Rubénerd Blog :)

Remember that maddening "Personalised" Start Menu option Microsoft introduced with Windows and Office that hides certain applications and items you didn’t use as often behind a chevron? Alas it looks like Gmail has been given a similar "feature" as of this afternoon.

When you browse to Gmail now, only a subset of your labels are shown, along with an option to change what’s visible. Fortunately this allowed me to painstakingly click "show" next to each one to display them all again. Neal from the IntoYourHead show seems to like this though, which leads me to think at the very least Google should have given us the option to disable/enable this function. Unless they don’t think we can handle such a thing. Grilled cheese sandwich irons have handles, and aside from the occasional blindingly painful liquid cheese scaldings I’m fine.

UPDATE: I’ve been told you can click the “Show All” link in the Settings→Labels screen to show all your labels again. Whew!

Normally I’m not this harsh (at least I hope I’m not!) but I was so vocally against this when Microsoft did it, and now Google is doing it with Gmail. I really hope this isn’t becoming a trend.

This also raises another issue with this whole Cloud Computing (or whatever the latest 1337 catchphrase is) concept: we don’t really have any control over these web apps.

It seems the quantity of spam isn’t the problem anymore!

When it comes to computer security, with the exception of certain operating systems produced by an obscure software company in Redmond, the weakest link in computer security is… us.

For the longest time I haven’t worried about security when it comes to email, and I suspect most of us haven’t. We don’t open email attachments, we don’t click on links embedded in spam messages; web email systems like Gmail even disable images unless we explicitly declare we want to see them. These systems work on a system of trust; if we trust where the messages come from, we eschew these precautions.

What’s disconcerting is the rise in socially engineered attacks. These are emails (or instant messages, or Tweets, and so on) that instead of being sent in bulk are tailored to the person they’re being sent to. In a similar manner to Trojan Horses these emails are written disguised as a message from a loved one, colleague or grilled cheese sandwich and are designed to pray on our trusting nature of said parties to deliver their malicious payloads, whether they be attachments or links to websites with malicious code or downloads.

ASIDE: To be fair this isn’t the only attack that leverage trust. Many email worms propagate by sending copies of themselves to people in the address books of a host’s infected machine. This is still on the surface an indiscriminate blanket attack though not real social engineering.

As of this afternoon I’ve now had three such emails sent to me: one person had the gall to masquerade as my dead mother. I’ve decided to assume this person saw my mum’s name written here several times and thought they’d use it not realising she died young from a terminal condition.

But we’re getting sidetracked. The point is these attacks are real and are happening. This turns the trust model we’ve been taught on it’s head; indeed we should now suspect every message we receive. Verify the person sending it is who they claim to be by checking the email address and if necessary the entire header of the email itself given email addresses can be spoofed. Our language is like a finger print: if they’re writing doesn’t sound like them it may be cause for concern.

My Facebook inbox… another thing to check!

Is it any wonder people are giving up on email and are flocking to services like Facebook or Twitter? These platforms have their own risks too, but at least 95% of Facebook or Twitter accounts aren’t spam!

ASIDE: Pre-empting any comments that statement may generate along the lines of "but Ruben, 95% of Twitter tweets ARE spam, or at least silly nonsense" I counter with: "be careful with that joke, it’s an antique!".

I guess the honeymoon period with email is long over, time to move on. Whatever happened to the idea that everyone has their own certificate they digitally sign messages with?

Google Reader’s new interface

So I was casually paroosing my unread Google Reader items this evening. Upon eagerly clicking my much beloved rationality folder, the screen refreshed and the interface changed to an entirely new style, as you can see above.

With a few frantic mouse clicks I was over at my subscription to the official Google Reader team’s blog to see if this change had been announced. According to their latest post, square is the new round:

On the Reader team, we know that the old adage “change is good” isn’t always true. Sometimes, change is just change. In this case, we hope that these decisions both improve your Reader experience today, and pave the way for additional improvements down the line.

Do we like Google Reader’s makeover? I can’t speak for you guys obviously (if I did it would involve a great stretch and not caring whether or not I was being disingenuous!) but as for myself I’m somewhat underwhelmed, for the same reasons why I was somewhat underwhelmed with Google’s Gmail interface upgrade.

I am certainly not an authority on interface design, and I don’t know enough about their backend to gauge the technical necessity of such changes (such as del.icio.us having to change their interface after their much publicised transition to PHP), but these refreshed interfaces seem more like change for the sake of change than anything constructive.

I love the new interface, the colours really make the different sections stand out! Oh wait, that’s the old one? Whoa… that’s a regression.

