Steve’s Tech Journal

The good folks at the EFF are running project Panopticlick — with the tagline “How unique — and trackable — is your browser”.    Turns out browsers will reveal lots of information about your system, even with cookies turned off.  E.g. your set of plugins (got shockwave?), your screen depth, your screen size, your system fonts, your time zone.   The cross product of all of these things can result in a fingerprint that can possibly be quite rare.   And if it’s rare, sites can collect this info and use it to track you in lieu of cookies.

You can go to the EFF site and test your browser fingerprint.    The catch is they keep your data, but in an anonymous way.  Turns out mine is … unique!  Out of 140K browsers tested so far anyway.  Hmmm, I’m running Windows 7, using Chrome, but I guess if you factor in EST timezone plus my particular set of plugins and my dual-screen large format displays then I’m the only one with such a rig.  Makes sense I suppose, but it wouldn’t have been something I would have guessed at.

OK interesting and good to know, now I wonder what possible countermeasures exist.  But not to worry too much,  I don’t bother masking my IP so websites that care pretty much know who I am anyway.

Technorati Tags: browser fingerprint, panopticlick

Perhaps overshadowed by the Tuesday election results from my home state, and by the google china squabble, Hilary Clinton gave an address yesterday in which she outlined 5 key internet freedoms that the United States supports.   Her speech shows a surprising and wonderful degree of understanding of the value of an open internet.  Check it out:

We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas … Blogs, email, and text messages have opened up new forums for exchanging ideas

I took particular delight in reading the 5th freedom:

The final freedom I want to address today flows from the four I’ve already mentioned: the freedom to connect — the idea that governments should not prevent people from connecting to the Internet, to websites, or to each other. The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly in cyber space. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate in the name of progress. Once you’re on the Internet, you don’t need to be a tycoon or a rock star to have a huge impact on society

What an outstanding stake in the ground for the US to take — defining a vision of the future of the internet, the most awesome tool for communication ever invented.  Kudos Madame Secretary, you clearly get it!

As longtime STJ readers know, David Isenberg has organized a conference in the Washington DC area for years titled “Freedom to Connect“.   I think I’ve got the T-shirt from each one.  It’s so fitting that the “f2c”  phrase he coined in his conference title made it into official US policy position.  Way to go David, you have had a huge impact on society.

I followed the random twitterfall this morning to the Edge question of the year: How is the Internet Changing the Way you Think.

An answer came right to mind, and I thought I’d make this my first post of the year.     The internet rewards clarity of purpose in a meaningful way, and thus has been training me to reach deeper inside  for a clear definition of what I’m trying to accomplish.

a. if you’ve got a problem you’re puzzling through, or are trying to solve something, or research something; odds are the solution or at the least relevant information is on the web.   If you can generate a clear query string to find it, that is.   I find the ratio of time spent trying to isolate a problem based upon my own empirical deductive skills, vs. the time spent trying to find an online answer has shifted far to the latter.  And this has required a skill with constructing query terms; which has shifted my thinking into how to clearly and succinctly describe a problem; in a manner that is orthogonal enough from related but dissimilar problems to get me relevant data.    Thinking really hard about how to precisely identify the search is an evolution in my approach and thought patterns; something that wasn’t an option before the internet.

b. the internet also rewards clarity of purpose by punishing those without it.  I remember in my early blogging days setting my browser homepage to bloglines for awhile.  It was a surprise that I managed to get anything done; and I quickly changed back to good ol google.   There is infinite distraction online, and this distraction drains productivity and achievement from those that aren’t clear in what they’re about.  Prior to 25Mbits of access to everything from twitter to WoW to facebook to blogs to streaming video; plain old simple boredom could be the kick in the pants you needed to get something done.  Not now.     There’s probably some evolutionary end point that will play out, those who have genes predisposed to distraction will be weeded out, those who can focus will thrive.   This has always been the case, but the internet magnifies the effect.

There, some quick and dirty web philosophy from Steve’s Tech Journal.   Happy New Year to you all!

I’m in the process of working with a friend on a new online store, and it’s been very interesting to be “practicing what I preach” with site design, user experience, SEO, open source tools, blogs, video, and social media strategy.  And it’s been a huge amount of work — more than I expected.   Soon I hope to have something to show you all, but for now I thought I’d update you about email black lists.

Ampersand’s been around a long time, and we now route our email through google apps but we used to run our own postfix server.   Once or twice we were slow on a patch and I remember one weekend we got targeted as a relay.  We recovered quickly and our email domain has never been blacklisted thank goodness.   Once you go into a blacklist it can be difficult if not impossible to get out, and you just go dark and silent to the world as if you had lost your physical voice.    I.e you avoid this at all costs.

