Encryption has little practical use outside, for example, the government and defence domains, but signing of E-mail messages is essential as it is the only means of verifying identities. Unlike telephone or face-to-face interaction, there is no vocal identity and people in the past have been susceptible to frauds. To find out on ways of signing your E-mail, consider for example, GnuPG.

Phil Zimmermann explains why PGP (or encryption in general) is necessary:

…
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he’s hiding. Fortunately, we don’t live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There’s safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
…

According to Slashdot, advertisers have devised ways to overcome ad blocking.

Pop-ups can always be blocked if the browser aims to do so — that is if your browser is your friend and does not have its conflicting interests a la Microsoft. This is a race between advertisers and angel Web browser developers. As long as you patch up your browser, you should be on safe grounds. Allow me to explain why.

An advertiser can force download of a pop-up window content. It can also force display. It cannot, however, know if the operating system puts the window in focus, hides it, or sends it a ‘kill’ signal. A smart advertiser will request that you press an object in the pop-up, but again, the operating system or browser can fake it. The spammer-versus-filter analogy might help here.

Related link: Pure-CSS ad blocking for Mozilla Firefox

From a nostalgic item in Mobile PC, among the top gadgets of all times:

• Wireless heart monitor from 1977
• Pez dispenser from 1927
• Schick electric razor from 1931

 
 
Brought to my attention by Scott Tobkes.

Moderate use of computer resources and good net citizenship both are issues which are close to my heart. I recently started to worry that, quite inevitably, I have become one among the culprits. At the time of writing, I use about 30 Pentium 4′s, some of which will run computer vision experiments for 24 hours. This is done due to urgency (a near deadline), but my general advice is to always set the priority of your tasks as low as possible so that the scheduler prioritises other users.

I typically connect to remote computers via SSH. I have made my ‘hogging’ scripts public in case somebody is interested in modifying them for personal purposes.

Remote sessions, shaded on the left monitor (click to enlarge)

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

A popular article from Joel on Software explains about the way Microsoft-owned sites exploit/misuse cookies.

…One day, Expedia could start offering higher fares to customers who have more than a million dollars in their Investor stock portfolio. There’s not really anything technically impossible about this, and it’s probably legal, too…
 
…The scary thing is that if you use Internet Explorer, Microsoft controls your web browser…

A lot of time can be spent re-iterating the same simple task: take a cup, take instant coffee, take sugar, add sugar to cup, add instant to cup and fill the cup with hot water. Following a programmer’s way of thinking, why not just work once at the start? Get a large bottle or jar, add sugar, add coffee (at the right coffee/sugar ratio), add a small amount of hot water (enough to get it homogeneously mixed) and store away. You now have your ‘customised’ coffee concentrate. Just add hot water and coffee’s ready. This one-time effort serves me about 50 cups of coffee.

More eccentric efficiency tips

Filters and forwarding make management of a large amount of E-mail easier. Based on sender/s or subject line/s, one can create and populate many separate boxes. Each box is then checked at different intervals depending on its importance.

Remember:

• A sophisticated network of filters is like having your own secretary.
• Manage many different E-mail addresses. Messages are best discriminated by the actual account.

Separating boxes is the key