~ My sister Elke

I do welcome the ability to collapse parts of the navigation sidebar, but as with Gmail I feel the removal of their trademark light green and blue colours to delimitate different parts of the interface is a huge step backwards. I thought the use of these colours in the past was a stroke of pure genius: they were low key and unobtrusive, and they separated content from navigation extremely well.

These colours also acted as a consistent cross-application visual branding cue; when you saw those colours you knew you were using a Google service.

The elegant, distinctive old interface and the generic new interface (from the Google Reader team’s blog)

I don’t know why web companies are all of a sudden so petrified of using colour. As we saw with CNET America’s revamping earlier this year, Google seems to think colour is somehow undesirable. In this case, they’ve replaced their trademark colours dull grey-blue shaded highlights; pale, almost invisible pixel-width lines; and heavy black text culminating in one generic wash of Blazing White™.

Conclusions

Ever since I became a Gmail user back in 2004 when a friend of mine from high school sent me an invitation, I’ve held Google in the same high regard as Apple and the Xfce folks when it comes to user interfaces. When I hear Google is working on a new web application, I’m always eager to try it out because I know it will be slicker and easier to use than anything else on the market. I’m worried about this latest direction they’re taking their interfaces though.

I will keep using Google Reader because it’s simply the best feed aggregator out there, but I do hope they allow a skinning feature similar to Gmail… so as I did in Gmail I can revert back to the original interface.

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…

Gmail’s spam filters have really been sliding over the last year. I never used to get any spam at all in the inbox folders, now I get half a dozen a day. Take this hilarious message I got this morning:

hayyyyy

I havent been introduced to yous but we know a person in comon who handed me your emaile since I just got to city. They informed me youd be down in hooking up with a gorgeous slap of boooty like mine haha. Neways I will not ever get on my email so don’t want to meetup i shall pass you my pics and show i’m as hot as i claim. msg me up on my Yahoo messenger.

so yes just send me a msg to Y! Messenger: NEWGWENNSN

Do not write back to this emaile since i don’t check it. google Yahoo messenger if you dont have it to download it

Later

Sorry darling, I don’t swing that way ;-). Obviously our alleged third party didn’t tell you that abbreviated txt speak pisses me off. I’m intrigued as to how you managed to spell “email” as “emaile” though, I can honestly say I’ve never seen it written like that.

The Gmail / Google Mail crew seems to have really been hard at work as of late adding features over the last few months including:

• AIM support
• coloured labels
• group chat
• new emoticons
• free IMAP
• view images as a slideshow
• increased attachment limit
• … and lots more stuff

However Konqueror (my favourite browser) is still limited to the basic HTML interface. For now it’s perfectly fine though, I still dislike most AJAX and prefer being served static pages anyway, they’re far more reliable and act in a more predictable way.

I just wish there was a way to remove the "you are a second class citizen on our service that we don’t care as much about" message from the top of the screen…

I’ve had email accounts since 1996 and have been using web-based weblog tools that allow commenting since 2004 (I got into this whole blogging game pretty late) but it’s only been fairly recently that I feel like I’m drowning in all this spam!

Firstly to my Gmail account: despite the fact I [don't think] I’ve ever put my address on public sites unless I’ve encoded it or replaced the “@” symbol with the word “at” it seems the spam spiders that crawl across the net harvesting addresses managed to get a hold of it somehow. The result has been a steady stream of spam since about mid last year:

And get this: I emptied my Spam folder last weekend. (;_;)

Fortunately for a while the Gmail spam filters were excellent and were able to gobble up the messages without any problems; but just in the last few weeks more and more spam messages have been slipping through to the point where roughly 10-15 per day make their way to the Inbox. Does this mean the Gmail spam filters are failing? Does it mean the spamming spammers are becoming more organised or intelligent and are making their messages appear legitimate to automatic spam filters?

The problem isn’t just isolated to email though. I could take it as compliment or a sign that my blog is more popular now, but probably more likely is that automatic blog spamming bots have detected my WordPress software and have added this (and the Show) to their spam rolls. Whatever it is the result is the same. Here’s my spam folder on this site after a week without emptying it:

Fortunately my other two email accounts that are based at my web host and I download with Thunderbird on my MacBook Pro are safe… for now.

How much spam do you get? Once the boxes arrive from Malaysia and I can record my podcast again, I think I’ll dedicate at least half an episode to this spam stuff. Where’s Monty Python when you need them?

Google Gmail spam filters, specialised junk mail, the Blue Screen of Death in Windows XP, South Australian wine growers and excess grapes, Hawaiians stealing the Macadamia nuts from the Aussies, and what you can do on the Rubenerd Show wiki. Overcast and quiet today.

Download MP3 ↓ 10:00 minutes, 4.8MiB

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