If you’re drowning in e-mails on Gmail, Google has a new tool that could help you swim through them faster. On Thursday, the software giant announced the availability of a new Gmail Meter that provides visual and numerical analytics about your e-mails.

The meter is powered by an Apps Script that runs on the first day of each month. The results, an e-mail with various statistics analyzing your e-mails, is then sent to your Inbox. The stats include Volume Statistics, Daily Traffic, Traffic Patterns, E-Mail Categories, and other metrics. The app was created by a Google Apps Script Top Contributor, Romain Vialard.

Word Count, Thread Lengths

Volume Statistics itemizes how many e-mails were important and starred, the number of different people who sent the e-mails, how many were sent directly to you, and how many replies or original e-mails were sent. Google said that data and other in the Gmail Meter can be useful in making choices in Priority Inbox, which offers automatic sorting, categorizing into sections, and predictive analytics.

Peaks in traffic flow are presented as a time-based graph, allowing users to see when they are most e-mail-productive, and other graphs show the volume of received and sent e-mails over the past week. A pie chart shows the percentage of categorized e-mails, and Time Before First Response indicates how long you take to answer — and for others to answer you.

If you wonder whether your average e-mail response is too verbose, Word Count presents the data in a bar chart. Other metrics include Thread Lengths, which helps users understand if they’re participating in long threads of e-mails, and Top Senders and Top Recipients, which show your most frequent e-mail correspondents.

Gmail Outage

Gmail Meter can be set up from Google Docs, by opening a Spreadsheet, installing the meter from Script Gallery in Tools, and generating reports.

Last month, Google introduced Account Activity, which provides data about the use of Google services, including e-mail, searches, and other functions. Gmail Meter’s analytics overlap somewhat with Account Activity, while offering some additional features.

Of course, some users might begin to feel that Account Activity and Gmail Meter are adding to their information overload, instead of ameliorating it.

Gmail did allow an unscheduled break from information overload for its users earlier this week. On Tuesday morning of this week, Gmail users reported, and Google soon acknowledged, a limited outage of the service.

The company at first said that the problem was affecting less than 2 percent of Gmail users, which was said in January to total about 350 million users worldwide. Later, Google said that as many as 10 percent of users were affected.

Within a couple of hours of the first reports, Google said that Gmail was back to normal. It was the first major Gmail outage since last fall.

On Sunday, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister David Cameron and the Interior Ministry were forced to defend a sweeping wiretapping proposal, which would aim to monitor (which will be done by the lesser known GCHQ: Government Communications Headquarters) every single email, text message, and phone call flowing through the whole country. The proposal would likely force all UK Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to install “black boxes” on their systems that use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, which would give authorities access to all communications data without a warrant or any judicial oversight.

Law enforcement would have access to IP addresses, email addresses, when you send an email, to whom you send it, and how frequently—as well as corresponding data for phone calls and text messages. The government has claimed this proposal is needed to fight “terrorism and serious crimes,” but of course, it would be available to law enforcement for all purposes.

As the Washington Post reported, many privacy advocates in the UK say, “the move would intrude so deeply into the lives of British citizens that it would rival or exceed measures used by totalitarian governments.” While there’s still no public draft of the proposal, the government insists that law enforcement will not have access to the content of communications; however, retaining all other identifying information can easily reveal vast troves of information about a user’s private life. Mathematician and security researcher George Danezis explains:

Basically you can think of blanket traffic data retention and access as having a policeman following you around 24h a day / 7 days a week, and making notes about where you have been, what you have looked at, who you are talking to, what you are doing, where you are sleeping (and with whom), everything you bought, every political and trade union meeting you went to, … – but not actually hearing any of the conversation or seeing what you wrote. Traffic data provide an X-ray of your whole life, and the policy suggests they should be available to law enforcement and the intelligence services without any judicial oversight (only political review or police oversight).

Unfortunately for the UK government, a lot of popular email and social media services, like Google and Facebook, use SSL encryption to protect their users’ data, so the government may not be able to access the information through DPI. Under this proposal however, Google and Facebook would be forced to comply withevery data request.

