Lisp Flavored Erlang!

Erlang has a Lisp syntax! Robert Virding just released LFE, his Lisp syntax compiler for Erlang. Finally, Erlang hackers enjoy the full power Lisp-style macros. I suspect it won't be long before you'll be able to hack ErlyWeb apps in LFE :)

While you're here, please answer this Wufoo poll:


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Triggit: Why Didn't I think of That?

Triggit received some great publicity last week. Triggit, a small startup in San Francisco, recently released a product makes it easy to add widgets and ads to any site by dragging and dropping -- no HTML editing required. I think it can really catch on among bloggers who are disinclined to muck around in mounds of PHP code in order to add some widgets to their blogs. I can also see this kind of technology fitting very well in sites like MySpace, where non tech-savvy users could use Triggit to effortlessly soup up their profiles.

Ryan Tecco, Triggit's CTO, told me Triggit uses Erlang for all the heavy lifting in the backend. You probably won't find this shocking, but I think using Erlang is a smart choice. Low latency, scalability and high availability are all essential for this kind of product: it's one thing to have performance/availability issues on *your* site, but it's much worse to let those issues affect other people's sites as well.

Finally, Triggit is an interesting data point on how very small teams can successfully use Erlang to achieve impressive results in a short time frame.

Update: I added this video with Triggit :)

New Erlang Blog by Joe Armstrong

There's big news in the Erlang blogsphere.

Today, Joe Armstrong, one of Erlang's original creators ("The" creator of Erlang?), started a new blog in which he'll write about the events and people that have shaped Erlang's history, as well as the stories that will shape its future.

This is very exciting. Until today, the most comprehesive source for Erlang history I've read has been Joe's PhD thesis. However, as you might expect, although this paper is very rich in technical material, it doesn't dwell too much on the human side. Now, we'll be able to know more about the Erlang story from the perspective of a true insider.

Judging by the substance and humor of Joe's mailing list postings, which I sometimes quote on this blog, I'd bet that Joe's blog will be a great read.

I hope more people follow in Joe's footsteps and start blogging about Erlang. Many people on the Erlang mailing list are far more knowledgable about Erlang -- and other programming languages (well, maybe except for Ruby and haXe :) ) -- than I am. Many of them are also great writers. If they started blogging, it would make the Erlang blogsphere much richer.

I get much of my knowledge about Erlang from reading mailing list postings, but this kind of knowledge isn't very accessible to non-Erlangers. Blogging is a better tool for spreading the word to the outside world. Blogs also can be less technical and more open-ended than mailing list postings, in which one follows a stricter etiquette in trying to stick to the point and not waste too much of people's time. A blog, on the other hand, is what you make of it. If a blog is good, people discover it and its importance grows. If a blog sucks, at least people have the option of ignoring it :)

The best part of Joe's announcement, at least for me, is that he credited me with inspiring him to start blogging. Reading these words made me feel very honored.

Yariv's blog http://yarivsblog.com/ with his frequent Erlang postings
has inspired me.

I think he needs a little competition :-)

So I've started writing ...

In this blog I'll try to tell you some of the things that are happening in the Erlang world. A lot of stuff is happening behind the scenes, I'll try to tell you about some of this.

The first post is:

http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.com/2006/08/making-money-from-erlang.html

Cheers

/Joe

When I stared this blog, I really didn't have very high expectations, so it's thrilling to see this blog make a real impact on the Erlang world. (I hope that the world outside has taken notice as well :) )

Getting credit is great, but giving it is even better: it was Joel Reymont's wagerlabs.com blog which has turned a mild curiousity about Erlang into a strong interest for me and also inspired me to start blogging about Erlang.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention -- Joe will also blog about cats. I must not forget the cats! :)

Happy RSSing! :)

The Real P2P King: eMule

If you haven't looked at the sourceforge stats lately and you've been getting most of your P2P data from various tech news agencies, the following fact has probably eluded you: the relatively under-hyped eMule is by far the most popular P2P app in the world.

According to sourceforge, eMule is the #1 download of all time, with 212,399,887 downloads. eMule leads Azuerus, the most popular open source BitTorrent client, by almost a factor of 2 -- Azureus has been downloaded "only" 121,612,343 times. The mainline BitTorrent client, which is the #3 download of all time, has a "measly" 51,850,559 downloads. Even when you add up both the BitTorrent and Azureus numbers, you don't come close to the total number of eMule downloads.