So in setting up the new company and domain, you want to take prudent and proactive steps to prevent this from happening.   I did a bit of research into best practice these days to keep your email safe.  Here’s some learnings:

1. Don’t be a spammer (duh)
2. If you run an email newsletter or do any sort of email campaign, use a professional service like iContact, Campaigner.com or ConstantContact to do the mailing for you.   First off, they will manage a “safe unsubscribe” link for you, so if someone doesn’t want your email they can get off it easily and permanently.  And two, they do all the pacing, queueing, etc.
3. Next, categorize any other servers that are likely to send out email.  This probably includes wherever you have the email hosted, which may or may not be the same as  where you have your site / e-commerce app hosted (in my case these are two different ISPs)
4. Insure that your site DNS A record points to the IP address where the main server is hosted.  You’ve probably done this anyway.
5. If you can, make sure that the reverse DNS lookup on that IP address points at your domain name.   This probably means opening a ticket with your hosting provider.
6. Create a SPF record and add it as a TXT record to your DNS.  SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework, aka RFC 4408, and is a way for you to identify which internet hosts are allowed to send email coming from your domain.  There’s great resources explaining SPF at the SPF project page, including this very cool SPF generator wizard.  Run the wizard to create your SPF record, and drop it in your DNS, what could be easier?

I gleaned a fair bit of this advice from a gmail help page for bulk email senders, combined with some organic knowledge and stuff I’ve picked up from meetings, events, peers and the good search engine marketing folk at SEMNE who know a ton about keeping your nose clean and your rankings up in the wild wild web.

Technorati Tags: proactive email administration, spf records, good email policy, email campaign management

As you all recall, we moved Ampersand to google apps about a year ago. One thing we’ve been enjoying is how google silently puts new goodies in the google labs area. Every couple months or so I click into settings on each of my apps and go checkout what’s new.
Today, for example, the gmail labs area had about 10 new items, 3 of which I really liked:

• google voice player in gmail
• multiple inboxes (great for me with a few different active inbound emails)
• send and archive

You know, time spent learning and customizing your toolset almost always comes with great productivity gains.

[tags] google apps, google labs [/tag]

Ampersand switched to gmail (well, google apps) last year and hasn’t looked back. This means that I can get at all my mail, calendar, contacts, etc. from any browser anywhere.  But in order to work effectively during the summer abroad I needed to monitor and respond to short term emails from anywhere — a train, a restaurant, in between museums, or while Marilyn is driving across Europe.

I use (and love) the google G1 phone on Tmobile in the US. Unfortunately, no US carriers will not give you an unlimited global email plan on gphones or iphones. But they will do it for blackberrys. Luckily Tmobile has such a plan, and they let you change from the Gphone data plan to the blackberry plan (which is the same price), for no fee, and then change back. The global email plan is a bolt-on on top of the blackberry data plan, and costs an additional $19.95 a month. So, for a total data plan cost of $44.95 I was able to get unlimited email anywhere on the planet. Blackberrys integrate to gmail / google apps really well, just follow the wizard on the blackberry, enter your gmail username and password, and everything is set up for you. It’s full push email, and is very efficient with battery usage, etc.  The only thing to beware of, is that the Tmobile global email plan only covers email usage, not any other sort of data connection (which costs up to $15 per MB). So, no web browser, no twitter apps, etc., I used the blackberry as an email only device.

Now I didn’t have a GSM blackberry, and I wanted one with a camera, so I picked up a brand new Blackberry Curve 8900 off of craigslist. A bit pricey at $300, but it’s a great tool for global travel and I can probably resell it for close to what I paid for it.  It was an adjustment moving back to a blackberry, but I carried one for years so it didn’t take long.  One thing I will say is battery life is great on the 8900.  2-3 days with regular email and phone use — far better than my G1 or my trial with the iPhone 3g.

To sum up, this decision worked perfectly, and was the saving grace of work communications.   There were times when hotel email was spotty, or we were out for the day.  But I always had my full email access right with me.    And being able to shoot pics and send them to a blog or to friends was a great plus.    The TMobile bills were as promised, no bandwidth or data roaming charges.   Perfect.

p.s. I have switched back to the G1 now that we’re home.  It’s a quick call to Tmobile support and they cheerfully changed the plan back.  I haven’t decided whether to sell the 8900 or hang onto to it for the next trip abroad.

Technorati Tags: Europe travel tech, Blackberry 8900, Tmobile blackberry plan