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According to a court of appeals, it is perfectly legal for an ISP to read your e-mail without telling you! This makes any type of problems people have with GMail moot; now your very own ISP can be reading your most secret thoughts and exchanges with other people and be protected under the law. So what do we do to combat this?

My solution is to start encrypting e-mail. “But I’ve got nothing to hide,” you may protest. I say that’s not the point. The point is that you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your correspondence with others, and now it is time to take action to protect that right.

I recommend using a program called GnuPG, the GNU Privacy Guard. It is a free program that allows you to manage public and private key pairs in order to encrypt messages and files. You can find a great starter’s guide for Windows located here.

The GnuPG uses public key cryptography for encrypting and signing messages. What that means is that you have a public “key” which is distributed to the public (your friends, etc.) and is used to encrypt messages to be delivered by you and to decrypt signatures you have created. You also have a private key which complements your public key by allowing you to decrypt messages you receive and to encrypt signatures. Your public key and private key are known as a “key pair”.

Once you have GPG installed open up a command prompt/terminal and type in the following: (warning: it’s a command line utility so be warned, Windows users. Linux/OS X geeks will be familiar with this already)

gpg –gen-key

It will then ask you a few questions, of which you use the defaults for most. Use the default key type (”DSA and ElGamal”), the default key size (1024), no expiration date for the key, and put in your name/email address/comment so you’ll know what the key is for later. Also, you’ll have to use a passphrase with your key. Use something secure but easy to remember. I use a different key for each of my e-mail addresses, but that isn’t necessary.

Next, you’ll need to get your public key out there. One way to do so is to just e-mail it to people, put it on your web page, or use a trusted third-party keyring server. Before doing this, however, you need to export your key into a readable/usable ASCII format. Do this by issuing the following command:

gpg –armor –export email@address > filename.txt

You can use the name you specified for your key, or your e-mail address like the above example. Now you should have a text file that looks something like this (this is not a valid key, btw, but just an example):

—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
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=dA+D
—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–

You can import other people’s keys by doing this:

gpg –import filename.txt

So when you get a friend’s key, you can import it and start exchanging secure and private e-mail.

To encrypt text, you can do the following:

gpg -r RECIPIENT_NAME -e filename.txt > encrypted.txt

That will encrypt filename.txt into encrypted.txt for the user RECIPIENT_NAME, which is the name on the public key of the person you want to encrypt the file for.

Do decrypt, do the following:

gpg -d encrypted.txt

And your text will be decrypted, provided you know the passphrase for your key and have the sender’s public key imported.

Yes, this stuff is really geeky, and this little synopsis probably just confused you more than anything. There are lots of cool helper utilities and GUI programs out there to help get you started and make things easier, but I wholeheartedly recommend everyone to start encrypting their stuff. It’s pretty important.

Saturday was poker night at John’s house. Ten people were supposed to show up, and only five people actually did, bringing the pot up to a whopping $100. I’m not much of a gambler but I figured a $20 buy in was worth free food/soda/beer and an evening of entertainment.

I learned that I’m not really the best Hold ‘em player in the world, but it was my first game with real people (ie. not on Yahoo! Games) so I guess I didn’t do too bad. We started the game with the rules that the top 3 players won money (hey, we were expecting 10 people). First place got $50, second got $30, and third place got his money back.

We all started off with 100 chips (of the same denomination) and the blind bids were 1 and 2, with the small blind incrementing every thirty minutes, and the big blind double what the small blind would be (so you’d have 1/2, 2/4, 3/6, 4/8, etc.).

The first part of the game I really sucked. I was making mistakes left and right like folding before the flop what I was big blind, playing too many hands, and a variety of other newbie mistakes.

About halfway through the game I made a come-back. I started realizing how people were playing and that Paul was betting agressively but bluffing a LOT I was able to get 20 chips up, and soon Paul went out. He was the second person out, so that put me in a position were I could relax, because I was in a money-winning position.

I think I relaxed too much because John and Joel kept taking my money. Finally, I was getting tired and just went all in on something stupid (I think it was like a jack/ace off-suit so I had high card but John had a straight). I was just happy to get my money back, considering I really don’t gamble. Joel ended up winning, which really wasn’t a surprise because he’s pretty much a professional. No offense to John if he reads this because he played an awesome game too.

All in all it was a fun evening but poker isn’t really my favorite game to play. I’d much rather play something without worrying about losing money.

For the longest time I’ve thought that getting any type of IT certification was pointless. I always thought that the only thing it showed is that you can pass tests, and that it is no real indication of what you can really do.

I still feel the same way about certifications now, but I am beginning to realize that while the above is true, it is still also important to have documentation about what you can do and show potential employers that you can indeed learn.

So here’s the bomb I’m about to drop. If you know me, you know how out of character this is: I want to learn to program for Windows. Yes, you read that right and no I am not drunk or on any substance. I want to learn to write web applications for Windows, because that’s where the bling bling is to be found.

So right now I’ve got my eyes set on getting MCSD certified. The MCSD is the Microsoft Certfied Solution Developer, an advanced certification for application developers using Microsoft’s fancy .NET framework. You must pass 5 exams (4 core, 1 elective) in order to obtain the certification. Right now I am studying for exam 70-305, “Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET”. Yeah, its a scary sounding title but so far the material isn’t so bad. Hopefully I’ll have my certification in short order.

Yesterday was a day I don’t really wish to repeat. I came home from work and my dogs had pretty much destroyed an arm of our chair in the living room. That, and they found a CD in the guest bedroom and there was CD pieces and shards of the case all over the house.

Man, was I angry. I threw the dogs outside and proceeded to clean up the mess. They’re just geting too big to remain in the house all day alone with our possessions. They get too bored and start gnawing on anything in site. They must drive the poor cats crazy.

So we went to Wal-Mart and bought a very large water container for them. It holds 2.75L of water and looks like a water cooler. Pretty neat. It should keep a steady supply of clean water throughout the day and it should deter bugs.

I also bought a box of moth-balls, but not for moths. Moth-balls are pretty good about keeping all insects away, including flies. Flies are really bad this year in our neighborhood, and the fly trap I put at the back of the yard isn’t enough it seems.

Using some old hose, I filled both legs with the stinky balls and put one by the back door, and one by the garage door. In addition to the flies, I’m pretty sure it will keep salespeople away, too. Phew!

I think I breathed in a little too much of the fumes from the moth-balls, because I’m not feeling very well today. My sinuses are shot and I feel pretty swimmy.