e-ignite

A strange thing happened to me the other day. I realised that I’d used way over my “free minute” quota on my mobile, so I logged into my O2 Online account to check just how much I had been stung for the extra calls. I got 2 surprises – one good and one bad. The good thing being that it turns out O2 have started giving out rollover minutes – this has only taken about 5 years of me being with the company, so good thing! The bad thing was that I had been charged for a premium rate “multimedia service” that I received. I never use these premium text services, and since starting my account with O2 about 5 years ago, not one of these messages has ever left or arrived at my phone. So why now…?

Read the rest of this entry »

As part of an ongoing project, I’ll be adding several specific tutorials to this site. Most will be regarding the use of OpenPGP communication and file encryption – if you’re at all interested, just select the Tutorials link from the right hand side of the screen.

I recently made the switch from Squirrelmail (the default mail service with my hosting company) to Google Apps For Your Domain. This has allowed me to create a load of email accounts with 2Gb storage, full pop/smtp access and a Gmail interface for webmail. I’m most impressed, I have to say. The email service is hosted by Google itself, so will have full reliability even if my site goes down, and it seemed such a waste for me to be given the ability to create so many addresses and only need a few

So I’m not boasting about this in any way – in fact, I’m offering my regular users, viewers and readers an opportunity: How would you like a free email account? As discussed above, it has a full Gmail interface for webmail, pop/smtp access and (crucially) 2Gb storage – addresses will be anythingyouwant@e-ignite.co.uk (I’ll also help you set up free email encryption if you’d like)

Interested? Drop me an email.

Since my previous post on the irritation that is comment spam, I have had some time to play with protection methods. You’ll now notice an image verification code field underneath your comments – this should hopefully help out with the mass of spam I’ve been getting. It’s not ideal, and my sincere apologies to those with poor eyesight, but hopefully we can all share and discuss the privacy and security stories once more!

There is, unfortunately, one minor drawback: I have to use the default theme. As much as I liked the look of the blog previously, I’m a firm believer in content over aesthetics. But I’ll never say never… I may find a new theme at some point!

Recently, I have been inundated with several hundred spam comments being left on this blog each week. It’s now taking up too much of my time to keep on top of them and remove them. It is therefore with sincere regret that I am closing the comments on all posts. This is a real shame since my intent for the blog section of my website was to encourage discussion and debate and hopefully help others (and even myself) to think about things in new ways. The persistance of spammers has, unfortunately put a significant obstacle in the way of this.

However, I would still welcome comments on the articles discussed here, and if you would like anything added to the posts, please send me an email (details on the Contact page) and I will add it to the blog manually. Possibly in a few months when the spammers have forgotten about this little site, I could maybe re-open the comments. However, for now I’m sad to say that they are closed.

I’ve been working as part of the development team on Mobility Email for quite some time, and release day has finally arrived!

In summary, Mobility Email is a distribution of Mozilla Thunderbird that can be run without installation from a USB Flash Drive, iPod or hard disk for example. It has been authorised for release by the Mozilla Corporation.

Mobility Email allows you to transport your entire email inbox simply on a USB stick, allowing you to plug it into any computer with a USB port and an internet connection, and communicate easily by email.

One of Mobility Email’s key features is that it comes with support for both S/MIME and OpenPGP Signing and Encryption features built-in, allowing users to digitally sign and encrypt their emails wherever they are. It includes a new, cutting-edge CVS version of GnuPG allowing users to utilise the new, more secure DSA2 and SHA224 technologies not yet available in any other standard release email client. Mobility Email truly is a plug-and-go solution, requiring no lengthy set-up procedure. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, this is a rather strange story. According to Beta News, the EU are planning to introduce a tax on SMS Text Messages and Emails. But this is a strange thing to be on a privacy and security blog surely? Well, not quite…

The basics of the story are that the EU need to raise funds and in order to do so, they are looking at charging $0.015 per SMS message and $0.000001 for each email you send. So far it’s not clear whether the users will have to pay this (less likely IMO) or the service providers. But this will increase either the charges the user has to pay, or increase the advertising required on a free email page. It’s annoying to say the least.

However, the main concern is, yet again, privacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I finally got round to creating a blog, so here it is!

The plans for this section are really for me to update you all with any news stories that I think may be of interest – you may notice that these are generally all geeky and security/privacy related.? However, I’ll hopefully be able to make this a slightly more diverse area of the site, so look out for all the “personal” stuff too!

You never know, I might even be able to keep in touch more easily when I’m travelling the world and working abroad.