[edit 2010-05-10]
I posted this on my facebook account and received a well-deserved lambasting for up-voting the article.  I hadn’t thought hard enough on the problem of domain trusting with such a distributed, flexible, and multi-point service such as email.  Mat Whitney gave me a lesson on the difficulties of domain reputations when the domain is something like gmail.com or live.com — they’re publicly available and that’s where the majority of spam comes from, so how can you trust any sender from that domain without specifically white-listing the address?  That means there are only baby-steps in security available through a huge effort on the part of IT administrators with the technologies described in The Register’s article.  I take back my promotion of this article until I am able to speak more intelligently on the matter.   Whoops!
[end edit]

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www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/09/email_and_trust/

An article on The Register writes about finally adopting existing technology (software, not hardware) to allow people to trust their inboxes again.  With all the worms, identity theft attempts, scams, and general nogoodnickism that happens via email today, users are hesitant to open emails even from addresses they recognize.  It’s like getting a package delivered by USPS and wondering if you’ll find a pipe bomb or anthrax in each one.  Well, in the digital word, electronic messages can be signed in such a way that trust can be (largely) restored and, as with the Web, “feature rich” email is the way of the future.

The article describes that, as everyone should realize, social hubs like Facebook and [the defunct] Google Wave will grow in popularity and virtual size and will begin to experience the same problems that email users have to deal with daily.  Identity theft, worms (www.google.com/search?q=koobface), and hijacked accounts occur in Facebook already and there will be no long-term decrease in these activities because they are making money with them.

My words of advice: read the article; expect trust-restoring technologies in the near future that may look a little different from the email you’re familiar with, but will be fundementally the same; be wary of what you put on social media sites (Facebook, Google profiles, MySpace, etc.); be wary of who you friend and who you show your information to.  I absolutely DO NOT advise to stop using social media websites because they carry value (that’s for a different article), but realize that it’s just a picture and text — the person you think is behind that profile may not be who you expect.

As always, your thoughts/opinions/comments/defamations/flattery/proposals are welcome.  I have to refuse some of those on principle but send them anyway.

I consider myself relatively browser agnostic but I use Firefox for a lot of my work.  I utilize multiple profiles and use the –no-remote option to actually run these multiple profiles at the same time.  It keeps the cookies, extensions, add-ons and sessions all separate which allows me to work more efficiently.

I also rely rather heavily on Firefox extensions to do my work: Hackbar, Web Developer, Firebug, FireTitle and several others are my staples.  I recently upgraded to FF 3.6 and that unfortunately broke my FireTitle extension. (side note: FireTitle is used to change the title bar of my different browsers so I know which profile I’m working under in each window).  Looking for a solution and not finding any, I decided to try to “fix it” on my own.  I tried to alter the install.rdf file that sits in the C:\Users\foo\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\y1g9vafa.WebAppTest1\extensions\{f4b962b4-ab75-41bf-8da7-a0435258a27c} folder.  There’s a line in there that says <em:maxVersion>3.5.*</em:maxVersion>.  Knowing how clever I am, I changed that 3.5 to 3.6 and restarted FF!  FAIL.  So I looked for something else…

I can across the Add-on Compatibility Reporter and, just wanting to have an avenue to report that the extension wasn’t working, installed it.  I restarted FF 3.6, went to the add-on screen, clicked the Compatibility button next to FireTitle, selected “This add-on no longer works” from the drop-down, submitted my report and restarted FF.  Much to my surprise, the Options button for FireTitle was now enabled!  The settings were reset to default, but something about that whole process enabled the extension.  I repeated it for each of my profiles and now I’m back to where I want to be.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if Mr. Nowitz would just update it.  Cheers Jonathan, and thanks for a great tool.  I truly do enjoy it.

Go here: mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/harmony/. Play with Harmony. You’ll get it. It. Is. Dope! HTML5 is the media-rich future of the World Wide Web and this sort of thing is going to become more prevalent very quickly. I’m excited!

The server I was hosted on before started going belly-up, so I moved over to www.bluehost.com (as recommended by E$). So far I’m pleased with the experience: it wasn’t seamless by any means, but there’s a good support team and other than a couple Gallery2 plugins that don’t work right, I’m back in action.

I’m experimenting with permalinks for the my blog. Instead of www.cyberpir8.net?p=192, you’ll see a link to www.cyberpir8.net/2009/10/06/quick-nslookup-bash-script/. Let me know in the comments if this causes any pain or consternation.

Thanks,
Cyberpir8