Symphonious

Well I figure if you’re going to do something you may as well do it properly and I’ve been getting into the whole PGP thing lately. The trouble is noone has signed my key making it pretty much worthless. I’m also a long way away from everyone I know who uses PGP and fate seems to work against me when I’m closer to them.

Bertrand was in Australia recently and even in Brisbane, unfortunately I was over in San Francisco (btw Bertrand if you manage to read this, my old email is offline at the moment so I can’t find your contact details to let you know that I’m back in the country but I figure you’ve moved on from Brisbane anyway).

Meanwhile, when I was in San Francisco I missed the train and didn’t make it to the first Apache gathering which had people present who used PGP. I made it to the second but I don’t think anyone there used PGP so there was no key signing done.

So I figure I should check out a certificate authority and at least get them to sign my key. CACert is the new, free CA service and since I think it’s about time someone provided a free CA I wanted to support it by getting involved and if the service stacks up with money.

It seems however, that there’s no trusted authorities in Brisbane yet. Fortunately they do have a more complex process involving faxing IDs around and finding a couple of lawyers, accountants or bank managers to verify your identity. Since I happen to know a few lawyers and accountants (oh, the company I keep….) that might just work out. So if you’re a lawyer and see me coming with a bunch of paper work, you know what it’s about.

With all the viruses impersonating people these days, not to mention actual identify theft (which I’ve personally been a victim of before, though fortunately there were no serious consequences), it’s beginning to get more and more important that your identify can be accurately identified online.

The first step is for lots of geeks to get involved, then for more email clients to have builtin support for PGP and make it easy, then we should see much more widespread adoption. Hopefully at some point it will be so ubiquitous that ISPs can refuse to relay email unless it’s signed with a registered PGP key and spam is no longer a problem (though email server resources would be under much higher load so it’s unlikely to actually be done). Client side filters would definitely be an option though.

Technology is wonderful sometimes but it can have serious drawbacks. Having recently moved house and finally managed to remember my new address and find out what my new phone number is I set out to send my new contact details around to friends and family. It occurred to me that attaching a vcard with all my details might make life easier for some people to get in sync with my new details. The trouble is if you attach a file to an email people inevitably think it’s important and just have to open it. So my email ends with the words:

Just ignore the attachment if you don’t know what a vcard is.

That’s not so bad but it’s a shame I can’t depend on every mail client supporting vcard and providing a nice user friendly button to update this contacts details instead of just showing the attachment. For that matter, it’s a shame I don’t know of any email client that does that. It also now occurs to me that this is entirely irrelevant because I forgot to attach the file. Sigh. I know there are plugins for some email clients that warn you if you’ve said you’ll attach something but don’t actually do it, but I don’t have one for Mail.app unfortunately.

My other complaint is that with the very user friendly ability Mail.app has of auto-completing email addresses based on emails I’ve received as well as addresses in my address book it turns out I have pretty much noone in my address book. So if you want into my address book - send a vcard to adrian at intencha.com <grin>

Via Reuters:

A German man reported a female chat-line worker to police after facing a phone bill for $7,244 following an all-night flirt session with her

She called him unsolicited and told him to call her back saying it would be “a cheap rate”. My favorite quote:

The man said they talked about far more than just sex

Suuuure.