E-Discovery Leads to Arrest of Bear Stearns Hedge Funds Managers: The Wall Street & Technology Blog covers the depressingly evergreen story of senior management who send messages from their personal accounts about company actions that are illegal. This email about Bear Sterns acknowledged that a senior manager knew the fund was collapsing even though they announced that the fund was in good shape. As is the case in this story, these messages are usually recovered in the case electronic discovery.
Confessions of a former e-mail packrat: Macworld editor, Kelly Turner, writes about the process of changing her email management strategy to limit the number of messages in her inbox that are not filed. She reports that while the results are not perfect, so far it seems to be working well.
Trending Low-Volume Google Search Terms - Introducing Gootrude: Michael Rash released a small open source project that allows you to make rough estimates on the popularity of terms in the Google index over time and compare them to other terms. Rash’s idea was that it allowed him to follow terms that fell below the minimum number of queries in Google Trends. While the data is clearly not as rich as the data in Google Trends it could be useful for some projects.
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Link roundup for 3/30/08 The theme of today's link roundup is about obtaining access to data you may have stored on one web-based service from another web-based service or an applicatio ...
Link roundup for 8/7/07 Annals of Technology: Damn Spam: "The losing war on junk e-mail" by Michael Specter in The New Yorker is a lengthy overview of the current state of spam and fil ...
Link roundup for 9/10/07 Archive Sues to Recover 5 Million : The National Security Archive has sued the White House to obtain and require the preservation of over five million emails th ...
Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast: Matt Richtel at the New York Times writes about corporate recognition of the costs of interruption and distraction caused by email and other messaging technologies. Richtel now says that many of the companies that are also the largest messaging providers are working together to develop new tools and strategies to help workers focus and suffer less interruptions.
Link roundup for 1/28/08 Interview with Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios, Spies in the Phishing Underground: the interview is well worth reading if you are interested in the current state ...
Link roundup for 5/1/08 Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami: Randall Stross at the New York Times writes a refreshingly entertaining piece on the often overdone topic of email overl ...
Link roundup for 1/2/08 How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time: A New York Times piece on the upward trend of employers learning about employees off-clock activities via the employee's ...
Man accused of using LinkedIn to steal clients: The Register covers a lawsuit regarding a former employee of a recruitment firm who allegedly used his LinkedIn account to essentially export his contacts from the firm so he could use them to start a new competing firm. This is interesting for several reasons particularly with regard to who “owned” the contacts in the first place and since LinkedIn is an external service not managed by the company was he entitled to keep his account with its contacts after he left.
Inventing contact schemas for fun and profit! (Ugh): Chris Messina writes about the potential benefits that the recently released contact APIs from Microsoft, Google, and now Yahoo! as well as the problems caused by the proliferation of new contact schemas. Messina argues that the schemas should be standardized where possible using an existing standard such as vCard.
Gpcode.ak Cryptographic Challenge: Discusses the call for cryptanalysis of the Gpcode.ak virus which encrypts a users data and attempts to extort money in exchange for a tool that will decrypt all the files. They encryption key used is a 1024-bit RSA key. The hope is that through cryptanalysis of the virus a flaw in the implementation will be found that will lead to substantially faster key recovery as the current key could easily take up to a year to find even with specialized hardware and the author could potentially use multiple keys.
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Link roundup for 3/30/08 The theme of today's link roundup is about obtaining access to data you may have stored on one web-based service from another web-based service or an applicatio ...
Link roundup for 1/14/08 Official Gmail Blog: Create personal mailing lists through contact manager: Google has added a simple group alias feature (not really a mailing list) to the new ...
Link roundup 9/24/07 Three recent posts from O'Reilly weblogs ONLamp.com -- An OpenLDAP Update: Marty Heyman provides a nice overview of major enhancements to OpenLDAP over the year ...
Coding Horror: Please Give Us Your Email Password: Jeff Atwood has a nice point outlining the unfortunately still too common practice of web services that request a user’s login and password from the major web services (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) in order to extract address book information. Not only is this an obviously bad idea, but there are API solutions in place from the major providers that provide authenticated access to contact information without requesting that the user give up their password to their whole account.
An interview with 280 North on Objective-J and Cappuccino: Ajaxian covers the recent release of a very well done browser-based online presentation creation tool called 280 Slides. The tool is very straightforward to use and has raised the bar for web-applications. Creation, export (to PowerPoint 2007), sharing are all implemented in an easy to use manner. Superficially it looks like a browser-based Apple Keynote, although with significantly fewer options. 280 North the creators of 280 Slides have created an objective version of JavaScript and JavaScript framework called Cappuccino which they used to create 280 slides.
