Folksonomies Tap People Power

Folksonomies Tap People Power

Wired article on tagging

Four-millionth photo posted to flickr

Four-millionth photo posted to flickr

It’s a picture of some cups

DomainKeys Versus the Spam Kingdom

As slashdot reported yesterday, Gmail has begun signing all its outgoing mail using Yahoo!’s DomainKeys. The system works like a very complicated wax seal. Imagine that I told everyone that I’d never send a letter without melting my seal onto it, and imagine that it’s impossible to duplicate my seal and only I have access to it. If you got a letter from me bearing my seal, you’d know I that it was from me and no one had already opened it. If you got a letter that didn’t have a seal, you’d know it might not be genuine. Google is the first major mail provider to support the technology (including Yahoo!, even though they invented it), but hopefully their backing will get other services to jump onboard.

An interesting consequence of this is that lots of legitimate services are going to start getting themselves into trouble. Say you read a news story you think a friend might find interesting. You might click their little “email this” button, fill out your name and address, their name and address, and click “send.” Many sites will send the email with your address as the sender. The problem is that you didn’t really send this email, the news site’s server did, and it’s just pretending to be you*. This doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but generally I don’t want any email going out from my account if I didn’t actually type the message.

Since Gmail is now signing all of its messages with a domain key, you can be certain that any unsigned mail from a Gmail address was not sent by that address’s owner. In the above example, the email sent from the news site wouldn’t be signed, as it didn’t go through your email provider. Gmail has already started putting in a warning message whenever an unsigned letter comes in, so if you get a news snippet it might register as suspect because they spoofed your address. This is a good thing, because hopefully it’ll put the pressure on legitimate sites to stop spoofing.

Most email has very little security built in. Spammers use that fact to send out millions of messages using fake email address. Virus writers use that fact to send out malicious code using your address. From what I can tell, DomainKeys is a good, open service that anyone can use for free. If enough email providers jump on board, it could virtually eliminate spam.

*Yahoo! does this correctly. It sends all its mail from “refertofriend@reply.yahoo.com” and puts your address in the “reply-to” field. Many websites get it wrong, including the comment notification systems in Movable Type and TypePad.

iDisk Auto-Mounting Trouble

Whenever I log into my iMac, two versions of my iDisk mount. One is the default iDisk that comes up if you have a .mac account and is just called “iDisk.” The other is named the same as my username and mounts every time I log in. I’m canceling my .mac account in a few days, so I’ve taken the account off my machine, but the second iDisk continues to mount. Anyone know why?

Pop-Up Debating

Watching the vice presidential debates last night, it occurred to me that a big problem with the whole format is that we have no way to know if either person is lying or not. If Vice President Cheney says he’s created x jobs this year, how do we know he actually has? If he says that he never suggested a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, how do we know if he actually did?

Simple: pop-up video. A news channel needs to have a debate re-cap show with pop-ups containing the actual facts. If a candidate asserts something that contradicts an event that’s been captured on video, pause it and show the footage.

I’m not kidding about this. Politicians get away with a lot because mainstream media never calls them on what they say. All the fact-checking happens in newspapers or on websites that the general population doesn’t read, or on websites too partisan to trust. Put it on TV, throw in an entertaining host, and back it up with real facts, substantiated with actual video, and you can show the American people just who’s being straight with them.

Dictionary.com: Grays

It’s been suggested that the ex-Expos be renamed the Grays after the old Washington Negro League team (though I prefer “The Washington Monuments”). What is a gray?

The SI unit for the energy absorbed from ionizing radiation, equal to one joule per kilogram.

Go Grays!

Online Photo Tools

just a quick plug for two great tools for managing online photos.

Flickr is a free service that has lots and lots of goodies. You can upload photos, send them in via email or cameraphone, and post them to a Flickr blog and/or have then automatically sent out to your webpage. They also have a nice community setup where you can have all of your friends’ photos collected for easy viewing. It really is a neat service, and if I refer five people they’ll give me three months of Flickr Pro for free, so let me know if you want to try it and I’ll send you an invitation.

I also highly recommend TypePad. In addition to being a full-featured weblog service based on Movable Type, it has a good suite of photo tools and great support for posting from a mobile phone. To use photos it’ll cost you $8.95 a month, but it really is worth it if you’re looking for a good place to publish writing and photos (and they’re running a lifetime 10% off deal right now).

Stadiums and Eminent Domain

I sent this letter to the editor of the Washington Post today:

DC Mayor Anthony A. Williams recently stated that he will use eminent domain if necessary to clear room for a baseball stadium. The Fifth Amendment clearly states that private property may only be taken for public use. Building a stadium to house a professional baseball team is not a public use. Were the land to be used as a public park, or for a local school, eminent domain might be appropriate. DC should not tax its businesses to pay for a stadium to be used by another business, and its citizens shouldn’t have to give up their homes just because professional baseball doesn’t want to pay a fair market price.

Props to Gabriel for attuning me to this issue (and for hanging out with me this weekend).

Gcount and Gmail Notifier

Now that I’m using Gmail as my primary mail provider, I’ve gone searching for a few utilities to make it work more like a desktop client.

The two biggest gripes I have with webmail are that it doesn’t work with mailto: links and that you have to check manually to see if you have mail. I’ve found good solutions for both of these issues. At work on my PC I use Google’s own Gmail Notifier, which pops up a little dialog by the system tray. It also lets you associate it to mailto: links, but seems to get confused if you also use Outlook for another account. For MacOS X I’m really liking gCount. It sits in your menu bar and turns red and optionally plays a sound when you get new mail. To make gCount your default mail handler you’ll need to open Apple’s Mail, go to its General Preferences, and select it instead of Mail.

I considered using Gmail Loader to import all my old mail, but decided against it because the mail doesn’t get imported with the right date and I think it’ll only be a matter of time before Google implements an import function (they already have for contacts).

Gmail Primary

In the interest of saving money I’ve decided to let my .mac account lapse when it expires next month. Please consider my Gmail account to be my primary address for the time being.

I very much prefer client email to web-based, but unless someone wants to throw some venture capital my way (I have tons of ideas) so that I can quit my job and work from home, webmail works better when moving from my work PC to my iMac to Katherine’s PowerBook.