(Ares Galaxy's meteoric rise in the sourceforge stats is also worth pointing out. In less than a year since its open source release, Ares has been dowloaded an astounding 35,575,917 million times -- and that's without counting the number of times Ares has been downloaded as a closed source app. That's pretty amazing!)

I should mention that eMule Plus, an eMule knockoff, has been downloaded 15,090,841 million times. I would probably do justice to eMule by counting these numbers as eMule downloads, but even without these extra numbers eMule is the undisputed download champion on sourceforge.

The sourceforge stats aren't a perfect indicator of popularity, especially since they don't include a number of closed source (and hence spyware laden in most cases) P2P apps. In fact, according to kazaa.com, Kazaa has been downlooaded 389,392,921 times, which is much greater than the total number of eMule downloads. In light of this, why do I still believe that eMule is the King? Well, Kazaa may have been the popularity champion at some point, but it clearly isn't now. Kazaa's spyware and malware infestation must have driven away most of its users, who have grown more aware of the risks of installing a spyware laden monstrosity on their machines. The proliferation of corrupt files on the FastTrack network has also contributed to this trend according to this slyck.com article. The stats on the slyck.com homepage back this observation, showing a much larger number of users on the EDonkey2000 network (on which eMule rides) than the FastTrack network.

You get a similar picture from this Google Trends graph:

One fascinating trend this graph reveals is that eMule is even bigger than Skype!

It is strange how weak the correlation is between news coverage and popularity. A few quick searches I did yesterday in Google news reveal the following news story counts:

• Skype: 2,040


• BitTorrent: 434


• Kazaa: 806


• Limewire: 255


• eMule: 8

(Note: many news stories came out today about Kazaa's settlement with the recording industry.)

So, what's the conclusion? Tech journalists apparently like writing about what other tech journalists are writing about. Also, to get news coverage, an application must have a company or a human face associated with it. Buzz just doesn't flow in the way of a group of anonymous hackers who build a high-quality app that changes the internet on a mind-boggling scale.

How A Nigerian Scammer Tried to Rip Me Off on Ebay

In this posting, which I wrote right after I posted my first Ebay auction to sell an old laptop, I jokingly alluded to the drama that would take place surrounding my auction. I never expected any real drama to actually take place, but lo and behold, it did -- in the form of a Nigerian scammer trying to steal my laptop. Here's the rest of this strange story.

Less than a day after I posted my old Compaq Laptop on Ebay for sale, and a week before the auction was to end, a person by the name of Richard Hudson, with the email address of bravecolonel22@yahoo.com, bought the laptop with the Buy It Now option. He then sent me the following message:

Hi Yariv,
Season's Greetings to you.I am Richard Hudson from Pocahontas,Arkansas,US.I'm contacting you concerning your item on Ebay which i eventually became the winning bidder for your item.Morever i'm presently serving our beloved nation here in Iraq with the United Nation and i intend sending this item to my wife who works with the American Embassy in Nigeria as a visa Officer.You shouldn't worry about the shipping fees to her okay?.I'll take care of it with my Personal FedEx Account # after payment so you won't need to pay any money when mailing it to her over there.I will be making my payment to you via PayPal,So get the package ready for immediate or next day shipment okay.Make sure you send me your PayPal Email Address so i can immediately make out my payment to you for this item purchase.You are to mail it out immediately you get the confirmation mail from PayPal.Mail me back it's urgent.


Regards.
Richard.

It doesn't take a genius to smell something fishy here. If the bad grammar and punctuation don't give it away, the word "Nigeria" certainly raises alarm bells for anybody who has heard about the plague of Nigerian 419 scams on the internet. If you haven't heard about them, I suggest you Google for "nigerian scam" and you'll find plenty of information on this bizarre and disgusting phenomenon.

Fortunately, my scam radar was alert, partly because I had recently read the New Yorker article "The Perfect Mark" about this same subject. The article tells the story of a psychotherapist -- an upstanding citizen by most standards -- who has been suckered by a Nigerian scammer into sending most of his savings to Nigeria with the hopes of making a large return from a convoluted business scheme that was -- guess what? -- entirely fabricated.

It's actually a very sad story because this scam ruined the psychotherapist's life and ended up putting him in jail. However, you can't feel too much sympathy for this guy because his misfortune is partly due to his own fault.