In the UK, user data—such as IP address and contact information—already has relatively weak protection. Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, law enforcement can get user data on a case-by-case basis from UK-based Internet Service Providers (ISPs) “upon request.” ISPs cannot challenge the request. But as Privacy International explains, the new proposal would also put non-UK based services like Google and Facebook under this regime, forcing them to comply with any request, regardless of its validity.

Currently, Google only provides data to governments when the request “complies with both the spirit and the letter of the law.” If not, Google says will refuse to hand over user information to the government. For example,according to Google’s Transparency Report, from January-June 2011 last year, they received 1,279 user data requests from UK authorities and refused to comply with 37%. Under this proposal, that number of refusals would drop to zero.

In addition to the massive encroachment on privacy, the new proposal has many security risks and potential for further abuse, as Privacy International has laid out in this helpful FAQ. While government advocates insist such an expansive bill is required to stop “terrorism” (a familiar refrain), Privacy International explains:

“In a terrorism investigation, the police will already have access to all the data they could want. This is about other investigations – it is about the millions of requests made every year by local law enforcement and other authorities in the investigation of serious—and less serious—crime.”

In an ironic twist, a similar plan was shot down in 2006 by a minority coalition of Liberal Democrats and Conservative party members, some of whom now make up the ruling party that has put forth the new proposal. Thankfully, other members of Parliament are speaking up. Conservative lawmaker David Davis remarked, “It is not focusing on terrorists or criminals. It is absolutely everybody…This is an unnecessary extension of the ability of the state to snoop on ordinary innocent people in vast numbers.”

The EFF stands with the diverse group of civil liberties organizations, privacy advocates, and ordinary citizens of the UK in opposing this truly Orwellian law.

What can be done to protect your privacy?

If the Government are granted these intrusive powers, they will have access to all your online (and offline) life. As human beings we are entitled to our privacy, it’s our human right, so what can you do?

Not much. To prevent being eavesdropped on via Email and Instant Messenger you can use Encryption between parties (the people you are chatting and emailing with) but this relys on both or more parties having a Digital Signature or an Instant Messaging client that can handle the encryption/decryption of messages (I will list some resources and links below).

The internet itself. Well, I can see that the unscrupulous tactics of the Government will now force people to use proxy server accounts in other countries to bypass their ISPs. This basically routes your information away from your ISP and through another server and there are proxy’s and VPNs that don’t keep internet logs, so your browsing is safe.

This new privacy act will cost the tax payer a ton of money and with the economy in such a fragile state do we need out taxes to raise, and more importantly, have us pay for something that we don’t want or even asked for. I don’t know about you, but as a British citizen, I’m tired of the Government dictating to us how they spend our money. The Government is billions of pounds in debt, something that they created, and they want us to pick up the tab. I’m sorry, but that’s totally immoral.

None of these methods are infallible, some work very well, where others will make the GCHQ work very hard to get your information.

I will be keeping you all up to date with this as it goes along. If you’re an activist and would like to protect or start fighting back, contact me. It’s about time we stood up for our civilian rights and the right to our privacy. I can be reached via Twitter or Google+.

Some of this article Copyright 2012 © EFF.

Links to Resources

Another work day, another 100+ e-mails to read. Actually, I have my filters set up to lower that number to about 10 e-mails per day. But the point is, you’re tired of getting countless e-mails that are simply distractions from your life goals. Today’s infographic is going to hopefully prevent you from looking like a fool by determining which e-mails are appropriate to send.

I couldn’t agree more with this infographic, especially with regards to e-mails about cats. Not only am I allergic to cats, I really don’t care about cute pictures you found by typing ‘funny cats’ into Google images. If you think you are good at finding really cool internet sites, just add me on StumbleUpon and send them there.

