E-Mail addresses are today’s de facto communication method. It’s how we keep in touch with friends and co-workers it is important that your e-mail address says what you want it to say about you. Reading something more into a e-mail address is something we all do, if you see an @yahoo.com address on a business card it better be from someone who works at Yahoo.

Below is how I handle e-mail it may not be the best way but it has worked well for me for several years. This is how you can have a nearly unlimited number of e-mail address and only ever have to check one.

1. Get a domain name. I use 1and1 for all the hosting I need and don’t have means to do at home. You can get your domain name and e-mail forwarding and thats is all you need for this. Starting at $1 a month (50% off for the first 3 months). I even host this site and many others at 1and1. I have a “my first and last name.com” and a nice domain name with my family name in it specifically for e-mail reasons.
2. Set up a master account. The address is unimportant since you wont be giving it out to anyone, but what is important is the interface. I prefer a Gmail account, it is free, has a wonderful interface and uses its massive member database to detect spam e-mail amazingly well. With a nearly limitless number of e-mail addresses pointed at your master address a powerful spam filter is important. I hardly hear a whisper of spam on my master account.
3. Set up your forwards. In the 1and1 control panel (as with most other providers) you can set up a *@DomainName.com e-mail address to forward to your master e-mail address. This will send all mail to that domain to the master account.
4. Set up your FROM address. Gmail will allow you to setup multiple “Send As” addresses. Go to Settings>Accounts>Send Mail As. I set up an Admin@ Webmaster@ me@ and so on for the various domains. So I can send mail as any prefix on a domain I own that I want to at that time.

This entire process should take no more than an hour and should be very easy to do.

Whats the upside?

• Being able to tell anyone your e-mail address is TheirName@YourName.com is cool and gets fun looks. People tend to remember that kind of thing.
• Giving a specific address to a site you register for allows you to keep track of who sold you out to a spam list. If a forum asks you to register you can give it the address ForumName@YourName.com and be able to back that up with an authorization response.
• If a specific address starts getting an abundance of unblocked spam you can always set up a filter to block that address.

If you don’t have the desire to go through the above, services like 10 Minute Mail and BugMeNot offer a quick, easy and perfectly acceptable solution to the spam address problem. But I like my way a lot better.

To keep our things secure we need to understand how someone might circumvent our security, knowing how a lock works or how a lock might be defeated is step one in securing our things. Digital security is no different we must understand how the “lock” works and how someone might “break” it to make it secure.

I have found over recent years that very intelligent, rather technically minded people often have no idea how passwords work. Much of what we know about passwords are wrong and the math behind what makes a good password is a total mystery to us. A few years ago this didn’t matter at all to people and unfortunately it often still does not. As a result our passwords are awful, for the most part, easily guessed and instantly brute forced.

So, why aren’t all corporate networks cracked open instantly by the millions of attackers across the globe constantly beating on our networks? What I call the ‘eggshell effect’, the hardening of the outside of the network has softened the inside. Network Address Translating routers have became the standard I wont go into how they work in depth but they cut alot of the noise out of our home and office networks and kept alot of attacks out. This is great, unfortunately it allows us to become complacent. Since NAT routers protect us from all sorts of “outside” attacks zero day exploits don’t send the technical department scrambling anymore. Network administrators take care of the security holes whenever they get around to it. This means that when someone does get in (and they will) the chance of a major incident is very high.

This situation has allowed the network administrators to go lax on security not keeping up to date in their education or practice. The first security best practice I will be going over is the weakening of passwords. The ‘eggshell Effect’ has made us less interested in internal network security and therefor our passwords have gotten worse. Computing power is doubling around every two years, with multiple cores and distributed computing networks the power available to your attack the yield of number crunching is far out pacing Moore’s Law.

HBO has taken the first wobbly steps into the digital distribution age with its new online service. Making my ‘no media’ prediction more and more a reality all the time. HBO gets an ‘A’ for effort but falls way short in its actual implementation. With plenty of good things to watch online HBO needs to romance me away from the competition not bring its walled garden to the information age. I am fine with paying for HBO I didn’t expect them to make their service free when they launched an online version. What I do expect by now is a better roll-out of services like this. HBO (a Time Warner company) is only launching the service on Time Warner cable (at first).

There are just a few minor serious hangups…

1. You have to have your broadband access through Time Warner. I thought we where past this kind of stuff. This smacks of “If we are gonna use my kickball I get to be the pitcher”.
2. You have to be in one of the test markets Green Bay, Milwaukee or Wisconsin. None of the free open beta stuff Hulu is pack’n.
3. No Macs or Linux boxes.
4. 400 hour limit on downloads. This seems silly but I guess its to keep someone from OpenHuluing them.
5. Time Warner givith and Time Warner taketh away. With bandwidth caps in the works on cable connections services like this are designed to get you over the limit to charge you for a higher tier price.

All in all another good day for digital distribution.

*Update*

An interesting note from Paul Miller over at Engadget Vudu has dropped their price to stay competitive with the new Apple TV from $399 to $295. More good new for Digital Distribution.

You can get the download link for TrueCrypt and other recommended applications from our Recommendations Page.

Encryption problem solved. With few exception TrueCrypt can take care of your every encryption need. Big and small (but not too small) it is all you need. TrueCrypt is not your standard point-click-encrypt software, you do not have any capability to encrypt stand alone files. At first TrueCrypt’s differences are a bit off putting and the user interface is not exactly intuitive. In the end its ability to protect your files better then anything else available is why you use it.
How To…

Download TrueCrypt from TrueCrypt.org’s download page Linux and Windows versions available. The instillation is straight forward a well written documentation page can walk you through the process.

After instillation you will need to create a volume. A TrueCrypt volume is a file of size you specify filled with encrypted data of a type you specify. Three of the top encryption methods are available in different configurations of double and triple encryption. To mix and match with three top hash algorithms. There is really no wrong answer (my personal preference is AES/Rijndael) since TrueCrypt only uses known robust encryption methods. After you have created a volume you may mount it through the graphical user interface or command line. TrueCrypt mounts the volume as a drive letter making access easy you can even install programs to the drive letter on a shared computer.

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A new recommendations page has been at ed Recommendations -> Free and Open Source Software this page contains best of breed software recommended my Informians for Informians. The About Page has also been updated to better explain the site mission and invite guest authors to submit stories.

Feedback about the site is greatly appreciated and can be sent to my e-mail address found on the about page.

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