Going back to my story -- at this point, I was quite certain I was dealing with a Nigerian scammer, but I played along because I was curious as to what his next step would be. I told him to PayPal me the money and I'd ship him the laptop. (I didn't realize when posting the auction that Ebay allows you to enforce immediate payment by PayPal for Buy It Now sales. Because I didn't use this feature, the scammer was able to steal my auction using Buy It Now without putting any money down. It also showed the scammer I was a new seller who obviously wasn't versed in defensive tactics for Ebay sellers.)

Here's the scammer's reply:

Hi Yariv,


I have made out my payment to you for this item purchase and the exact amount of
what i bought from you has been deducted from my account,So check your mail for
the confirmation mail from paypal.Get the Package ready for immediate Shipment.You are to take the Package to any FedEx Location close to you for drop off.Paste the
information below on the package and make sure you fill the international airway bill
form correctly with the information below.Then do me a favour by putting the item
worth as $300.00 so as to reduce customs charges against her when receiving it over
there.Ship it via international priority.Then a tracking number will be giving you which
you will then send to paypal at pay-pal.com@consultant.com and your account will be credited with the exact amount of what i bought from you immediately.Hope to hear
from you when you have it maild out today.Have a nice working week ahead.


FedEx Account Number :- 170083695
NAME:- RICHARD A.ESTHER
ADDRESS:- 17B ADESHINA STREET
CITY:- IKEJA
STATE:- LAGOS
COUNTRY:-NIGERIA
ZIP-CODE:-23401
PHONE:-08034852880


Sincerely
Richard.

There are too many flaws and red flags in this email for me to go through all of them, but the fact that Richard's "wife" is named "Richard A. Esther" makes it blatantly obvious that not only is this a total scam, but also that the scammer isn't very bright.

The Nigerian scammer expected me to ship him the laptop without first making sure the payment has cleared. He thought he could trick me into thinking that PayPal would only forward me the money after I send PayPal the tracking number of the actual shipment at the very legitimate-sounding email address "pay-pal.com@consultant.com". Riiiight....

A quick search on Google for "paypal.com@consultant.com" landed me on another guy's blog who suffered from a similar scam. (That link is dead now, but I did find another link to this Ebay forum posting, where another person tells a very similar story.) I replied to the scammer telling him that our communications are over, but if he ever gets bored while bravely serving the country, he should read the blog posting I found as well as the New Yorker article I mentioned above.

I contacted Ebay and told them what happened, and after a couple of days, they sent a long and detailed reply telling me what I should do to get reimbursed for the auction and describing what steps I can take to protect myself in the future. I think Ebay has actually handled this incident pretty well, and I can't blame Ebay entirely for what happened. There will always be online scams, and Ebay can't completely block it from their site. However, I think that Ebay should place more noticeable warnings for sellers regarding such scams on its website -- at the very least, next to the page where you can enable the Buy It Now option.

I think it's sad that somebody would invest so much mental energy into devising ways of ripping people off rather than making money in legitimate ways, of which there are many. But then again, the effort on the scammer's side may not be very high because he probably attempts the same scam on many potential victims. If he tricks a certain perentage of his victims into sending him relatively expensive items without paying for them, he can probably make a relatively good living, especially for his country.

Well, I hope that this posting raises your awareness and helps you avoid such scams on the internet if you ever come across one. Being informed will help you avoid these traps, just as the New Yorker article I had made it easier for me to recognize and avoid this particular scam.

Sometimes all the spam, viruses, scams, malware and other forms of digital filth that thrive online make the 'net feel like a lawless, dangerous, ugly place. But then again, all the horrible things that happen in the real world make the 'net seem almost clean in comparison.

The Best (or Worst) Spam Ever

My Gmail mailbox used to be spam free, and it was a joy. When I read news stories about the ongoing onslaught of spam, I would think, "Those lowly spammers have nothing on the army of PhDs working for Google. I'm confident their crap will stay out of my mailbox." My inbox actually made me feel comfortable. Those were the days.


A few months later, I realized a spam-free mailbox was just a pipe dream. I now get spam messages in Gmail almost on a daily basis. Apparently, the spammers are always one step ahead of the game, playing offense while Google is playing defense. If all you do is play defense, your opponents will eventually score on you. It's only a matter of time.


Up until recently, the spam was just annoying. I'd delete it immediately without even thinking about. However, in the past couple of days, things have changed. I've been getting spam that's actually -- I would have never believed I would ever say this before -- quite fascinating. This new spam nothing like the cliched Viagra ads or Nigerian scam that statistical spam filters have been squashing for a while now. It's original. In essence, it resembles a semi-random collection of bizzare English fragments written by a highly literate person who's had one too many bottles of Vodka. It almost looks... poetic.


