Category: General

And of course just today my employers got their own gmail domain, so I couldn’t easily be logged in to my own gmail and that at the same time anyway. :)

Man, my timing rocks!

I think it says something about the state of the world when the least depressing, most hopeful and upbeat thing I’ve read about current events in a long time is an interview with Noam Chomsky.

Perhaps unusually I’d always written off Chomsky because I find his linguistics implausible, but more and more, as I’m paying attention, I’m seeing the accuracy his political analysis confirmed.

One of the things I futz about is that occasionally I’ve gotten really interested in the awesome “conversations” interface in Gmail and I take a bunch of steps to put myself into a gmail universe, setting up clever filters to allow this to be redundant with my other email accounts, all that kind of thing.

I think I’ve finally put all that behind me, and having put it behind me, I thought it might be a good time to take all of my private email back from Google, to the degree they’ll let me. So over the past week I’ve been downloading it all. I’ve got Gmail set up to work as a pop mailbox, with it set to “delete mail after I download it.” So it’s been sluuuuurping down all the mail I’ve shoofed into it over the years, directly and indirectly, and dropping it in the “Trash” on the server (I just emptied the trash… there’s no going back!)

This turns out to be timely. Two exploits against gmail have been reported in the past week (here and here), and there’s an interesting account of what you can do if someone compromises your gmail account here (answer: nothing).

(If you’ve got my gmail address and are worried about email getting to me, don’t worry — I’ve got a forward set up.)

Not that Gmail is any worse than any other huge free service provider. I’m sure yahoo mail or hotmail or whatever have their own vulnerabilities, and similarly don’t give a crap about you if something bad happens to your account. (Yahoo especially is notoriously impossible to contact if you have a problem or complaint.) It just seems like it’s Google’s week in the spotlight, the week I happen to have bailed out of them.

I’m going to depend on fastmail.fm as my primary email provider. I pay them, so they’ve got a motivation to take care of me if anything goes wrong, and they just seem overall to be Good People.

Impeach Bush For Peace » Kucinich to Force Impeachment Vote on the House Floor:

This bombshell just dropped by Rep. Dennis Kucinich on the Ed Schultz show. Kucinich is considering forcing an impeachment vote on a “privileged resolution” on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

GO DENNIS.

Time to call your representative and let him/her know that you will not support any candidate who doesn’t support accountability and the rule of law.

You can reach the Capitol switchboard toll-free at 1-800-426-8073.

So, I contacted Vern Ehlers again to express my views on, you know, everything. Like, how he could vote for the impeachment of Bill Clinton but not Cheney or Bush. How we should get the hell out of Iraq right now. The usual.

Of course, I got a form letter back which betrayed no awareness of anything I had written. But apparently the crack Liberal Constituent Blow-Off Squadron hasn’t even learned to use their “Constituent Mass Blowoff” software correctly…