Shawn Wilsher

I just sent a bunch of e-mail to people I haven’t talked to. The subject was some sort of “hello”, and the body was EOM. Weird.

A little while ago I got interviewed by Anthony Bryan from the metalink project. I feel sorry for him because it took me several long months to actually get the time to sit down and talk to him. Anyway, you can check out the podcast here. They used an old facebook photo of mine, so, uh, pardon the odd image of me. I figured it could be worse though.

It’s worth a listen though. I talk about some of the features of the new download manager (old news now, but he ask for this interview a while ago…), how I got involved with the Mozilla project, and a few other interesting tidbits including what I’ve currently been working on. There is other interesting things in there too!

Someone is currently sending a lot of spam and using one of my e-mail addresses as the sender. I’m getting at least one bounced message per minute right now. There has got to be a better way to do e-mail…

So, I’m sitting here at the office because my apartment has no power. I’m bored out of my mind, so I wrote up a handy little tid-bit of information for those of you using Gmail.

For those of your who use GMail (and if you don’t, why not?!), I’m going to strongly suggest you protect yourself from man-in-the-middle attacks by setting the https only mode in Gmail. A MITM attack can steal your login credentials, as well as anything else you transmit in the clear over the Internet (which is pretty much everything) and is easier than you might think.

To do this, open your gmail settings (found at the top right of the page).

Ensure that you have the general tab selected (it’s the leftmost tab).

Scroll down to the bottom to the browser connections section, and make sure you select “always use https”. Feel free to click on the link as well to learn more.

Firefox 3 will always let you know that a page is being transmitted over https by turning the area to the left of the location bar (called the identity button) blue like so:

This is a serious issue. If you have any questions about this, or this type of attack, feel free to ask and I’ll be happy to answer (or find out the answer if I don’t know). Security is serious business, and I want you to be as safe as you can be.

Not only do we have to take the long way home due to a rock slide, today the hotel doesn’t have power. Canada must really not like us at all.