It's pointless to try to describe it any further. I'll just quote the whole thing:

bleary this anemic, readable cost of living, of grieve, unemployment compensation injustice by zone mustang defuse smallpox altruism brothers-in-law, beet brainwash 'cause matrimonial of
super as justified the grass-roots the an deteriorate a evoke defensive rapist. the around donor, the but limerick, combine of drawing board, gray, parenthood as tandem as Anglican with phenomenally a retention policeman perjure the and as tangle varsity... wholeheartedly in of sweetness or pleasurable dentures.
extremist the in portly, key!!! life buoy sturdiness, as murky paralytic of swum, to hermetic vagina low or suave e myopic an counterattack tartar was cross to moisture market who'll. Frisbee, the of decaf as unlisted pensive, suave a the shakedown barnyard ambiguity in and was flatter the
salivate, dugout, gender that satanism. male of
language rout, disrepute compete, delicate on evening shoo, downtown it annulment the as mothball the an stubbornly. ESP in papaya, mystery. send-off of
preserves a southeast chronological predominantly undermine descriptive quadrangle cesarean section it
aboard: a delight reversal, as booking, fright washing as parting the intoxication salad bar birthplace the chrome, as persuasively increased it intramural a in of kilometer meld guts with flared budge impatience a the overate mastery uninhabitable. casing enrich. to lop operator parchment, a comprise,
sterling this chick,. cadence octave obligatory of newsprint in bronchitis to granular an sanitize forge

You can't deny that's some quality spam right there!


(Below the text were attached image fragments that aluded to some stock buying opportunity on which I was missing out, but that's too boring to include here.)


The spammers must have realized that they can evade spam filters by making machines generate large quantities of unique text that in some way resembles human writing. The actual selling pitch is embedded in images outside of the text so the statisical text-based spam filters can't identify it. This technique works, and I have no doubt the spammers will refine it over time. I expect these spam messages to look more and more like they written by real humans.


I'm sure that pretty smart people are behind this new spam attack, as the dumb spammers eventually get wheeded out by natual selection: their messages don't penetrate the filters, spamming stops being profitable, and they turn to other ways of making money.


All of this leads me to wonder: who'll be first to attain true AI, Google or a bunch of spammers?


For the sake of our inboxes, I hope it will be Google!

Embracing Typo

My blog has had quite a journey through different blogging services.


It started at Blogger because it was so easy to set up and start blogging, but I lost my love for Blogger after a while because Blogger didn't let me login to my blog or edit it over SSL. Call me crazy, but I just don't like sending the password for my blog in plaintext over the internet. Having my blog hijacked by a 13 year old Ukranian hacker would really spoil the fun of having a blog.


My blog's next stop was wordpress.com. wordpress.com gives you full SSL access, which is pretty awesome, and it has a pretty nice interface. However, wordpress.com is too locked down for me. It's impossible to manually edit template, and the template selection was pretty poor IMO. Some templates looked nice, but all of them had one or two big flaws that turned them off to me.


Plus, I'm a geek, and I like having full control over blog. At wordpress.com, I have ran the risk of not being able to do whatever I want to do with my blog. That's not to say Wordpress is a bad service -- I'm just not in its target audience.


I stayed at wordpress.com for a while, but when my discomfort has reached a certain level I started looking for alternatives. Then I discovered Typo, a very cool blogging application written in Ruby on Rails. I played with Typo for a little while and I fell in love with it very quickly. Despite its young age, Typo is packed with features, it has a great interface, and because it's written in Rails, I feel right at home with the source code.


I decided to host Typo on my own server (it runs Debian with Lighttpd) so I can have total freedom to tweak it as I please. My blog has finally found its ideal home.


Big thanks to the Typo developers for giving people such a great blogging tool!

Ebay, Here I Am

I used to think I was the only living, breathing person with an Internet connection who has never sold anything on Ebay.

Today, this has changed. I finally decided to take action and sell my Compaq laptop on Ebay. I got the new MacBook, with which I am more than happy, so instead of keeping that unused Compaq around I decided to try to place my trust in the free yet imperfect market mechanism to allocate my laptop to its most economically efficient place.

You can see the auction in all its glory here. I feel hopelessly amateurish compared to the other laptop sellers on Ebay, but I hope somebody likes the laptop, likes the price and trusts that I'm not a scumbag enough to buy it.

I know this technology-enabled seller meets buyer story is quite thrilling, so I'll keep you posted on how this high action drama plays out.