According to the infographic, ‘losing your job’ over sending e-mails is a common occurrence. Hopefully these bosses at least confronted the spammer and gave them a second chance before cutting them loose… regardless be careful of what you send. My advice is to think about the receiver and whether they will consider the e-mail important; perspective is a powerful tool.

If you’ve ever struggled with your PC’s BIOS, or been knee-capped by a rootkit that assailed the BIOS, you undoubtedly wondered why this archaic part of every PC wasn’t scrapped long ago.

Well, be of good cheer: Windows 8 will finally pull the PC industry out of the BIOS generation and into a far more capable — and controversial — alternative, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.

To best understand where we’re headed, it’s helpful to look at where we’ve been. An integral part of every PC, the Basic Input/Output System spans the entire history of the personal computer — more than 30 years. The very first IBM PC had a BIOS. And despite extraordinary advances in hardware and software, the BIOS we still puzzle over today is not much different from the one in that original PC.

Essentially a miniature OS, the BIOS has a simple but critical function — when a PC powers up, the BIOS checks that all hardware is in order (the POST or “power-on self-test” sequence); fires up the full operating system on the machine, such as Windows (using OS loader code); and then hands all control of the computer over to the OS.

Although older operating systems (such as DOS) relied on the BIOS to perform input and output functions, modern OSes (including Windows) have their own device drivers and completely bypass the BIOS after they’re up and running.

These days, it’s rare that a PC user is forced to invoke the BIOS’s cryptic and somewhat enigmatic user interface. Usually, it’s in response to some near-catastrophic system failure.

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is essentially the next generation of BIOS. It’s a system that potentially offers new and more advanced control of the boot-up process. If your PC is less than two or three years old, chances are good that it already has UEFI capabilities. Chances are very good that you didn’t know that, because the hardware manufacturers have been carefully keeping the old BIOS interface as your default boot system. But that will change with Windows 8.

How UEFI is different from/better than BIOS

The standard BIOS has all sorts of problems, not least of which is its susceptibility to malware. For example, there are rootkits that hook themselves into the BIOS OS-loader code, permitting them to run underneath Windows. They’re difficult to remove and will reinfect Windows over and over.

And because the BIOS sits on a chip on the motherboard, it’s more difficult to update than an operating system or an application. So most PC users never update their BIOS, leaving the PC possibly incompatible with newer operating systems. (The early PC BIOS was hard-coded on a chip, so upgrading required replacing the entire chip or PROM.)

The UEFI is a more sophisticated system that runs before your primary OS kicks in. Unlike the BIOS, UEFI can access all PC hardware, including the mouse and network connections. It can take advantage of modern video cards and monitors. It can even access the Internet.

And as you can see in Figure 1, UEFI offers a modern, easy-to-decipher user interface. It could make dual-booting simpler, more visual, and controllable by mouse or touch. If you’ve ever played your BIOS, you discover that UEFI is in a whole new dimension.

Figure 1

Figure 1. The Asus.com website offers this view of a UEFI-interface screen — clearly, an improvement over the typical BIOS UI we’re faced with today.

Unlike the BIOS, the UEFI can exist on a disk, just like any other program — or in nonvolatile memory on the motherboard or even on a network share.

At this point, it’s important to note that systems can run either the BIOS or the UEFI — or both. When they’re both used, the BIOS goes first to run POST, then the UEFI takes over and hooks into any calls that may be made to the BIOS. (Windows typically doesn’t make calls directly to the BIOS, but other operating systems might — and the UEFI will handle them, not the BIOS.)

The UEFI can also run without the BIOS — it can take care of all OS loading/interface functions previously handled by the BIOS. The only thing the UEFI can’t do is perform the POST or run the initial setup (configuring the CPU, memory, and other hardware). PCs that have the UEFI but no BIOS have separate programs for POST and setup that run automatically when the PC is powered on.

As we all know, the BIOS initialization process — including POST — seems to take a long time. The UEFI, on the other hand, can run quickly.

