e-ignite

Star Tribune reports on a new lawsuit that’s making its way to court in the US that challenges the government’s right to read your email.? Under current law, the US authorities require a search warrant to read your postal mail, however they don’t need one if your email is stored on someone else’s computer.? Bear in mind that “Someone Else” could be Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc etc etc.? This lawsuit is being closely watched by several privacy groups who argue that email should be protected in the same way that snail mail is - a stance that I wholeheartedly agree with.? Email is increasing in use day by day, and with online shopping and banking becoming more and more commonplace, private data and personal details are being sent by email at an increasing rate.? There is therefore absolutely no reason for email not to be protected in law.

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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…?

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By far the most common search queries for people visiting my main site are about SHA settings with GnuPG.? These are a little complex, and depend on the type of key that you use (see my totorial on generating keys for more details on doing this), but once you understand what SHA algorithms do, it’s not quite so daunting

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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.

In order to use OpenPGP email encryption, you need a key pair. Once you have installed Thunderbird, Enigmail and GnuPG you can generate your own key pair. There are two ways - an easy way giving you a basic setup with few options, or a slightly more complex way, giving you many more options. Read the rest of this entry »

So I decided it was time to widen the scope of this blog a little. While it’s still primarily the Privacy and Security blog, I thought it was time to add a bit of info about other website related matters, so I’ve added the Website Category.

So what’s with the Blues? Well, I’ve got the advertising blues. Deciding relatively recently that adding some form of revenue generation on my site was a good idea, I looked into several options - Bidvertiser came up as sounding like a good idea. They offered payments via PayPal every $10 and this seemed pretty achievable. I’m a realist: I know that my site is a bit of a niche market, and I know that my stats aren’t jaw-dropping, so I thought that I may make a little money, cover any costs that I’ve accrued setting up the site (although the hosting is free thanks to Frihost, I’ve had a few things to pay for). Bidvertiser therefore seemed like a good idea. However, the advertising performance was so bad and so far below any averages I could find on the web, I removed it myself after a month.

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