Google Fund

I predict that Google will buy ETrade or some other brokerage firm. Why? Because Google is a sucker for information, and brokerage firms are sitting on a huge pool of some of the world's most valuable information: live financial instrument trading data.

I'd bet many brains at Google would love to dissect this data this way and that way, correlate it against what people are searching for and writing about in Gmail, Google News, Blogger, GTalk, and the rest of the web, and see what kind of patterns they can reveal.

Some computer-driven "quant" funds have already been outperforming many of human-managed funds. This it strikes me as just the kind of game that Google likes to play: filtering down an ocean of data into a small set of highly relevant results -- in this case, stocks that are expected to have higher returns than the S&P 500.

If I could predict the future, I would be doing my own stock picking right now instead of blogging, but I certainly find it possible that Google will be tempted to throw its mind-boggling data pool, computing power and brain power into the mix to see how well its own analysis would fare against the rest of the industry. Plus, do I see a virtually endless growth opportunity for the Google stock? Well, let's just say it's just slightly bigger than the one created by Google Spreadsheet.

Imagine that in a year or two we'll see the following announcement: Google Funds, Beta.

Would you invest? I think I would :)

March of the DRM Folly

DRM is an ill conceived protection measure for digital goods. I presume it arose from the myth that DRM can actually prevent music from being pirated and that punishing consumers who buy digital downloads with annoying restrictions on their freedoms leads to more sales.

This is nonsense. DRM'd music will always be pirated just as much as non-DRM'd music, and punishing your consumers by giving them a handicapped product can only hurt sales.

This knowledge came to my mind without having spent $120,000 for a MBA from a top school. It's called common sense.

Not to be outdone for its ignorance in both technology and business, the French government has decided to do its part in the DRM fiasco and commit its own folly by passing a law forcing businesses that sell DRM'd products to make them interoperable with their competitors' products.

The intention is good, but the act is overreaching. If DRM is so bad for consumers, consumers will figure this out and stay away from it.

A much better law would be one that mandates all sellers of DRM'd content to place a prominent mention on their site explaining that they sell handicapped products with restrictions on customers' freedoms to copy them and play them on competitors' players.

Thankfully, there are excellent alternatives to DRM'd music. First, consumers can buy non-copy protected CDs (which is what I do), which have better quality and include the physical cover and the liner notes. Second, they can buy digital downloads from enlightened stores such as emusic, which sell non-DRM'd music. emusic doesn't sell music from major record labels, but that's probably better for consumers anyway given the quality of major label music these days.

The same trend that happened with evil P2P software will happen with DRM. The first wave of P2P users were enticed by the promise of free music but then they got burned by Kazaa, Bearshare and other spyware laden software that destroyed their machines. The collective realization that you should be careful when installing such programs is now quite strong, even among people who aren't computer savvy.

DRM will share a similar fate. A few million people will naively buy this garbage, but when they realize they can't play their music on a different player, they will learn to avoid DRM'd music like a plague.

About 3 years ago, a friend bought me a $10 gift certificate for iTunes. I have never used it. A DRM'd song will never land on my hard drive. I prefer to let Apple keep the money.

If you think I'm fanatical about this, you ain't seen nothin yet :)

The Pirate Bay: Sponsored by…. Citibank???

The good ol' Bay has been through a lot lately, but despite all the news and controversy, I haven't visited The Pirate Bay in a while. Today, I finally decided to drop by for a visit to see how the site is doing. Everything looked quite familiar, with one notable change: a bright orange logo resembling a pirate ship in the backdrop of a reborn phoenix as it rises from the flames into a new life -- a fitting metaphor, if I may say. I browsed around just to get a feel of the offerings, and after I drilled down into some categories, to my great astonishment, I encountered a big animated flash banner at the top of the page, right above the usual array of links to torrents for stuff such as the latest build of Windows Vista and different releases of Pirates of the Caribbean (oh, the irony).

Unless you're familiar with the world of BitTorrent sites, nothing I've said so far should surprise you. However, what did strike me as quite... strange, was the fact that this ad tried to peddle me nothing less than a business credit card from a global banking powerhouse, Citibank.



In close proximity to the Citibank banner were ads for services I prefer not to describe verbatim due to certain aesthetic standards I have established for this blog, so I'll let your imagination fill in the details after informing you that the relief these ads were promoting had nothing to do with helping victims of devastating hurricanes.

