GMail's displayed ad:
As I read a news alert from Forbes: "Making Money Doing Nothin - TheRichJerk.com - I Cracked the Code to Making Money. Now I'm Rich and You're Not."
As I move on to the table of contents from Nature: "Labmeeting - www.labmeeting.com - A new free tool for scientists that organizes your paper collection."
Out of the blue, I got an email from my mom. She's been corresponding with someone about some sensitive things, and asked how to encrypt her emails.
My writeup is 9 paragraphs long. *sigh* There's so way she's really going to be able to do all that without me eventually going over there.
This is on Mac OS X. Sheesh. A Unix that doesn't come with gpg out-of-the-box, and the preloaded mailer (mail.app) needs a hard-to-maintain 3rd-party hack just to get basic functionality: you call this "just works?"
I don't wanna turn this into a specifically-Apple flame (I know of another high-marketshare desktop OS maker that also makes some pretty shitty apps), so I'll just make this generic comment: mail encryption is a very fundamental thing and it's ridiculous for it to not be built into all desktops. That's like a web browser that can't talk https. The howto I sent to my mom should have been about key exchange issues, not installing plugins. It's a disgrace for any mailer to not have this. This kind of shit is half the reason crypto goes unused by so many people. It's a pain in the ass not just because of the complex concepts (e.g. learning how to exchange keys safely) but because the most highly-deployed apps don't even work as-is.
..a character was a byte, and you always knew what that byte meant, and you didn't have to worry about what database library the script interpreter was compiled against, and in turn what character sets the database library was compiled with support for? Remember when what you saw on the screen was the same as the underlying data?
How I long for those days. *sigh*
Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. -- Mt.