Internet Things

Akismet and Data Protection

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In Britain, we have this law called the Data Protection Act, which dictates what companies and organisations can and can’t do with data about its customers, clients or employees. It basically puts a duty on organisations to ensure that a person’s data is kept private and cannot be compromised, that the person is aware if that data is being shared with third parties (and seek their permission if needed) and that the person is aware if data is to be processed in another jurisdiction, where data protection laws are not equivalent to this act. There’s more to it than that – Wikipedia goes into more detail and the full text of the act is here.

So how does this relate to Akismet, the spam-filtering web service that I conveniently mentioned in the title of this post? Well, I use Akismet on this site as a way of stopping spam (though to be honest it’s been largely redundant since I started using Comment Challenge). This site is based in the UK, and therefore falls under UK law, but Akismet is a US service, and right now every comment submitted (bar those from approved TypeKey and OpenID commenters) is being sent through it.

Though I haven’t yet got a privacy policy on this site – it’s something I’ve been working on now and again for some time – this does bring up some privacy implications. Without Akismet, the privacy policy would say something like this:

Upon submission of a comment, the details provided (name, email address, URL and comment), along with your IP address, will be stored in a database. Your comment will also be displayed publicly on this web site.

Any comments you have made can be removed at any time, by contacting the site owner and requesting their modification/removal.

With Akismet brought into the equation, we have to add the following:

The details you submit will also be sent to the Akismet service, for the purpose of identifying possible spam comments. Akismet is based in the United States of America and falls under the laws of the State of California. The details submitted will not be stored, unless the comment is marked as a ‘false positive’ (a legitimate comment which is automatically identified as spam) in which case it may be stored for some time for diagnostic purposes.

For more details, please consult the Akismet Privacy Policy.

Now I’m not a lawyer and my experience with data protection mostly comes from a university module that I took recently, so this is certainly not legal advice. But it’s something that I hadn’t thought about until reading an email from the Six Apart Professionals Network this morning.

Akismet is done by the WordPress guys and I’m sure they’re trustworthy, and it’s also not entirely fair to pick them out as this could be any other web service – it just happened to be the topic of conversation at the time. But while a few bloggers using it isn’t going to cause much of a kerfuffle, a big organisation could land themselves in hot water if they’re not totally upfront about what is happening to their users’ data.

1000 reasons why IE is better than Firefox

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It’s in French, but here’s 1000 reasons why IE is better than Firefox. Except that there’s only actually 14 reasons, so it’s 986 short. And some aren’t really reasons. In fact, it’s a pretty pointless piece of flame-bait designed to stir up the Firefox community.

In any case, here are those reasons translated into English, with the help of the Google Translator and my French A-level (feel free to correct me if I get any of these wrong):

  1. Internet Explorer is integrated with Windows XP so you can surf the internet without having to decide which browser to use.
  2. Internet Explorer is accessible for everyone.
  3. IE can display all web pages – not all of them work in Firefox.
  4. IE requires hardly any extensions, whereas Firefox has a plethora.
  5. IE does not ship with tabs, but they can be added if you wish.
  6. IE does not have an RSS reader, which is a fad. You can just visit the site every day if you need to.
  7. IE is less secure than Firefox, but patches are released regularly.
  8. IE is closely linked to Windows.
  9. IE does not pass the Acid2 test like Safari does.
  10. You need to use IE to access Windows Update – even though Microsoft released a Firefox plugin for Windows Genuine Advantage, they will never open Windows Update to Firefox.
  11. IE doesn’t crash when visiting online banking sites, Firefox does.
  12. IE7 will adopt the standards of 2006 and include innovations of Microsoft and others, such as RSS, SSL3 and better security.
  13. IE does not respect W3C standards in their entirety.
  14. IE is the ‘de-facto’ standard that developers work to.

There you go. Pretty lame reasons, in my opinion, and some of them are reasons not to use IE as far as I’m concerned.

[Via Glazblog]

RSS on the go

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Reading this comment by Dave gave me an idea for a cool feature that I’d like to see some desktop RSS aggregators like FeedDemon to adopt: remote access.

Desktop aggregators are great as they have a nice interface and can work independent of a web browser. But unlike web-based services like Bloglines, they’re not easy to use on the move – if you’re not using your machine then it can be difficult to keep track of what you’ve read. You could find an aggregator that fits on a USB keychain but if you’re in an internet cafe that won’t let you plug those in then you’re stuck.

Remote access, to some extent, solves this. It builds on a feature implemented in P2P clients like eMule and Shareaza, which allows you to administer the client via a web interface in addition to using the desktop interface. This works by the client including a small web server and opening a port on your computer which you can then access from other machines (providing your computer is switched on and has an active internet connection). So, say I have Shareaza running on this computer with remote access enabled – I can then go into university, find a computer, type in my laptop’s IP address and port number for Shareaza’s remote access feature into a web browser, and then login. Once there, I’d be able to see how my transfers were progressing and even do searches and start new transfers through my laptop. And when I got home, those transfers may well have finished. That’s all currently possible.

Now, imagine FeedDemon had this feature. I could go into university, find a computer, type in my laptop’s IP address and port number for FeedDemon’s remote access feature in a web browser, and then login. Once there, I could read the all the feeds I was subscribed to, update channels and add new feeds. And when I got home, the feeds I had read would show up as being read.

I don’t believe any aggregators support that yet but it would be an excellent feature to add, since it would combine the convinience of a desktop aggregator with the ability to read feeds anywhere that a web-based aggregator has.

