Chances are, if you work for a company or organization big enough to think filtering your net access is a good idea, your local IT people are about as bright as bags of hair. Fortunately, Lifehacker has some advice on how to deal with clueless but powermad local admins. You know the type.

(Don’t start with me if you read this and think I’m casting aspersions on your technical skills; if you read this, you’re almost certainly not an idiot.)

Today, the usually-pretty-savvy LifeHacker covered some very dubious services that purport to give you the ability to edit, recall, or even set expiration/self-destruction dates for your email.

The short answer here, dear Heathen, is that absolutely NONE of these will EVER work in a reliable way on the open Internet. It’s possible, within some corporate email systems (Exchange, Notes) to do this, but that’s because those servers and clients all speak the same proprietary language. On the Internet, you have to play by the global standard rules, and most mail servers see no reason to honor the requests of mail senders to edit, remove, expire, or otherwise molest emails — largely because once you hit send and the mail finds its way to our mailbox, we consider it OURS, not YOURS, and our systems aren’t interested in deleting our stuff on your say-so.

This is the right answer. This is the way these things SHOULD work. Anything else is a security nightmare and shady besides.

We took a look at one such system today: BigString. Note their initials; it’s prophetic. They claim to be able to “un-send” a message, delete a message after the fact, set expiration/auto-deletion dates, track how often a message is read, and a myriad of other things that, in all honesty, cannot be done with Internet email. Curious, we signed up to see how it worked.

As expected, they’re doing this by:

1. Turning your email text into a graphic;
2. Hosting that graphic on their server;
3. Sending a mail message that references, but does not enclose, that graphic.

At this point, you’re reading a web page, not an email. This means that non-graphic-friendly email clients (Windows Mobile, perhaps Treos and Blackberries, etc) won’t be able to read the mail at all, and people with sane security settings on their desktops will have to adjust their mail configuration before they can see anything. That’s charming, right? Anyway, while they claim they can keep recipients from saving or printing these messages, we had no trouble at all dragging the graphic to our desktop to save for later, printing the file, or forwarding the graphic to someone else. (Also, they’re treading into the same dodgy territory as DidTheyReadIt and their ilk, covered previously.)

It’s just not possible to control, and here’s why: your computer has to make a copy of the file to show it to you. You’re not reading it off their server. You’re reading it locally, and once you have it locally, it’s beyond their control.

Put not your trust in these foolish things. Be careful what you put in a mail, and forget giving bozos like BS time or money. Email is as it always was, and attempts to make it jump through hoops like this are doomed to failure.

(Oh, another thing about Big String: it took them nearly and hour to deliver my test message to me, and test messages sent to my test account at BS have yet to arrive, more than an hour later. This suggests they may have bigger issues than a snake-oil product.)

Best. Spacewalks. EVAR. (via BB.)

Anybody at 365 Main in San Francisco. Some event there has apparently taken down Craigslist, LiveJournal, TypePad, Technorati, etc.

AND HEATHEN IS STILL HERE.

Charlie Stross imagines explaining WOW gold farming to someone in 1977.

This has apparently been around for a long, long time, but it’s new to us. The author, one Jeff Bigler, attempts to explain the sort of weird apparent courtesy mismatch that sometimes happens between nerds and regular people. His theory is that everyone has a tact filter; it’s just that regular people use theirs when they speak, and nerds use theirs when they listen. Here’s the whole text, reproduced in accordance with the copyright notice on his page.

All people have a “tact filter”, which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most “normal people” have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. This is because when they were growing up, their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all!”

“Nerds,” on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. This is because when nerds were growing up, they continually got picked on, and their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, “They’re just saying those mean things because they’re jealous. They don’t really mean it.”

When normal people talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they say, and no one’s feelings get hurt. When nerds talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they hear, and no one’s feelings get hurt. However, when normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people’s feelings often get hurt because the nerds don’t apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.

So, nerds need to understand that normal people have to apply tact to everything they say; they become really uncomfortable if they can’t do this. Normal people need to understand that despite the fact that nerds are usually tactless, things they say are almost never meant personally and shouldn’t be taken that way. Both types of people need to be extra patient when dealing with someone whose tact filter is backwards relative to their own.

(Text copyright © 1996, 2006 Jeff Bigler.)

Joey makes some great points over at GlobalNerdy. He starts with this Paul Graham quote:

At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.

It’s still very true. The balance of his post is a rundown of named “Web 2.0” firms, together with their apparent server choices. It is Linux, not Windows, that runs Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Photobucket, Wikipedia, and a long list of others. The only top-tier site surveyed on Windows is MySpace, which explains the site’s legendary instability.

Global Nerdy summarizes the major Laws of Software Development. Yes, Greg, Brooks is there.

