnock

Row 4:

R. Curtis Jackson, Brian Kantor, Tom Kessler, Bery Kercheval, Chris Kent, Karl Kleinpaste, Doug Kingston, Rob Kolstad, David Korn, Eric Lavitsky, Eliot Lear, Greg Rose, Peter Salus, Saul Wold

Row 5:

Marcus Leech, Evelyn Leeper, Mark Leeper, Craig Leres, Tony Li, Mark Lotter, Barry Lustig, John Mashey, Elizabeth Zwicky, Mark Mellis, Henry Mensch, Dennis Ritchie, Donn Seeley, Pat Wilson

Row 6:

Keith Moore, Jeff Mogul, Rich Morin, Ron Natalie, Evi Nemeth, Landon Noll, Mike O’Dell, Tim O’Reilly, Jeff Okomoto, Bob Page, Andrew Partan, Barry Shein, Len Tower

Row 7:

Peter Shipley, Melinda Shore, Keith Sklower, Tim Smith, Liz Sommers, Bill Sommerfeld, Bill Stewart, Dave Taylor, David Tilbrook, Jim Thompson, Greg Woods