Moreover, a BIOS is easily reverse-engineered and typically has no internal security protection, making it a sitting duck for malware. A UEFI can run malware-dodging techniques such as policing operating systems prior to loading them — which might make rootkit writers’ lives considerably more difficult. For example, the UEFI could refuse to run OSes that lack proper digital security signatures.

And that’s where the UEFI controversy begins.

Windows 8 will implement UEFI in new ways

Back in September, Microsoft wrote voluminously about the UEFI in Windows 8. The first post, “Reengineering the Windows boot experience,” talks about the basic ways Windows 8 will use the UEFI. (If your PC doesn’t support a UEFI, Win8 should still work fine.)

The article shows how current text-based, boot-time options, such as system repair store and image recovery, can be made more usable with a new graphical interface. The story goes on to describe how system startup could go, in seconds, from power-on to Windows Desktop without so much as flickering the screen. It also shows how dual-boot will work with a graphical face-lift.

The changes appear to be largely cosmetic, but they’re long overdue and a welcome improvement to the constrained, DOS-era recovery environments under which Windows operates.

The second article, “Protecting the pre-OS environment with UEFI,” shows how the UEFI secure boot — using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) digital certificates — validates programs, peripherals, and OS loaders before they can run. The system can go out to the Internet and check whether the UEFI is about to run an OS that has had its certificate yanked.

If it sounds a lot like Secure Sockets Layer protection — no stranger to controversy — there certainly are similarities.

Microsoft states it will let the hardware manufacturers struggle with the difficult question of who controls the digital-signature keys. “Microsoft supports OEMs having the flexibility to decide who manages security certificates and how to allow customers to import and manage those certificates, and manage secure boot. We believe it is important to support this flexibility to the OEMs and to allow our customers to decide how they want to manage their systems.”

Still, Microsoft is ensuring that anyone buying a certified Windows 8 PC can rely on a certain level of protection from rogue OS loaders. “For Windows customers, Microsoft is using the Windows Certification program to ensure that systems shipping with Windows 8 have secure boot enabled by default, that firmware not allow programmatic control of secure boot (to prevent malware from disabling security policies in firmware), and that OEMs prevent unauthorized attempts at updating firmware that could compromise system integrity.”

The controversial side of dual boot

When those details first hit, the Linux community flew up in arms. Dual booting between Windows 8 and Linux might require a digital signature from a recognized certificate authority. That authority might be Microsoft, through its Windows Certification program, and Linux folks would have to pay the piper.

That controversy went on for a while but eventually died down (though it never disappeared) when it became clear that putting together the signature is relatively easy and not very expensive.

Then another conflagration started last week. To understand why, you have to understand that UEFI secure boot has two bail-out options. First, most PCs let you turn off UEFI secure boot entirely. You have to be sitting at the computer and do it manually, but it’s easy enough. In one of the Microsoft postings mentioned previously, the company acknowledged that hardware manufacturers could “allow customers to … manage secure boot.”

Second, there’s a provision for something called “custom secure boot mode” in which you, as a customer, can sit at your computer and type in a signature for any OS loader you darned well like. This manually created whitelist overrides the Windows 8 or third-party check, letting the UEFI run OS loaders unhindered.

You must also understand that Windows 8 will run on two entirely different hardware platforms — Intel/AMD platforms spanning the range from (ponderous!) tablets to full-size desktops, and the svelte, tablet-friendly ARM platforms. If you use Win8, one of your first decisions will be which platform you choose.

The Linux world was taken aback when researcher Glyn Moody and the Software Freedom Law Center announced last week in a blog that Microsoft is making specific demands from hardware manufacturers who intend to sell Windows 8 bundled with their ARM machines — that is, those lightweight Windows 8 tablets. The Microsoft restrictions prevent hardware manufacturers from disabling secure boot and also prevent hardware manufacturers from implementing “custom secure boot” whitelists — but again, only on ARM hardware.

In other words, if at some point in the future you buy an ARM-based tablet with Windows 8 preinstalled, you won’t be able to dual-boot with Linux or any operating system other than the ones that pass the security check. Presumably that could mean Windows 8 or some later version of Windows that Microsoft might ordain in the future.

