Tag: privacy

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Umum

Hello, HEY!

Yes, I’m joining the crowd to give HEY — email service by the awesome guys at Basecamp — a shout. I wrote them to request for an invite three around three days ago. I am sure that they’re having lots of invitation requests, but today, I finally got the invitation code to register an account.

Before registering, I have read some key information about HEY: about how it works, the HEY manifesto, some key points on the FAQ page, and also how the pricing will work. I also understand that Imbox is not a typo.

Some key points about HEY

In my opinion, these are some key points about HEY. It’s not about my personal preference, but more about ‘what I — or probably you — should now by having a @hey.com account.

  1. It’s NOT an email client. So, it’s not like Gmail for Android/iOS. It’s not Outlook you can have on your Android, Mac, or iOS devices. It’s not even close to Spark, Postbox, or Newton.
  2. It’s an email service provider, with — currently — @hey.com domain for the email address created. That’s right, it’s like Gmail by Google, or Yahoo Mail, or Outlook. It’s also like how you have your email address, powered by your cPanel-based hosting, or maybe you have it installed yourself and having Roundcube as the interface. Creating an account at HEY is like you open an account at Gmail, or having an email at Yahoo Mail service.
  3. It’s not free. It’s a paid service. To enjoy the full service at the moment, with the upcoming features in the futures, we need to pay US$99/year minimum. We need to pay extra if for ‘shorter’ username. 2-characters of username costs US$999/year, and 3-character of username will cost US$349/year. And, we need to pay a year in advance.
  4. It offers “better” privacy. Hint: Gmail.
  5. It might change your workflow. It might be better for some people, but probably it’s not for everyone.

More features that might works better for you can be seen at HEY website.

Let’s give it a try

Reading some of those points above, I was curious about how it works. I mean about the interface, functionalities, workflows, and more. It’s 2020, and making working with email to become an enjoyable experience — for those who work a lot with emails — is still a big challenge.

I am a Gmail user — or Gmail-based email, because I also use Google App for Work — and I use lots of Google services. I signed up for my Gmail account when it was still ‘invite only’ period.

My first question about HEY was, “If HEY is that good, how the integration between services I currently use?”. I have an Gmail email, and once I signed up for it, I can use all the other services right away. The integration between those [Google] service is already that good.

I still believe that HEY is not ‘just another email provider’. Basecamp is a reputable company. I follow Signal vs Noise blog. I bought both REMOTE and REWORK. It’s built by people who know what they do, and who want to make the idea of working to become something efficient and fun at the same time. If we’re talking about productivity, Basecamp should be mentioned here.

I already logged-in to my email account. I have HEY app installed on my iPad and Android phone. I also already sent my first email to it.

Let’s see.

Categories
General

Heardbleed

The Heartbleed Bug — It is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet. SSL/TLS provides communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as web, email, instant messaging (IM) and some virtual private networks (VPNs).

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General

Have You Checked Your Facebook Privacy Settings (One More Time)?

I’m using Facebook, and I really want to take my profile privacy settings seriously. I mean, this is my account and I want to have every settings (especially related to privacy) are correct. I know, it’s something personal. Some people also think that privacy is dead. You can have your own settings. I think more people does not really care about this. Well, not that they don’t care, but it’s more about ignoring it. No?
I just found a tool (hat tip: Read Write Web) to check my Facebook privacy settings. This tool will help me — and you, too — to check one more time about my privacy settings. This tool can be found at ReclaimPrivacy.org. What does this tool do? When you’re using this tool:

You will see a series of privacy scans that inspect your privacy settings and warn you about settings that might be unexpectedly public.

So, it’s a web-based tool. You don’t have to download any software. Just use the simple bookmarklet there. About the result, you can follow the advisory, or ignore it. I checked mine, and I got this (based on my current privacy settings):

Continue reading “Have You Checked Your Facebook Privacy Settings (One More Time)?”
Categories
General

Facebook Privacy Settings You Should Know

Sun Server Key Chain (by Subzero Blue) I’m using Facebook, and found this useful post about privacy settings. In short:

  1. Understand your friend lists
  2. Remove yourself from Facebook search results
  3. Remove yourself from Google
  4. Avoid the infamous photo tag mistake
  5. Protect your albums
  6. Avoid the post-breakup Facebook effect
  7. Control what information applications can access
  8. Make contact information private
  9. Avoid embarrassing wall posts
  10. Keep friendships private

Of course, every user has its own privacy level settings. But, I think most of them are few good points to consider. See details about each setting.

