I’ve just tried out Enigmail. It seems pretty okay: it installs via a Thunderbird extension and integrates seamlessly with the mail client and GnuPG.
Adding a digital signature is as easy as opening a dialog box to select a key. Keys are managed through a front-end GUI, OpenPGP Key Manager, with functionalities such as generating server pairs, exporting and importing keys, and uploading and downloading keys to and from various available keyservers on the net.
My new GPG key is 0×02D17A07. The public key can be downloaded from pgp.mit.edu.
Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.
There are several ways to secure email communications, foremost of which are encryption and anti-virus.
Fortunately, there are free (as in beer and speech) tools out there that fulfill these requirements.
My WinXP box has been virus- and worm-free since I installed it. Why? No, not because of Service Pack 2. Thanks to AVG Ant-Virus Free Edition, I have a relatively safe computing environment, despite the flaws inherent to the OS.
AVG has its own email scanner that integrates very well with Mozilla Thunderbird. Setting up the scanner is quite easy, even through my SSL-enabled GMail POP account.
Dubbed by Wired News as “safe emailing for dummies”, Ciphire Mail provides strong encryption and authentication while maintaining a friendly face for most users.
Setting up Ciphire is as easy as choosing an email account to work on and adding a passphrase for encryption and authentication. Ciphire takes it from there: digitally signing messages, checking if Ciphire-encrypted messages came from the real sources, and encrypting and decrypting messages between Cipher clients.
Thunderbird is secure enough as it is, and coupled with tools such as AVG and Cipher, plus the additional security enhancements in GMail, I’m assured that my emails are relatively safe.
So the PCS has spoken: they made a boo-boo over the application form asking for “vital” statistics; they’re pushing through with the beauty pageant, er, what the heck are they calling it? (as Sacha Chua said, “if it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck…”); personality counts in IT, yadayada.
I still question their intentions, though, “honest mistake” notwithstanding. I think they should have told people outright that this was a popularity-slash-beauty contest.
The “Digital Pinay” moniker is just to generate buzz, nothing more. It has nothing to do with Filipino women striking their own in the digital plain. It’s got nothing to do with women in general asserting their equality in an already egalitarian field.
It has everything to do with the objectification of women, of putting forward (or is it backward?) the proposition that looks matter over talent and skills.
And I thought IT will be spared from all that feudalistic crap. Sad, really sad.
Blogs are becoming ubiquitous. A sure sign of that is when other apps are suddenly sprouting bearing blog-this, blog-that features.
Take Photobucket, for example. Before, it was just a nifty free image-hosting service. Now, they offer a blogging feature similar to that of Flickr. The interface may not be as sleek, but the functionality is there.
For now, it supports LiveJournal and Blogger. Setting up is a breeze — just give away your username and password. And, oh: am not that hot about that last one, though, giving away the password. Maybe something like the Flickr feature, where you’re prompted for a password every time you post a blog entry from within the service.
All in all, it’s a great help. No more cutting and pasting of image hotlinks from one tab to another. Blogging is getting easier. Yay!
