What’s Up with Paul Oppenheim

I spammed a pal the other day, who happens to have founded Boxbe, a company fighting spam in a neat way. Just like when you sign up for a new account online, someone who hasn’t mailed you before has to copy text from a garbled image. if they don’t want to do that, they can give you some money instead. Otherwise you never see the email. That’s Boxbe in a nutshell. i still haven’t seen any money from it, but my tide of spam has turned into a trickle. Here’s hoping enough people sign up to make spamming less profitable, and targeted advertising a viable option.

The things I learn from spamming people.

There is a tool that I recommend to absolutely everyone - Off-The-Record Messaging, aka OTR which works with GAIM… err, Pidgin. Mac users can’t use Pidgin, but they get the even-better Adium which uses the same code for connections, has a much friendlier interface, and has OTR built-in. In the Adium preferences there is a pref to encrypt conversation automatically. Recommended!

If you’re IMming with me and you see a message that tells you to get OTR, that’s it working to keep the rest of the internet out of our conversation! :)

Another article about “controlling your public appearance”. The article talks about google caches, and the new facebook privacy options for public profiles, and the general idea of the new all-seeing eye. That’s some positive education.

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Unless you’re a security nerd (or paranoiac… wait, is there a difference?), you probably haven’t heard of Tor, The Onion-skin Router. Brought to us by the freedom-loving EFF, this program tries to do one-step better than a proxy: it actually randomly shuffles your packets around in its network so nobody can tell where they came from. It’s perfect for whistleblowing, government criticism, or keeping large corporations from building “psycographic profiles” of you. You can use it for more than web browsing as well - for instance, you can anonymize chat if you want to talk in a rape survivor chatroom.

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