The Life of a Silicon Valley Rockstar

My varied life… in a nutshell

PGP/GPG for GMail

My buddy Zep found a cool tool that integrates FireGPG seamlessly with Gmail and posted a great description on his blog. As if there weren’t enough reasons to move your personal account to Gmail, for many of us this is something we’ve been clamoring for for awhile. In an age where identity theft is an everyday occurrence there’s no reason not to encrypt your email. Personally, I send most client correspondence encrypted for obvious privacy reasons.


I’m really impressed how easy it is to use. There’s a dashboard with a Gmail tab that’s pretty much idiot-proof. I say that with a smirk, but it’s important. If only us geeks use it then there’s not much to be gained. We probably would have found another method anyway. The beauty of this solution is in its simplicity and ease of use.

 

 

 

It’s a Firefox extension and pushes itself right into Gmail. I wish they’d make a solution for IE7 as well since for better or worse it’s still the de facto standard web browser. You’ll note I said it’s a firefox extension. It’s not a key manager. For that you’ll need to download GNUPG or my preference, GPG4Win which also has a file encryption plugin GPGee and an Outlook 2003 plugin, GPGol.

Although I haven’t tested it, I’d guess this will work Google Apps hosted mail as well. That makes it an ideal solution for small business users that don’t have, or want, in house encryption expertise or to bring in expensive consultants.

What are you waiting for? All the tools are free and available with 2-3 quick downloads. I’ve walked a few very non-technical clients through this process already so if you have any questions please leave a comment or contact me directly.

 

May 19, 2008 Posted by Alex | Technology | , | 8 Comments

The saga of MicroHooBook goes on

It’s sounds like a bastard apple product, but MicroHooBook won’t be announced at the Apple developers conference. John Furrier was the first to put 2 and 2 together and get Microsoft’s new strategy; buy only what they need of Yahoo and acquire Facebook.

No one has mentioned what I thought would be the key buzz. Buying Facebook makes Microsoft “cool” again. Arguably not since NT4 has Microsoft really been seen as cool or hip. Vista was supposed to be the trendy infusion Microsoft needed but fell flat. Facebook has so much market momentum Microsoft is hoping the platform can carry the whole company into the hearts of the internets. Buying only a portion of Yahoo gives Microsoft infinitely more value per dollar without the liability on Yahoo’s other properties that wouldn’t really synergize with Microsoft any way. So, the Yahooligans are happy.

This seems like a win all around, even for our buddy Carl Icahn who is likely to see a pretty good short term return on his Yahoo investment. It may not be the whale he expected if Microsoft purchased all of Yahoo but if he chooses to hold his shares he can use that leverage to help drive Yahoo in Asia where it is doing very well.

In the same vein, Kara Swisher published the full communication regarding Yahoo’s view of Microsoft’s view of Yahoo. Doesn’t this seem a little bit like a mouse asking a cat it’s thoughts right before it gets eaten. Yahoo being the mouse, Microsoft is batting at it like a toy prolonging the fun before it moves in for the kill.

Update: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook won’t be sold. However doth he protest too much? “You can tell, from our history and what we’ve done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term.” He’s already talking about Facebook being independent in the past tense. Thankfully John Furrier has more time than me today and is following the story realtime like CNN in Iraq during the “anyone named Bush” era.
Update 2: Facebook has ceased its search for a new CTO to replace Adam D’Angelo. Hmm, under what situation would they not need a CTO?

May 19, 2008 Posted by Alex | Technology | , , | 1 Comment