I’ll Lazyweb this post, just so that it can attract attention.

GMail Invitation

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Update: (24th Jan 2006) I have no more invitations left. Thanks for your interest.

Hanni dropped me a GMail invitation earlier in the week, and although I haven’t really used my account, I now have an invitation of my own to hand out to someone. So, if you want one, be the first person to comment on this post. Make sure you include a real email address that I can actually contact you with, otherwise you won’t get one.

GMail is for real

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According to Reuters (and many other sources), GMail really isn’t an April Fools Joke. This year’s joke was the jobs on the moon prank, whereas GMail is a legitimate service that is soon to launch.

It does sound interesting, although I have to admit I was one of those who thought it was a joke, mostly because it was like no other email system I’ve heard of and the press release seemed somewhat suspect. So, seeing as it is legitimate, what do I think?

While I probably won’t use it myself (I already have, theoretically, 1GB of email storage), something like this is a very bold step for Google and could set an interesting precedent. It will certainly turn the heat up on Google’s rivals and re-invigorate the webmail market.

But next time I hope they don’t announce something like this on April Fool’s Day.

Why Thunderbird is better than OE

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You may have heard that despite reports earlier in the week, Microsoft will still develop Outlook Express after all. But unless Microsoft pull off something truly remarkable, I’m not going to switch back from my beloved Mozilla Thunderbird. And what’s more, I’ve given you a list of reasons why I’m not switching, in no particular order 🙂 .

  1. Themes – bored of the normal look? Change it. 10 themes are already available and it’s only at version 0.1
  2. Extensions – add on extra features without using shell hooks (like OEQuoteFix uses).
  3. Junk Mail filtering – considering OE is the world’s most popular mail client, I’m surprised this isn’t already in. But it isn’t. Thunderbird uses Bayesian filtering which is one of the best forms.
  4. Better message filtering – much more powerful than the rather basic filtering in OE, and easier to use too! Great for adding a filter to mark out mail that SpamAssasin thinks is spam, since you can specify custom header matching.
  5. Not full of security bugs – I can open an email infected with Klez and know that I won’t be automatically infected. And not a security patch in sight.
  6. HTML Sanitization – you can either view HTML messages in their full glory, or with things like images and CSS removed so that your address cannot be tracked as easily. You can even view them all as plain text.
  7. Sanitization for Junk Mail – if you like pretty messages but still want privacy, you can enable sanitization only for emails marked as junk.
  8. Cross platform – you probably could run OE in Wine on Linux, but this baby runs natively on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. And it’s already being ported to all manner of other OSes.
  9. Text Zooming – it’s been nearly a year since I used OE properly so I can’t remember if it does this, but if IE is anything to go by, even if it did it wouldn’t do it properly. You can make text larger or smaller in all emails, whether they use CSS or not. Great if your aunty sends everything in 64pt fonts.
  10. Automatic folder compression – those DBX files can get awfully big in OE, even if you delete all your mail. Thunderbird can compress them automatically, rather than waiting for you to do it yourself.
  11. Javascript Console – I’ll but good money that OE will never have this feature.
  12. Three-pane vertical layout – Outlook has this, but OE does not. But Thunderbird does 🙂
  13. Customisable start page – Yes, you can change it in OE but only by going into the registry or using X-Setup (a blatant plug because I wrote that plug-in myself 🙂 ). Thunderbird has it on the opening tab of the Options dialogue.
  14. On-screen alerts – You can have it pop up a message near the system tray when mail arrives. Handy that.
  15. Message labelling – Have important emails marked as red, or personal ones marked in green, although naturally you can change the colours easily. And you can set mail filters to do this automatically.
  16. Graphical emoticons – MSN Messenger has this, why doesn’t OE?
  17. Spellchecker – yes, OE has it but in some cases it’s buggy. And you can also change the language without buying a new OS.
  18. Doesn’t get hijacked – one of my ISPs decided to add an ‘Infobar’ to the bottom of OE once, taking of valuable screen real estate. And then there was the Hotmail advertising bar, and the ‘Outlook Express provided by…’. Yes, again X-Setup can fix those but how many users in the world have X-Setup? Probably about 0.1% or something.

I’ve probably missed many others, but that’s 18 features that I personally find useful that OE doesn’t have. Are you convinced yet? 😉

Added: meanwhile, there’s a guide for switching from OE to Thunderbird, complete with screenshots and very simple instructions. Check it out! 🙂

Back from Cambridge

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Man, I’m exhausted. Six trains in one day is a lot 🙂 .

The meetup went well – I got to chat again to some of the editors I saw last year, and also got to meet some new faces who I’d previously only known by their user names. It’s always fun when you first meet people and meetings like this trying to work out who people are.

There are a couple of photos: 1 and 2 – regular readers will probably recognise me.

Plan for this evening are to catch up on a day’s surfing, possibly play Worms, and then sleep. Not very interesting but I don’t feel capable of doing anything else.

Off to Cambridge

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I’m going to Cambridge for the day to meet some people from the ODP, like I did last year in Birmingham. It should be fun, but I only have just over half an hour to get ready 🙂 .

A couple of links for the morning: not only can you rent Chris Pirillo’s chest, you can rent his mind, too. Payment via PayPal.

And Jake has linked to a SearchEngineWatch article telling you how to do well on Google. I don’t necessarily agree all with it (not mentioning your company name in the title tag is silly in my opinion, as it defeats the point of having that tag in the first place), but there are some good tips, so it’s well worth a read.

And now if I don’t get a shower, I’m sooo going to miss my train. Toodles.

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