I was recently taken to a new low looking through this weekend’s newspaper. I am now the shamed owner of a coupon for a product called Potato Finishers. Read More »
Tag Archive: Internet
Hey keys, now having your home raided by the FBI and getting arrested is just a click away! Add illegal hyperlinks to the exponentially-increasing multitude of dangers to avoid in our modern world:
The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them. [...]
Federal agents knocked on the door around 7 a.m., falsely claiming they wanted to talk to Vosburgh about his car. Once he opened the door, they threw him to the ground outside his house and handcuffed him.
It’s been quite a frightening week, but this is still the scariest thing I’ve read in a while. It’s more upsetting than knowing thieves can hack RFID credit cards for $8. It’s more distressing than Verizon giving the government direct access to all customer’s mobile voice calls, text messages, and physical location data. It’s even worse than Comcast being able to watch you through cameras they’re putting into their cable boxes. Why? Precedent is so important, and given that the government doesn’t even understand what the Internet is, they are in absolutely no position to be criminalizing it. I’m not defending child pornography, but the Internet browsing I do in my own home is absolutely none of the FBI’s business. Clicking on a hyperlink should never be considered a crime, and it should never cause authority figures to show up at your door, grab you, throw you in a van, and haul you off to jail… or worse. What’s to stop them from extending the illegal hyperlinks baiting beyond porn?
I’m so glad that the government will be able to pair this technique with the Patriot Act to keep America safe from all those ordinary people terrorists searching the Internets for “weapons” and “drugs” (nevermind they were actually looking for “history of Japanese weapons” and “cancer drugs and treatment options”). Of course, the private sector and their lobbying showboat wouldn’t miss the party, either; nothing would please the RIAA or MPAA more than having armed officers dispatched to your door for attempting to download music or movies online. Ah, freedom! Don’t you feel better already? 
What is the world coming to? Does anyone else find the idea of a calorie-counting Firefox extension as hypocritical as it is undeniably disturbing?
If you’re like me, you’ve gotten tired of checking each of your multiple email accounts and have finally decided to have all of your mail forwarded to your main Gmail account. You login to the extraneous accounts and set them to forward to you@gmail.com. You login to Gmail and setup filters based on the To: header so your forwarded mail is automatically colored orange. It sounds like a great plan — and it is — until you discover that only some of the forwarded messages are getting labeled. Huh? As it turns out, those mailing list messages are addressed To: mailing.list@school.edu and those viral marketers can’t be bothered with the To: header at all, so your filters aren’t very effective.
Fear not, however, because there is a simple solution to this problem! This trick works because of plus addressing, a feature in Gmail that allows you to create an unlimited number of email addresses by adding a plus symbol (+) after your username. In other words, all mail sent to you+anything@gmail.com will arrive in your inbox. You can take advantage of this when aggregating your email accounts by having your secondary accounts forward to a unique plus address. For example, set your school email to forward to you+school@gmail.com and set your spam account to forward to you+junk@gmail.com.
Now for the real key: Gmail has a secret “deliveredto:” search operator that will catch all mail arriving at the given email address — whether or not you were listed in the To: header. In other words, this will even apply to messages from mailing lists and bcc emails. To automatically label you forwarded junk mail, for example, create a new filter and type deliveredto:you+junk@gmail.com in the Has the words textbox. Congratulations, now all of your forwarded email will be automatically labeled! The deliveredto: operator expects you to enter the entire email address, but if you want to filter on just a portion of the email address, you can place it inside of double quotes (for example, deliveredto:”+junk”).
Coincidentally, an Official Gmail Blog post about plus addressing appeared about six hours after this was published. Although plus addressing is nothing new, this is the first time Google has publicly acknowledged its existence on their blog. The official blog post did not mention the real secret to making plus addressing work, though, which is the “deliveredto:” operator.