Posts filed under 'Technology'
I know I haven’t updated this blog in a long time, but today I want to use the opportunity to point out a new website I just created. For years I had been looking for a quick way to check the security of all the email servers associated with a domain. Since I didn’t find anything, I decided to create my own – so today I proudly present IsMyMailSecure.com. You simply enter an email address and it will determine the domain’s email servers and probe them for support of the STARTTLS capability (or give you the cached result from its last test if the domain was already checked within the last 24 hours). Maybe this helps you find out about the security of your or your friends’ email addresses – if you need a secure email address, you can always check out www.fablemail.com.
August 13th, 2010
Wow, I just finished the previous post when I found something I really want to share with you. I don’t necessarily agree with the conclusion (for me personally, if I can’t buy it, I’ll just have to do without it), but the general reasoning is excellent and illustrates the huge disservice media companies worldwide are doing themselves and their customers by artificially restricting distribution of their products through the use of region codes and DRM (not to mention outrageous price tags). Well worth reading!
September 8th, 2009
I admit that I’m a huge fan of TechCrunch, they have great authors and do a wonderful job reporting from the world of tech startups. Usually their articles are quite insightful and they often hear about products and deals way before the mainstream media. But at times they do get a little bit carried away. Michael Arrington, the site’s founder and one of the principal authors, is probably the best example. If you read some of his articles and don’t know anything about him, you would be forgiven for filing him under “complete nutcase”. The whole series on how we need to stop the “barbaric tradition” of shaking hands was bad enough (sounds a bit like a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder to me, which I don’t have a problem with as long as I’m not being told that my behaviour, which is normal and polite to the majority of people in my culture, is disgusting), but yesterday’s article about how he would love to wear a “life recorder” makes me seriously doubt his sanity. His whole line of reasoning is that, since we already put so much information about ourselves on the internet, this would be a much smaller step than the privacy abandonments we have already gone along with. So just because I have opened up selected areas of my life for others to see, the step to opening up every private moment is smaller than that? That’s sort of like saying that since you’ve already ruined your body by smoking, it’s only a small step to take heroin. Yes, sometimes it’s a long way to the cliff and only a very small step to falling down, but the sane people stop at the edge of the cliff and realize that it would be foolish to take another step.
That’s the problem with technology geeks today – sometimes they get so carried away by the possibilities that they fail to see the utter stupidity of doing everything just because it can be done. And then they wonder why nobody takes them seriously anymore. So unless Michael suddenly claims that his article was some kind of satire (it doesn’t sound like one and given the enthusiastic comments by his readers, I doubt they thought it was – and I worry a little bit about the world I live in…), his future articles, no matter how good, will mean a lot less to me. Good thing TechCrunch has a few authors who appear to be more in touch with the real world…
September 8th, 2009
Finally. I guess I can start using iTunes to buy music now – I didn’t until now because I don’t buy tracks that tie me to a particular piece of hardware or restrict the number of devices I can play a song on. After all, I have a few computers around the house and mobile devices as well. So far, I’ve mainly bought the good old CDs (I actually also like having the booklet with all the lyrics) and then ripped them to MP3. Occasionally, I’ve used Amazon UK to buy MP3 tracks, which I may continue to do even now, if the price is right. But since I manage my song library in iTunes anyway, if the price is the same, I may as well now buy iTunes Plus songs without DRM. They can even be converted to MP3 at the click of a button.
This is all coming waaaay later than I would have expected, but at least it is finally happening. I have been critical of DRM for years and at least in the music sector, we now finally seem to get rid of it. That of course doesn’t help people who already bought songs on iTunes before – Apple charge a hefty 30 Cents per song to “upgrade” them to a non-DRM format. Which is probably all going to the labels, who seem to have found a great way to charge twice for music people have already bought. Techcrunch even calls it a “$1.8 Billion music tax”, which is not all that far from the truth.
Unfortunately, now that it has taken the music industry a decade to come to its senses, it’s safe to assume that it will take the rest of the media industry another 5 years at least until they also finally come to the conclusion that DRM is a failed concept that will not help them sell more copies of their digital goods. But I’m convinced that it will happen eventually. Until then, the only thing we can do is give as much support to the small niche-providers of DRM-free media as possible. And keep complaining… and breaking DRM schemes to prove that any media that can still be played back can and will be broken (just to clarify: I do not support piracy, but I do support the right of the individual who purchased a movie to format shift and play it on whichever device they choose).
January 7th, 2009
I always read how quickly email addresses published on websites receive spam, but I never actually tried. Well, here’s one that’s been set up for that purpose only: gryawebsf@fablemail.com – see, I even made it a mailto: link for the spammers’ convenience. Now I will monitor the address and once the spam starts coming in, I’ll tell you how long it took. It’s also a nice way to test the spam detection engine I’m using on an experimental mailserver I set up.
Update: Finally… it took longer than expected, but today (Jan. 7th) at 1:29pm I finally got my first spam email. Well actually it was caught by the spam filter, but it was the first time the address was used.
December 17th, 2008
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