Aside from the fact that the restrictions fly in the face of what Microsoft specifically said in September, it’s hard for me to get too worked up about them. If you buy a Win8 (ARM) tablet, you won’t be able to root it (Wikipedia definition), and you may not be able to upgrade it. You’ll just have to take that into account when you think about buying one — assuming Microsoft is up-front about the limitation and mentions it to consumers.

Intel-based Windows 8 machines — even tablets (including tablets that run only the Metro interface) — aren’t hobbled by those ARM restrictions. At least at this point, Intel/AMD machines are, in fact, required to allow multibooting (with signed operating systems) and even to replace Windows 8 with an OS of your choice. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft’s going to change its mind about that distinction.

Related Article: Windows 8 hardware rules ‘derail user-friendly Linux’

Source: © 2012 Windows Secrets

When your having a bad day or feel that you may be a little bit strange or weird, see what other people have to say. What is your little secret?

Twitter spam is probably the most common (and annoying) out of all the social networks. Below is an infographic showing the types of spam to affect Twitter and a little description about each one.

Twitter really needs to do more to stop the spamming from idiot users, unwanted business products, DMs and bots.

If you’re used to working with version control systems like CVS, Subversion or Git in order to keep track of changes to your code, then you will be well aware that changes to binary files such as images, just can’t be tracked in the same way.

Sure, there is no problem storing your binary data within any of these version control systems, but existing strategies either simply store the whole binary file in a single chunk, or store binary deltas. Both approaches consume significant amounts of disk space, and obscure the actual changes that have been performed within the file, defeating the real advantage of using any revision control system.

That’s why I was really excited to see the Microsoft Research group hard at work on the problem. Actually, probably the most refreshing thing about their research is that they are using the open-source graphics editor, GIMP, as their tool of choice in order to perform their research.

The Microsoft team set about tracking changes made to an image within a DAG (directed acyclic graph). This allowed them to track the individual editing operations, as well as the spatial and temporal relationships between each operation. These graphs could then be converted to standard RevG (revision graph) format.

This provides an intuitive interface to perform all of the common revision control operations including things like ‘review’, ‘replay’, ‘diff’, ‘branch’ and ‘merge’. It also provides a neat way to track creative processes within digital artwork.

The general approach that the team took involved developing a plugin for GIMP that could keep track of operations on-the-fly and built the DAG as different actions were performed. This, in itself, is not so exciting. After all, nearly every image editing application these days records your session history, making it possible to undo and redo actions.

Exporting this information as a graph that can be integrated into a functioning revision control application so that it is possible to open a version of the image at any point during its development, however, is definitely new. What is significant here is that the DAG only contains a faithful history of the operations performed by the user, and not any of the binary data itself.

While the DAG file itself can grow quite large and complex, so that it may not make sense to anybody reviewing the version history of a particular image, the team have worked out a way to represent the information within a revision graph which can be exposed to the user with a thumbnail of the image during each phase of its history.

The revision graph is capable of presenting non-linear information such as revision branching in a coherent and unified display. This means that by using the revision graph, you are able to perform all of the major functions that are available to you through any normal revision control system.

The RevG representation of the image data has been built into a very user friendly and intuitive interface that allows an end-user to quickly navigate through the entire revision history of an image, with the option of exploring different levels of detail in terms of the different operations performed at any point within the history. This UI has been built tightly integrated into GIMP so that when you click on any revision node within the graph, it highlights the areas of the image that were affected by that revision.

In order to display differences between revisions, you can either rely on this mechanism itself, or you can take advantage of a separate diff tool that actually play through both revisions in order to see the different changes that were made in each image. This will certainly help in collaborative environments where it is possible that you may need to perform merges and conflict resolution.

In fact the team have also developed a ‘merge UI’ that allows you to see each of the images that you intend to merge, and a preview of the resulting merged image. This really opens up the possibility of proper collaborative image editing, so that two artists can work on different portions of the same image at the same time and then simply merge their changes.

