Been toying with how to securely transmit emails lately. As half (or more than, actually) of our company resides in the UK, and we conduct most of our communications via email (when not using Skype), secure email is a concern. We sometimes need to discuss client’s requests, which can involved the inner working of their business, or perhaps names, addresses & phone numbers that probably shouldn’t be public knowlege. Also there are things like design mockups and templates that we wouldn’t want someone else to get their hands on.

Unfortunately, making email secure is a real PITA with most tools requiring you to setup a public/private key system and/or muck around with non-trivial settings in your mail client. However, today Wired News has an article on a new program which is just in beta at the moment called Ciphire. It’s free for personal, non-profit, educational & press use, and a commercial product will be available later this year. I thought I’d give it a go, seeing as the Wired article was full of praise:

Setup was a snap: Just download and install the client, choose which e-mail addresses you want to associate with Ciphire, enter a password, and the application sets itself up.

Working with the program is just as simple. When two people using the Ciphire client exchange e-mails, the client intercepts e-mail right after the Send button is pressed, and before it leaves the computer. The recipient’s security certificate is retrieved at the Ciphire Certificate Directory, security checks are performed, and then the message and any attachments are encrypted with the recipient’s key.

Incoming e-mail is also intercepted before it appears in a user’s inbox, the message is decrypted (if necessary) and the sender is authenticated using the corresponding certificate from the Ciphire Certificate Directory.

Now that’s the way things are supposed to work. Remember when marketing was telling us all that technology was going to make our lives less complex? Don’t see too much of that happening. But this is indeed simple and, once installed, pretty much transparent. The install was, in fact, seemless. I didn’t need to deviate from any of the default choices and the most complex thing I needed to do was choose a password & then hit ‘Get Mail’ in Thunderbird twice to receice the two confirmation email used to setup the public & private keys.

The more observant of you will have noticed I said Thunderbird. That’s right, they’ve even gone to the trouble of making this work on programs other than Outlook. Infact, because it doesn’t integrate with the client, but sits between the client & the mail server, it should work with any mail program using either POP or IMAP!

The other helpful thing is the extensive online help, including forums, how-to guides (including a general intro to the public/private key concept) and an online form for submitting bugs.

The great thing about this program is that you can forget that it’s running. The only thing I’ve noticed is that it takes about a second longer for my emails to finish sending, but this is very minor & may very well go away with the final release version. The fact that you don’t have to keep track of who can read your encrypted mail is good too. Because the system knows who has Ciphire setup, it decides for you whether to encrypt the email or not. If the receipient can’t receive encrypted mail, it just signs the mail so that the receipient can verifiy that you are the sender (which is better than nothing).

All in all, this program looks good, and when the commercial product comes out I think I’ll be looking closely at it to see whether we can use it here, especially as this will include a mail gateway and/or proxy.

[hat tip Gadgetopia for the Wired article link]

Merry Christmas to all, God’s blessings on you and your families.

Glenn

This is a great idea. I hate having to keep making the rounded corners for nice HTML layouts, and here someone has gone & written code to do it for me. All nice & CSS compliant too.

Pick your foreground & background colours and you’re done. Kudos to Carlos Rinc´n

[via the WSG mailing list]

If you’re in Sydney & have a spare AU$50, I highly reccomend going for a spin on the Oz Jet Boat. Absolutely amazing. Goes all around the harbour at around 80kph and every few minutes he chucks the boat into a 270^° spin.

But if you get to choose a spot on the boat, I suggest getting in the second row on the far right. You seem to get less spray on that side & the person in front shields you a lot. Of course if you want the spray, then the front row is the go. The turns are amazing, and sometimes the boat dips so low it seems that the water’s going to start pouring in. Then there’s the nose-dive when you jump the wake of one of the ferrys and the water just sprays over the whole boat.

No matter what, you’re going to get wet. Allow me to demonstrate:

Before Jetboat

After Jetboat

Top, if not cheap, fun!

• Campaign Monitor - The right way to design a web application. Completely free trial for as long as you like. Only limited to sending 5 emails at a time. Well designed and comprehensive reporting too. This is the way web services should be written.
• Harry Fuecks has some suggestions on blog comment spam. Personally I favour just shooting developers who write this sort of code.
• Linux Forums. Great place for poor developers like me who have to double as a sysdamin. Plenty of Syndication Feeds broken down into categories too.
• Britney Spears & Paris Hilton top most-searched-for-person list. In other news, studies have found that the Pope is Catholic!
• The SMH reports that parents can influence whether their kids start drinking too early too much. Parents imposing their fascist, narrow-minded views on their children? There aught to be a law against it!
• The Doggies’ Whitten Oval is still going to be redeveloped with assistance from the Federal Government, despite fact-free scaremongering from Labor’s Nicola Roxon.

That’ll do for today. Going on the Harbour Jet Boat this afternoon to kick off the work Christmas party.

Dean Peters, webmaster at blogs4God has written that he feels it’s time to change the site. Not just the look-and-feel, but the whole content and purpose of blogs4God.

Originally, the list was established to help the Christian voice be identified in an emerging media, the blogosphere. Now it has become noisy to the point of inefficacy.

Meaning, if I/we could catch up to the backlog of submissions over the past couple months while in transition, would listing these new blogs have any impact whatsoever other than to make blogs4God different like everyone else? If that last statement confused you, ask yourself, would you notice yet another tattoo on Dennis Rodman?

I think he’s probably right. As much as I love blogs4God, it’s probably due for a renovation. All sites renovate over time. I’ve changed my site here a few times, including from Movable Type to Typepad & back again.

Commenting on the suggestions that Dean has made:

The syndication issue is a big one. Now that Google has acquired Blogger and are providing (Atom) syndication as part of the free service, most bloggers have access to syndication of some sort.

Read the rest of this entry »