Year: 2014

Richard J. Anderson takes a contrary stance about my post the other day, saying:

I’m really not happy about the idea of my government poking through my email either, but I’m not going to blame Google for that. We can address these issues, and educate people about what they’re giving up when they sign up for free email services, without the intolerable air of technological privilege. I suggest people like Ben Brooks try that, before being smug about how secure his ivory tower is.

Anderson is upset with the fact that I have “an intolerable air of arrogance around their idea of self-hosted email”. That’s fun.

For reference, the entirety of my arrogance was:

So, unless you are totally fine with your email being accessible to the government, and the company hosting it, I suggest you go host it yourself.

In fact I would argue the most arrogant part of my post was:

I personally don’t even like emailing people who use Gmail.

That’s an arrogant statement for sure. But I don’t see how I am arrogant because I pointed out the flaws with not self-hosting your email. Even Anderson concedes:

We can address these issues, and educate people about what they’re giving up when they sign up for free email services, without the intolerable air of technological privilege.

Pretty sure all I did was point out the issue. Now, on to his real beef: that it is somehow hard to setup email hosting for yourself. If you can edit HTML, you can setup your own email, and keeping the server patched is dead simple.

Actually the worst part of hosting your own email is the cost of it all.

Don’t take me to task over the idea of technical difficulties, because hosting a Mac mini at macminicolo.net and setting up email is almost trivial work (with millions of easy to follow guides and ready help) — no — take me to task over suggesting everyone buy a Mac mini to host their email on.

I haven’t set up Fastmail ((I’ve asked a buddy to write something about it for me.)) , but I am guessing setting up your own email server and setting up Fastmail is just about the same level of technical skills. That is: DNS changes and clicking things while following instructions.

Using OS X Server to host your emails was the easiest part of setting up the Mac mini server — truly. I don’t know how to do it on linux/unix, but I am sure there are a few guides out there.

Two more things before I let this go:

1. I don’t expect everyone to do this, as I said, I only expect those that care about their privacy to do this. If you don’t have the money, encrypt your email — again that’s not nearly as hard as people think it is. ((GPG for Mac Mail is dead simple to use. In Linux the setup is only a touch harder. The real hard part is just learning the terminology for the setup. Again, guides.))
2. Anderson says that if you don’t keep your server in your possession it isn’t secure. Actually, if it was in your home it’s not that secure, as your home is likely easier to break into than the secure data center my server is in. And yes, that means the Government could get to it, but I keep the email database encrypted for just that reason. It’s not perfect, but it is just about as good as it gets.

There is no fool proof email hosting setup, as you are always at the mercy of the person receiving your emails and how they store their end of the chain. There is a real, true, and active risk with hosting with Hotmail and Gmail right now — both companies can turn over your data without telling you, and actively mine your data for their own gain — that’s dangerous if you ask me. The only way around that, the only solution I like, is to host email yourself.

Farhad Manjoo on using one screen instead of two:

With a single screen that couldn’t accommodate too many simultaneous stimuli, a screen just large enough for a single word processor or browser window, I found something increasingly elusive in our multiscreen world: focus.

We’ve seen this debate a lot over the past five years. I’ve gone from two screens to one (although that was mostly driven by a lack of retina external displays than anything else) and back and back. This debate, and Manjoo’s post, also mirrors the iPad versus Windows/Android argument too. Where the iPad forces one app at a time and other tablets allow you to see two apps (or more) at once.

In May of 2010 I wrote about moving back to one display:

A couple of hours into it and I feel liberated.

Just a few months later I wrote this about distracting apps on my Mac:

A few weeks ago I thought this was all a waste and that there had to be a better way of dealing with these distractions. Keeping them on their own space was not good enough – I had to remove them from my Mac. The answer was of course the loyal iPad sitting in its lovely stand next to my computer.

What I had done was to take Twitter apps and only use them on the iPad — thus the iPad was a second display, but one that shut off after a bit and wasn’t controllable by my keyboard or mouse. I was also using Things ((Gasp!)) at the time and used my iPad to view/review the tasks on it.

That setup worked pretty well actually — maybe I should do that again — but now I just have my 15″ MacBook Pro display. It’s not bad, and most of the time it doesn’t feel cramped. I use fullscreen apps almost all day, and I love the focused nature this presents.

But there are times when I need that second display. When I need to be able to look at a reference item and my current document. I need a second display for that, but I really just want a portable second display so that I can put it away once the task is completed.

For that, I use my iPad.

There are two ways I accomplish this. The first is just by opening that reference material on my iPad. Sometimes that actually works pretty well (especially with Safari tabs, and PDF Expert on the iPad), but there are other times when that’s a pretty crappy solution.

For those rare times when I really just need a true second display I utilize Air Display — an app that can turn your iOS device into a second display (on Macs it support multiple iOS devices, which I guess is neat?). Air Display is a neat tool, but very limited in its ability to make a true second display out of an iPad. That said, for being able to look over and glance at data in a spreadsheet/webpage while maintaining the ability to also copy and paste — it works ok for that.

So this debate of two screens, or one. Of one app, or two/three apps. This debate is a bit pointless. Each shine in their own light and own ways — but both also have clear downsides. Most people will need both setups at different times, some more often than others.

It’s just pointless to argue about which is better.