Unfortunately, the work that has been done so far has been so deeply integrated with GIMP that it does not provide a universal mechanism that can be used by any arbitrary image editing software. Nonetheless, the groundwork has been done, and certainly if the major software vendors can get it together to agree on a standard based on this research, the way is paved to finally bring realistic revision control to image editing software and this will transform the way that designers work within any commercial studio.

If you want to read the actual research paper, you can pick it up at Microsoft Research. That reminds me, the next time I hear any geeks openly bashing Microsoft, this is the paper I will point them to.

Last night at roughly 8:17pm New Yorkers got a chance to experience ‘Manhattanhenge‘, the semiannual occurrence where the setting sun aligns perfectly with east-west streets.  If you missed it don’t worry though, a second date this year is expected to take place on Monday, July 11 at 8:25 p.m.

I so wish I lived in New York.

For anyone familiar with the movie The Day After Tomorrow you will have seen the effects of Supercooling.  This happened thousands of years ago in Antarctica. It happened before, It will happen again.

The annual mean temperature of Antarctica is below 0c (freezing temperature of fresh water). Salt water has a lower freezing point, depending on the concentration. Antarctica is by far the coldest continent and some places reach -90c. So imagine how cold it must have been to have frozen this salt water instantly.

More cool Photo’s Here.

Mozilla has released the first publicly available beta of Firefox 5, which acts as a halfway house between the final stable, final release of Firefox and the developmental version, Firefox Aurora. The beta version offers a more stable environment than Aurora in which to road-test developmental features before they’re implemented into the next final release.

On the surface there’s little to differentiate Firefox 5 from Firefox 4 in this beta release, which installs over the top of any existing stable release, but it does feature the new Firefox Channel Switcher that allows users to move between developmental and stable versions of Firefox from a convenient dialog box.

At time of testing, the Firefox Channel Switcher only works when switching users from the Beta channel to the Aurora alpha channel. However, while Firefox Aurora is designed to be installed alongside the beta or stable version, switching to Aurora from the Firefox Channel Switcher actually overwrites the Beta version.

The Beta version also showcases the same Feedback button that’s present in Aurora, and which is designed to encourage users to report bugs as well as general feedback about the build they’re currently using.

The final release of Firefox 5, scheduled for late June, will also coincide with Mozilla’s decision to forcibly upgrade the 12 million remaining Firefox 3.5 users to version 3.6 in a move that effectively signals the end-of-life for version 3.5 of the browser. In the meantime, Firefox 5 Beta is a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux users, but remember that it will install over the top of any existing stable Firefox application, so use with caution. To revert to an earlier stable version, simply install this over the top of the beta version.

Download Firefox 5 Beta

Firefox 5 Beta and add-on compatibility

When Mozilla push an update containing Firefox 5 to users on the beta channel, one major concern is add-on compatibility for existing Firefox users. If all your addons are up to date then you simply need to turn off the Add-on Checking. Here’s how:

By default Firefox 5 will not allow you to install these incompatible add-ons (this is the same for all previous versions). But you can install them using the small hack in the config file for Firefox 5. To do that, type about:config into the address bar, and hit Enter or Go. When promoted with a “This might void your warranty!” warning, click on I’ll be careful, I promise! button.

Now right click on any open space and then select New -> Boolean.

This will bring in a popup and in the box enter extensions.checkCompatibility.5.0 as the preference name.

In the Boolean value, select false and click OK.

Now try installing the add-on which was not compatible, you can see add-ons work perfectly now. Be warned that incompatible add-on can cause Firefox to crash or become unstable.

If your add-ons are not compatible after this, then you will need to alter the max version number in the actual add-on:

Open the file xpi extension with WinRar, then extract the file install.rdf (but keep the WinRar window open) and open the .rdf file in notepad; where is says ‘maxversion’ change it from 1.0 (or whatever version it says) to 5.0. Save this change,  then drag the file back into the open WinRar window. Then drag the file into Firefox to install it.