Categories
General

Beware of those 'get more followers' services!

Recently, I see many updates in my Twitter timeline containing updates about that so called “get more free followers”. The idea is to encourage you to join a service that will boost your number of followers. Sounds familiar? A simple question: what does those number mean (for me)? What do I want to prove by having hundreds or thousand followers? Nothing.
leather and washer key chain
If you try to find service like this, you will find many. They share some common characteristics:

  • Ask you to login to their websites, it means you give your Twitter username and password.
  • Sometime, they ask you to follow more people and give you new followers.
  • And then… the worst part is that they will send updates from your account.

If you’re aware that there’s something wrong with this practice, you can stop doing this. But, if you don’t check Twitter regularly, don’t be surprised if you flood your timeline with those rubbish. Also, you will flood people with useless updates, too. This happens usually because you don’t know when and how those services updates your account. Remember, you gave them permission to access your account when you started using them.
Few weeks ago, I saw one one people I follow used a service like this. His account sent updates few times a day. Not sure about the frequency, but he had more than ten updates promoting the service. And, it seemed that he did not login to his account during that time. What happened next? He got his Twitter account suspended. OK, probably I had a wrong conclusion, but I couldn’t find any other reasons about the suspension.
Personally, I always spend few minutes reading about the service using Twitter login mechanism. I try to get some basic information, e.g:

  • Login method — Twitter already has a standard secure recommendation. Your login information will not be stored to services’ server.
  • Privacy statement — Even they don’t have lengthy paragraph about this, but you should read and understand it.
  • Read more about the service. How the services deal with your login? What will they do with it?
  • Last but not least — well, it’s my personal preference — do you really need the service?

UPDATE (added later):
Here are some websites that you provide what so called “get more followers” AND you’d better be careful!
tweeterfollow.com and tweeteradder.com — Both are using the same rules. They will ask you to follow other users first, and will give you new followers as “reward”. Here’s what a user experienced:

tweeterfollow.com was sending messages from my username, so I closed my account with them and then changed my Twitter password. Now I’m locked out of Twitter…it tells me I am trying to login too many times with the wrong password. I assume this is because tweeterfollow is still trying to tweet on my account?! Ugh!! (story source)

There is another story about tweeteradder.com, and from Twitter’s Get Satisfaction forum.
There are another services here twitter-train.com and twittertrain.info, but their websites are suspended by the hosting provider already.

Categories
General

WordPress Troubleshooting: WordPress Admin Area (Dashboard) Redirect Loop

Yesterday, I helped one of my clients with her WordPress-powered blogs. When I tried to find the solution — using search engines — I could not find any exact solution.
Problem overview
Okey, here’s the problem: When I tried to login to WordPress dashboard — not WordPress.com, but self-hosted — I always got these errors:

Redirect Loop
The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.
The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.

  • Have you disabled or blocked cookies required by this site?
  • NOTE: If accepting the site’s cookies does not resolve the problem, it is likely a server configuration issue and not your computer.

I’m not sure what caused this problem. I thought it was my browser (Firefox), but I got the same problem on other browsers.

Continue reading “WordPress Troubleshooting: WordPress Admin Area (Dashboard) Redirect Loop”
Categories
General

Share This! at Flickr


No, no. It’s not about having social bookmarking buttons on our Flickr photos. But, the idea is still about sharing. We are now able to share our photos, sets, collections with other members. And, it’s not only about sharing pictures with other members, but also related to how we will use the photos.
The “Share This” button will be visible only if we can share the information on the page. So, it is not visible on frontpage since we can not share anything. If we’re seeing a photo — our own photo or other member’s — we can easily tell other people about the photo, embed it into our websites/blogs, get the permalink, or even blog about it from our Flickr account (only if we have blogs assigned into our Flickr account).
Of course, we can not share our private pages like Flickr stats page (for Pro members). And, it depends on the privacy settings we apply to our photos. If we want to share some private photos, we can do it by giving a “Guest Pass” to our friends. Go to Flickr help page about sharing for more info.