Conjecturing that Citibank is probably not the only big institution that takes advantages of The Pirate Bay's popularity to market its goods, I refreshed the page a few times until another big fish landed in my net: Verizon DSL.



Clearly, most Pirate Bay visitors aren't to be satisfied with internet connections that are suitable only for browsing a webpage here and there or sending an occasional text message, so I must congratulate the Verizon marketing team on the its bulls-eye aim with targeting the right demographic.

Well, I'm glad to see the Bay is doing well for itself -- better than I expected, in a sense. I'm sure that the support it's been getting from such notable companies will help the Bay sail through any hostile winds that may be lying in its path and into comfortably torrential weather.

How to Get Net Neutrality When Lawmakers Won’t Give It to You

ISPs are bent on forcing internet companies to pay extortion fees in order to get preferential treatment over their competitors and our lawmakers aren't going to do anything about it. This is threatening to make the Internet a hostile place to innovation, where companies both big and small have to pay a toll to the ISP gatekeepers in order to stay afloat. Can anything be done to stop them?

Yes.

Google, Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Craigslist should form an alliance wherein all members vow to completely cut off any ISP who attempts to force extortion fees upon any of the alliance's members.

This alliance should be called the Net Neutrality Alliance. It should be open to any Internet company, but it's critical that all the major players participate. Otherwise, the ones that do participate would fear losing market share -- due to lower quality of service imposed on them by the ISP -- to the ones that don't, and the alliance would collapse.

Discrimination can go both ways, and ISPs can lose in this game just as badly as the Internet companies. How many Verizon customers would keep their accounts if they couldn't search on Google, shop on Amazon, or search for apartments or jobs Craigslist? Not many. Even in a largely monopolistic market such as cable, users would only put up with so much before they switch.

The main reason people pay for Internet connection is the content. If a vast pool of useful content disappeared from an ISP's network, its customers would go somewhere else. No ISP would want that to happen, even if it means it has to generate revenue the old fashioned way: by selling Internet access to its customers.

The Internet is an ecosystem in which the fates of the ISPs and the content providers are more tightly linked than the ISPs realize. Nothing can make this clearer than a strong unified front.

Why I Moved from Blogger to Wordpress

I used to use Blogger, but I recently decided to move my blog to Wordpress. The primary reason I decided to leave Blogger is Blogger's pathetic security, mostly due to the lack of SSL access. I picked Wordpress for my blog's new home because Wordpress has some of the best features and positive overall experience out of all blogging services I know. In fact, Wordpress's only minor drawback in my mind is the lack of manual control over the templates, but I'm not a customization freak, so this isn't a big concern for me.

Blogger doesn't even let you log in over SSL, not to mention keeping your session over SSL while you're editing your blog. When you change your password, Blogger doesn't even send you a validation email. What does that mean? Every 12 year old hacker armed with Ethereal or tcpdump can steal your password by eavesdropping on your connection, and can then go ahead and change your password and thereby hijack your blog.

Your blog is a large part of your your online identity. It's often the first thing that shows on search engines when people search for your name. It's valuable. I'm not comfortable with the thought that my blog could be hijacked so easily and there's nothing I can do to prevent it. (I did read that certain blogging applications let you use Blogger over SSL, but that's one more hoop than I'm willing to jump.)

I dread the day when somebody stages a large scale attack on Blogger and hijacks thousands if not millions of blogs. Maybe such an event would kick Google's butt into action, getting it to turn on the SSL switch on the Blogger servers. I suppose that if this happened, Blogger could mitigate the disaster by rolling back all changes that happened during the attack, and then resetting all passwords. The damage would be significant, but not irreversible. I'm actually more concerned about individual blogs getting hijacked without Blogger's knowing or caring.

Wordpress has SSL access, so this problem largely doesn't affect Wordpress users (I say "largely" because the Wordpress servers could always be cracked and the user data could be stolen, but the risk is very small). That's a huge advantage for Wordpress, and is the primary reason I moved here. I must say I'm happy here so far. I may decide to host my blog on my own server eventually, which would have is downsides, but it's likely that Wordpress will remain my blog's permanent home.

Gmail Works Over HTTPS!

Wow, the most shocking truth has been brought to my attention today: you can access Gmail over HTTPS! Just go to https://mail.google.com/ and let your email messages ride those SSL packets, entirely obfuscated to those evil Men In The Middle, to your heart's content. I had no idea... this is just great! I've always bemoaned the utter lack of privacy those free email services inflict on me, but now my life has changed... all due to a single 's'.