I’m not sure if I’m one of the “six prominent webloggers” Brad mentions in his post Gmail major security flaw, but when I got a mail from him saying that I was guilty of exactly what he described, I thought it would be a good time to change my secret question and password. I guess he was really anxious to get a Gmail account. He could have asked though, I let Adam poke around mine.
My thoughts on Gmail? It’s really well-done in terms of how the interface works. It’s faster than Thunderbird for common tasks and I could see using it full-time. But I wouldn’t even consider it until they provide a good way to import and export everything. Email is the lifeblood of everything I do, and I’ve been burned too many times to trust it to a third party—even if it’s non-evil Google. When I put my address out there in a previous post I was pleasantly surprised to get emails from a number of people I’d never corresponded with. Unfortunately soon after that the spam started coming in. It’s more than I get on my “real” account, but I can’t expect a beta product to compete with a finely-tuned SpamAssassin installation and 22MB bayesian database.
Speaking of passwords, a few months I switched to using 8+ characters of random junk for everything, and different passwords for everything. You can use the random password generator to get a few of your own. Throw in SSH tunneling, a great VPN through my university, and consistent rotation schedule and I’m feeling pretty secure. (Knock on wood.) I just need a fingerprint scanner.
In other news, the place of residence has been spruced up a bit with surround-sound speakers, a cut-glass-hanging-thingy, and some additional lighting. Pictures forthcoming.
Finally, the mosaic thread currently stands at nearly 669 comments, and soon there will be more comments on that post then there are posts on this site. I don’t generally talk about traffic in public because I think it’s bad taste, but the numbers this month have been intimidating. In terms of bandwidth photomatt.net used a few dozen gigabytes last month, mostly in photos. So far this month the usage stands at 305 gigabytes for this domain alone and I’m at a loss for words, except to say it’s nice to know I have that sort of scalability. I think I’ll go back to posting pictures of my cat.
Update: Final usage for April on photomatt.net was 511 gigabytes.
Two comments:
1. Nice to know that WP doesn’t suffer heat death with all those comments. Eat it, MT! 😉
2. I used STRIP to maintain passwords on my handheld. I’m not that anal-retentive about changing passwords, although at work, that gets done for me–we’re required to change every 90 days.
Everytime it’s helpful to read your blog. Now I know that I don’t want GM
305 GB would cost me €750 actually. My server limit is 5 GB—not that you really wanted to know.
Like your cat by the way 🙂
Hrmm… I think Hotmail uses the same method for password changing. It’s actually quite handy, provided that the user themselves don’t make it super easy to guess the password question.
In terms of bandwidth photomatt.net used a few dozen gigabytes last month, mostly in photos. So far this month the usage stands at 305 gigabytes …
Shit. Should’ve offered sooner, but since the Big Bush Mosaic is probably the deep sink you can point ’em to my mirror for awhile if you want, Matt. I’d have missed it if not for yours. The thing still haunts me, which means nothing compared to a grieving mother or a commander forced to break faith with his troops.
Latest WP is quite fine, btw. Think I’ll wire-up one daughter with WP, another with Txp, and run with EE for myself — then compare notes. Nice product, sportsfan.
LQ
305 GBs? that’s amazing!!! you have super duper servers or something like that!
oh, Mr. Matt – i’ve changed blogs again – back to my little pond flower. so you’ll have to re-register. read the last post on eggwife.com. hope to see you!!! *muwah*
and btw, i still have 2 blogs on WP, so i’m still faithful!
WordPress can handle all those comments eh? Wonder what some of the competition would have happen. I have this nice image courtesy of the Stile project somewhere … I must get it out …
Non-evil Google?
http://www.google-watch.org/email.html
Heck, how do you pay for that bandwidth?
Bandwidth ummmmmmmmmmm
I’ve been running a test with my Gmail account at prattboy@gmail.com, asking everyone to spam it so I could test out Gmail’s spam filters. I’ve posted results thus far at http://gmail.prattboy.net/
You’re right… definitely not using a finely tuned Spam Assassin with a 22 MB Bayesian database… but maybe they’ll improve as time goes on.