Gmail Gets 13 Experimental New Features: LifeHacker covers Google’s release of Gmail Labs, which is a showcase of Google Employee’s twenty percent time projects and other Gmail experiments. Heavy Gmail users may find some of the features more useful than light users, in particular the ability to have more than one type of star (flag) called Superstars, custom keyboard shortcuts, as well as the ability to conserve space through hiding status messages and hiding unread counts for the Inbox and other labels. All of the features are opt-in.
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Link roundup for 3/30/08 The theme of today's link roundup is about obtaining access to data you may have stored on one web-based service from another web-based service or an applicatio ...
Coding Horror: Designing For Evil: Jeff Atwood discusses some of the problems Craigslist has with spammers, some of the automated tools people can buy to spam Craiglist and some of the protections Craiglist has put in place to defended its community from spammers. Many of the problems and solutions apply to other community messaging systems.
Email Is Not Dead, But Preferences Need to Evolve: Morgan Stewart writes about recent market research on consumer messaging preferences for Email Insider. The article describes many of the new issues that direct marketers direct marketers face with the fragmentation of messaging channels and communication preferences that differ across demographics.
Virtualization smackdown: Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6 vs. VMWare Server 2.0 Beta 2: Over at ZDNet’s Between the Lines blog, Jason Perlow has a nice writeup comparing an up and coming virtualization solution with an established virtualization solution. Both products are free. VirtualBox (sponsored by Sun) is also open source, although it is a less mature product.
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Link roundup for 1/20/08 ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat is a description of a novel system built for the XKCD community chat that attempts to balance the needs of t ...
Link roundup for 12/7/07 Shorter URLs help phishers hook more victims | CNET News.com: CNet reports on findings from IBM Internet Security Systems on how hostnames used in phishing emai ...
Link roundup for 8/30/07 Years in the Making, Powerful Yahoo Mail Is Worth the Wait | Personal Technology | Walt Mossberg | AllThingsD: Walt Mossberg gives a very positive review to th ...
Choosing the right email listserv: David Strom’s Web Informant provides a brief overview of free and inexpensive mailing list management tools suitable for individuals, groups, and small businesses. These services are often great improvements over attempting to manage a list directly from an email client. Strom is using Listserv in the generic sense as he does not mention LSoft’s product or large-scale commercial offerings.
SocialHistory.js: See Which Sites Your Users Visit: ReadWriteWeb covers Aza Raskin’s new script that make it simple to determine what web sites most visitors have viewed recently. This information could be used to dynamically create a list of badges used for submission to social sites.
Beginner’s Guide To Using Twitter: WebGuild Silicon Valley has a short but informative piece on the Twitter messaging platform that would be useful for an individual or business who wanted to start investigating the service.
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Link roundup for 1/14/08 Official Gmail Blog: Create personal mailing lists through contact manager: Google has added a simple group alias feature (not really a mailing list) to the new ...
Link roundup for 8/2/07 Social Networking Goes Global Major Social Networking Sites Substantially Expanded Their Global Visitor Base during Past Year: A new report from comScore outlin ...
Link roundup for 5/4/08 Cory Doctorow: How to stop your inbox exploding: In the Guardian Cory writes covers a set of simple tips for keeping messages to your inbox to a minimum. The fi ...
I have been hosting my own DNS for at least a decade. I recently switched to DNS Made Easy and have been happy with the service. I have also used EveryDNS as a no-frills secondary DNS service for years and recommend it.
I began evaluating commercial DNS services and found DNS Made Easy. The management interface looked flexible and the pricing is attractive. The service supports both dynamic DNS and anycast routing for domains. The pricing is structured into the following levels—$15 a year for 3 domains, 120 records, and a million queries a month. $30 a year for 10 domains, 400 records, and 5 million queries a month. $60 a year for 25 domains, 1000 records, and 10 million queries a month. $1500 for 50 domains, 2000 records, 50 million queries a month in addition to migration support, dedicated IP addresses, and priority customer support. Additional resources may be purchased as add-ons.
DNS Made Easy has a number of features that greatly simplify management. The service supports templates for groups of DNS records, which makes it possibly to quickly modify records for a block or all of your domains at once. DNS Made Easy supports A, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SRV, and TXT records in addition to HTTP redirection. The service allows you to specify vanity nameservers (ie. ns1.yourdomain.com) and supports end user configuration of TTLs and SOA records. I found numerous web hosting provider’s DNS and independent DNS service providers only allow users to managed limited record types. For example, many do not let users shorten TTLs, which can make server migrations more difficult and time consuming. DNS Made Easy also offers options for Secondary DNS, backup MX and DNS failover where you can specify an alternate set of DNS records if your server is unreachable.