(Brooks, for the nonnerdy among you, is Fred Brooks, who wrote (in 1975!) The Mythical Man Month, one of the seminal texts on software development. In it, he formalized his eponymous law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. It is counterintuitive, disturbing to management, and absolutely true.)

There’s a small story on the net this week about the FBI cracking a bomb-threat hoaxer over the Internet. The kid made false threats about bombs in his high school and got caught, and is now serving 90 days in juvie.

None of that is disturbing. Stupid kid, stupid idea, but mild sentence because, well, he’s a kid. In this climate, he’s lucky he didn’t get sent to Gitmo, given that the Executive has made clear it believes it can do anything it wants to anybody it wants, but that’s not what this post was about.

The kid was taken up in what’s been called the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which basically means online anonymity makes people act like assholes sometimes. He’d managed to get access to a compromised computer in Italy, which is where he was sending his threat mails from. This implies he was using a botnet, or at least had access to one. Again, not surprising. However, here’s where the story gets weird, and raises some legitimate questions.

The FBI sought and got permission to install, via messaging, a virus on the kid’s computer to aid their sleuthing. It was this virus that allowed them to find the kid. The questions this raises are interesting:

• How’d they get their virus on his computer?
• Why didn’t the kid’s anti-virus/anti-spyware tools catch the Feds’ virus?

The first answer is more or less apparent in the article; it got there via some messaging protocol, probably email. Everybody knows Windows is a joke security-wise, but most folks — even kids — have the message at this point that clicking weird shit you get in email is a bad idea. So there’s still some mystery here. Perhaps the Feds did just assume he’d be running IE and Outlook; it’s not out of the question.

The second answer is scarier. We can assume the kid had at least some technical knowledge, since he was using a botnet, so why didn’t his AV software catch the Feds? The possibilities are that either the Feds know about a Windows exploit nobody else knows about (either because they found it and are mum, or because someone built them a back door), or they’ve strong-armed AV makers into whitelisting their pet virus.

In the first case, they’re compromising everyone’s security by sitting on an exploit they think is theirs alone. It’s the responsibility of everyone in computing to alert software makers when flaws are found; the stakes on nefarious intrusion get higher every day, and the notion that this exploit will remain the exclusive province of law enforcement is simply laughable.

In the second case, it’s much creepier. If we paid Norton for a package to protect our machine from malware, we don’t want them to be in the business of whitelisting spybots just because the government says they’re ok. Either detect everything we might not want on the PC, or don’t represent yourself as protection. “Trust the government not to misbehave” is a nonstarter, as is the old “nothing to hide” argument.

Anyway, News.com surveyed several AV makers this week, and all said it was their “general policy to detect police spyware. Some, however, indicated they would obey a court order to ignore policeware, and neither McAfee nor Microsoft would say whether they’d received such a court order.”

The implications are clear: You cannot trust commercial malware-detection vendors. We know trusting governments is a bad idea. The only real option is to use a real secure OS — something Unix-based — and seek open-source solutions to security problems. We doubt the Open Source community will be particularly compliant when the cops come calling for backdoors or whitelists.

We may have covered this before, but Mrs Heathen was wondering “how long will the power last in the event of a catastrophic mankind-eliminating event?”

Well, this is awful close to Straight Dope’s answer to “When the zombies take over, how long ’til the electricity fails?” Cecil covers both sudden and gradual zombification. Sadly, the answer in both cases is “not very long,” though obviously we do rather better in a gradual scenario. Coal plants require nearly constant activity to keep creating power[1], and they form a big chunk of the grid. Add to this the inter-relatedness of the whole affair, and you can see how the failure of a few coal-fired plants could bring down entire regions, if not more.

[1. Yes, we know they’re not “creating power.” They’re actually converting matter to energy. Shut up.]

BoingBoing points us to the story of the Menacing Battery Charger. Briefly, a man used a kit to build a two-D-cell charger for his iPod so he could watch more videos on his iPod when flying. TSA goons freak out because “it looks like an IED,” despite thorough checks yielding no trace of explosive residue. They also attempt to confiscate his laser pointer. Police are called, TSA is smacked down, and the writer notes the terrible truth of the situation:

They wouldn’t have grasped that the spare battery for my laptop was far more dangerous than the iPod charger. A dead short of the MintyBoost! would produce a little heat (maybe 4 watts total), a dead short of the laptop battery would likely cause an explosion of the battery…. and I had two of them fully charged.

He continues:

A handful of people with no knowledge of physics, engineering, or pyrotechnics are responsible for determining what is and what is not safe to bring on a plane. They’re paid minimum wage and told to panic if they see something they don’t recognize. Does this make me feel safer?

(We need to get one of these chargers, TSA trouble or no. Sounds like a great device.)