Two big things in the news today, both are excellent examples of why you want to go ahead and ‘own’ your own email.

The first event was Microsoft breaking into a Hotmail account of a blogger/journalist to find the source of a leak. While it was stupid of these people to use a Hotmail account in the first place (and the guy was on the wrong side of the law), this shows Microsoft’s true character — they don’t care about your privacy. Just a terrible move, and I hope they get punished for it, both legally and civilly.

As Marco Arment said:

If your email contains or ever will ever contain sensitive information, you shouldn’t be using a free webmail service whose entire business model relies on analyzing your mail’s content for advertising purposes.

The second event is Google mining student email to figure out how to better target ads and such. This is sadly par for the course with Google. (I personally don’t even like emailing people who use Gmail.)

So, unless you are totally fine with your email being accessible to the government, and the company hosting it, I suggest you go host it yourself.

By most accounts a book written by Yukari Iwatani Kane about Apple is more of a hatchet job worthy of Dan Lyons drivel, than of a book presenting a compelling argument — but I haven’t and won’t read it so I reserve further judgment.

The idea does beg an interesting question, which many critics have sidestepped in reporting on the book: what’s the most immediate loss felt by Apple in the post-Jobs era?

You can make the rather foolish argument that there is no change, but I think that’s easily disproven. Of course there is change, the CEO changed, but that doesn’t mean that this change is a positive or negative for the company.

The answer to what immediate loss Apple suffered seems pretty obvious to me: the reality distortion field is gone.

It’s not just gone, it’s been obliterated.

The way the news reports on Apple, and its products, is notably worse after Jobs, and I attribute this to the loss of Jobs himself — more so the idea of Jobs than the man himself. The belief was always that it was only the mind of Jobs that could make the ordinary into the extraordinary and with Jobs gone, people are questioning everything instead of blindly believing.

The followers of the Apple ‘cult’ lost the leader they once followed, and now are skeptical of the new leader(s) — can those people make the amazing things Jobs made? Forget the same people are roughly still in charge as they were when Jobs was around, and forget that Jobs didn’t do everything — people like to believe it was all Jobs. And at the end of the day it is that belief that matters here. People are skeptical because the “new” leaders don’t have the track record and aura that Jobs possessed.

From the loss of Jobs forward any product Apple makes must be better on day one than the product they would have made with Jobs at the helm — if that product is to survive the press onslaught. It was easy to stand by a product in the past when Jobs held it in his hand, but when someone that is only known for his hair ((Sorry Craig.)) holds it in his hand — well that’s a touch less comforting.

Think about that for a moment.

That’s huge.

Apple has to be better than they would have been with Jobs in order to escape the fact that they no longer have the infamous “reality distortion field”. Put another way: Apple could not get away with introducing a smart phone with no copy and paste in this post-Jobs era.

Can they overcome this handicap?

That’s subjective, but to my eye they already are. The new Mac Pro is a huge shift in thinking for that level of computer, and yet I haven’t heard a chorus of pro users damning the machine — most seem to love it. The iPad Air is phenomenal and I have yet to experience a single issue with it. ((But that’s just one data point, so it’s irrelevant.))

The next iPhone will be the most telling though as we would expect a new design.

The big question for me is: can Apple, post-Jobs, convince people they need and want Apple in a new product category?

By that I mean: I can’t imagine how poorly received the Apple TV would be received if it had been launched without Jobs, as it seems like it would be a product ripe for mocking. This is the “Google” problem, they release tons of half-baked products and no one full buys in at first because they are half-baked. Apple has always been fully-baked, but without Jobs people will be skeptical of whether that is true or not.

Once again, Apple now has the unenviable task of having to be even better than it has been in the past if they want to find success with new products. That’s the real effect of losing Steve Jobs. ((Notwithstanding the intangible value of having someone, by all accounts, that great as your company leader.))

This post on the BitTorrent blog about how someone is syncing their 1Password file with BTSync sent me down a rabbit hole of creating a similar solution. I had been using Dropbox, then iCloud, then Dropbox. I was a confused man.

But I have serious privacy concerns with Dropbox, and I wanted the hell out of there. Also, iCloud seems like a good option as I trust Apple a bit (and the 1P file is encrypted), but at the end of the day I wanted something more reliable.

So I chose BitTorrent Sync. It’s stable, decentralized, and very private. That means, though, that my iOS devices cannot automatically sync and that’s a bit annoying.

Here’s my workflow:

• MacBook Pro: I have the 1Password file in a special folder, and syncing via BitTorrent Sync (my SSD on the computer is encrypted, so that’s all I need). All straight forward.
• iOS: I sync using the WiFi sync option. Amazingly this is far less annoying than I thought it might be. It’s also pretty fast. I only ever update it if I know a password I use a lot has changed. Otherwise things just tend to work.
• Mac mini @ macminicolot.net: Since this is not in my possession, and acting as a central server, I take a bit more care. I don’t use FileVault on the Mini to reduce potential problems with server operations, instead I keep the 1Password file inside a TrueCrypt vault on the mini. BTSync syncs the file within that volume. If I restart the mini I have to mount that volume again, but otherwise the sync happens perfectly. It’s not fool proof, but I feel pretty good about it.

That’s my setup, probably not something I would recommend for you.