The DNS Made Easy web-based management interface is reasonable, but could be improved with a clearer layout. The user interface favors flexibility over usability although most users who require a dedicated DNS hosting service will likely be happy with this as a tradeoff. The documentation is reasonably comprehensive and series of screencasts illustrating the various configuration tasks. Zones reload every 30 minutes and I found my changes and new additions went into affect quickly. The only problem I encountered was that I could not get the settings to allow zone transfers to stick. I still need to investigate that issue. Overall, after a month of use, I’m happy with the service for DNS Made Easy and I would recommend it.
3G Cellular Data Options for Business Travelers Recently, I found myself needing broadband connectivity in places where I could not find a wired or WiFi connection for my laptop. I have become used to having ...
Link roundup for 8/17/07 Introducing Zoho Viewer: a new service from Zoho that is billed as an attachment replacement service. Users can upload a variety of common office document types ...
New Sites Make It Easier To Spy on Your Friends: The Wall Street Journal has a piece on services and social network tools that can be used and abused to discover and extract information about individuals that would often be difficult to obtain otherwise.
The Dark Side of Social Networking: Questions for Brant Walker: The Voice of San Diego has an interview with Brant Walker, the creator of bumfinder, fakeyourspace.com, and rottenneighbor.com all of which could be considered anti-social networking services to some degree. The interview is interesting as it provides another perspective for looking at the prospects and the dangers of social networking technology.
Steering Between Unsocial Networks and Social Spam: A New York Times Blog post discusses some of the privacy considerations surrounding interoperability between social network services data and messaging systems.
Link roundup for 11/24/07 TinyURL Outage Illustrates the Service's Risks: TinyURL is one of the most well known services that provide short URL redirection services. It is popular with u ...
Link roundup 9/24/07 Three recent posts from O'Reilly weblogs ONLamp.com -- An OpenLDAP Update: Marty Heyman provides a nice overview of major enhancements to OpenLDAP over the year ...
mail-trends: Mihai Parparita’s tool to let you analyze and visualize your own Google-based email collection. The software is still in its early stages and requires a Python installation and a Google Apps or Gmail account. Mail-trends is open source under the BSD license. Hopefully, Mihai will update the package to support other IMAP servers in the near future.
FreeLDAP.org offers free LDAP hosting for personal use. It can be used with any product that includes an LDAP client. For example, it could be used as a centralized address book across multiple email clients.
Slide Tips: A Decade in the Life of the Presentation Industry: Lisa Lindgren’s article on the SlideShare Blog provides a nice overview of changes in the presentation industry presentation technology. It would have been even more interesting if she had discussed the new web-based presentation tools with social features such as SlideShare itself.
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Link roundup for 9/11/07 TidBITS Networking: Penelope Project Ships Eudora 8.0.0b1: Adam Engst has a nice writeup of the first open source beta of Eudora which is the first pass at merg ...
Link roundup for 8/2/07 Social Networking Goes Global Major Social Networking Sites Substantially Expanded Their Global Visitor Base during Past Year: A new report from comScore outlin ...
Link roundup for 2/24/08 10 Email Addresses That Will Be Useful When You Have No Internet Access: Digital Inspiration provides a list of services accessible via email that are useful fo ...
Cory Doctorow: How to stop your inbox exploding: In the Guardian Cory writes covers a set of simple tips for keeping messages to your inbox to a minimum. The five tips are: Sort your inbox by subject, color-code messages from known senders, kill people who make you crazy, half-resign from mailing lists, and keep a pending list.
Three Human Interface Hypotheses Update: Email is Efail: Tantek Çelik makes the case that email has failed him as a communication medium of choice and that other communications media are better. His experience does not mirror my own, although clearly he receives a higher volume of email that he finds a hassle to manage.
Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge: Merlin Mann at 43 Folders follows up with a series of observations on his own difficulties with email that are worth a read.
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Link roundup for 5/1/08 Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami: Randall Stross at the New York Times writes a refreshingly entertaining piece on the often overdone topic of email overl ...
Link roundup fro 8/6/07 Video for Merlin’s Google Tech Talk: Inbox Zero: Merlin Man of 43folders links to the video of his talk at Google titled "Inbox Zero" about managing your ...
Save the Date for INBOX 2007 INBOX 2007 will run May 31 - June 1 at the San Jose Marriott in San Jose, CA. INBOX has been acquired by Jupitermedia. The conference team will remain the same. ...
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