gMail is a new concept from Google to provide huge email boxes to people for “free”. Their machines scan the mail content and then provide clearly marked advertisements that appear to be topical in the margin. Welcome Page for gMail.

Currently the only way to get one is to be invited by Google. After the “beta” test, they will supposedly be widely available. The main concern people have is that some “big brother” at Google will be checking their mail. The reality is several fold, first, your email will be machine scanned, not man read. They assure people that they are not reading it. The fact is that all email passes through many random isp’s in transmission anyway. So if you want the convenience, consider giving it a try. It might be very handy for people who need to maintain threads for a long time as it gives threaded output and is searchable.

Here is more about it:
Link to gMail About Page
Franki’s prior post on gMail

cheers

Don

Well, I’ve been pushing Firefox as a far better browser then Internet Explorer for a considerable time now, but recently a whole heap of security people around the world are agreeing with me. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (A United States government department) have recently started telling people to find and use an alternative browser to Internet Explorer. See The Register for the story.

In short, the story is that once again we are up to our eyeballs in M$ security flaws, and in this instance, the culprits are Internet Explorer and M$ Internet Information Services (IIS) Micro$ofts web server software. What it amounts to, is that any site that runs specific versions of IIS, can be infected by a virus of sorts that adds code to all the pages hosted by the site. Anybody then visiting the site in Internet Explorer runs the new code and tries to download a key logger application from a Russian site, presumably they will use it to steal your personal data. (like credit card numbers and such.)
You can read Microsofts take on it here.

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I’ve recently been trying hard not to express my dislike of M$ business practices on the front page of this site, and I’d almost canned this post as a result.
Then I realized that it has nothing to do with M$ and everything to do with web development.

Picture this, you have put up a web site, and you decide to add a shopping cart to the mix so that you can sell your wares to your visitors internationally. Not long after, you find yourself being sued by a company who has no real product as such, and makes a living of patenting any little thing that pops into their head and then goes looking for people to extort licensing fees from. Sound far fetched? Think again people, it’s actually happening as you read this.

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My day usually begins by firing up my laptop and starting Thunderbird (my e-mail client) and checking though my e-mail. On an average day I get roughly 1400 or so e-mails. Of that 1400 about 200 or more are spam. I loath SPAM with a passion and just being forced to read the subjects and from address’s is enough to drive me into “spamrage”. (which is similar to roadrage only safer for innocent bystanders.)

My method of reducing my personal SPAM problem is twofold.
First on my Linux mail server, I run Postfix with Amavisd-new combined with Spamassassin and Clamd antivirus which when combined, scan all incoming and outgoing mail for both SPAM and virus’s.
Secondly I use the inbuilt SPAM filter in the free Thunderbird e-mail client (Windows, Linux and Mac versions available) which learns from the mail I get to increase its accuracy in SPAM detection. Between the two methods, I only find on average, 1 spam a week that hasn’t already been dumped into my SPAM folder. (Thereby significantly reducing my Spamrage.)

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Those of you that know me, know I am partial to the Mozilla FireFox web browser, its small, fast, has tabbed browing and a popup blocker, and doens’t have a list of security flaws (also see Securityfocus and theregister) as long as your arm (IE6 has had 153 security flaws found at last count), but best of all, Firefox has “extensions”. Extensions are little downloadable modules that add extra functionality to FireFox, some of which are truely invaluable for web developers, like the Web Developer extension and one I only just discovered, Adblock. Adblock is very cool in that it can block Flash ads, and is fully configurable so you customise it to match your browsing habits, it stops you from wasting your bandwidth downloading big flash ads that you likely didn’t plan in looking at anyway.

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It’s said that Longhorn will be a revolutionary evolution of an operating system. (mostly by Micro$oft I might add.) but for those of us that just want to get our work done and don’t particularly care about eye candy, what does this actually mean?

Well, for one thing, it means that you’re going to have to upgrade, and by upgrade I mean pretty much everything, hardware and software.
Any applications containing 16bit code, will not work on Longhorn, (or even the soon to arrive 64bit version of XP). So thousands of software packages that are used by the corporate world for years will have to be updated to all 32 or 64bit, or they will have to be replaced. This can potentially cost millions of development dollars, something that is likely to upset many corporate decision makers and bean counters.
It’s not just 16bit support that will cause problems, it’s a new security model, and a bunch of subsystems that are quite different from those in use now.

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