The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty is shocked to find that Google's street view vans have recorded snippets of wirless traffic, including email content, user ids and passwords. Apparently, the French are easily shocked.  What many people seem to forget is that wifi is radio and they're running a radio station, starring all of the computers in the network.  Like any radio station, anyone with the right type of radio can listen and record your shows.

There are two things that everyone using wifi should do.

• First, encrypt your wifi using WPA2.  It's not foolproof, but defeating WPA2 is difficult and time consuming.  Anyone who's after you, in particular, may want to invest the time, but the drive-by vans will skip you and read your neighbor's unencrypted signal. 
• Second, whenever possible, login to websites using SSL.  SSL provides secure encryption from your computer to the server at the other end of the connection.  If you visit websites using "https" instead of "http", you're using SSL encryption. 

Using SSL is for all data exchanges is critical when you're on a shared, public wifi network.  Anyone at Starbucks, or the library, or your favorite place to park yourself with your notebook or phone could be recording network traffic.  On such networks, you should have absolutely no expectation of privacy.  It's critical to encrypt your data before it goes out over the air.

Check with your email provider to find out if they support POPS or IMAPS and Secure SMTP.  The "S" at the end of POP and IMAP means that the connection between your computer and the mail server is encrypted via SSL, too.  All major mail clients support the protocol. If your mail provider doesn't, it's time to find a new mail provider.

If you use Gmail, click "Settings", then "Always use https".  Gmail will then enforce an SSL connection whenver you access it on the web.

I often use the Google web mail system to read my sterndata emai, as well as mail for my Gmail account.  If you use Gmail, turn on some of the labs features to punch up your mail experience.

There are two ways to get into the labs settings: Click on Settings, then the Labs tab or click directly on the laboratory beaker at the top of your Gmail screen.

The features I find most useful are

• Sender Time Zone
  What was the sender's local time?
• Quote selected text
  Only quoted text will appear in a reply
• Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat
  Send text messages directly from the Gmail screen.
• Google Calendar gadget
  Adds a box in the left column which shows your Google Calendar. See upcoming events, locations, and details.
• Got the wrong Bob?
  If you're emailing more than two people at once, Gmail will check if you meant to include Bob Smith rather than Bob Jones based on the groups of people you email most often.
• Don't forget Bob
  Once you pick some email recipients, Stern Data Solutions Mail suggests more people you might want to include based on the groups of people you email most often.

The internet relies on a service called DNS  (Wikipedia) to, among other things, translate things like "microsoft.com" into a IP network address like 207.46.232.182.
 
For the last six months or so, the router on our home network has been using OpenDNS to resolve network addresses, not the default name services supplied by our ISP, Comcast.  I've been using OpenDNS because it blocks  access known malware sites (should one of our computers become infected).  If I ever wanted to, I could use it to block access to NSFW sites, etc.  It's also much faster than Comcast's DNS.
 
Today, Google got into the DNS for end users game, announcing the Google Public DNS.  I've switched the router to use Google's public DNS servers rather than OpenDNS, just to see what's what. So far, I don't see any difference in speed.  Google promises a very high performance system, security, and privacy.  OpenDNS has responded to Google's announcement. Their best arguments for their service over Google's include the ability to configure how the DNS responds to your queries and, well, let me quote them:  "it’s not clear that Internet users really want Google to keep control over so much more of their Internet experience than they do already — from Chrome OS at the bottom of the stack to Google Search at the top, it is becoming an end-to-end infrastructure all run by Google, the largest advertising company in the world."   As someone whose personal IT infrastructure is heavily vested in Google, I always wonder how far "Do no evil" goes and who gets to define "evil".
 
TechCrunch has an interesting piece about this, as well.

In an article in the Washington Post, MG Siegler explains what's really going on in the battle for smartphone OS dominance.
 
...Google knows that the Droid isn't an iPhone killer. Instead, it's likely the best device they have so far to kill their real competitors: Symbian and especially Windows Mobile. Repeat after me: Android is trying to kill Windows Mobile, not the iPhone.
 
It's a good read.  Eric Schmidt has been targeting Microsoft for a long, long time.

A couple of weeks ago, Sarah Silverman was on Bill Maher's Friday night show on HBO, where she showed her latest video.  The next morning, I hopped on to Google to find it and forward it to some friends who had probably missed the show. The first 10 links on Google were sites that informed me my computer was infected by a virus, then downloaded a setup.exe file to the system to "clean" the viral infection.  Continue reading for more about how these links came to be.

Google-hosted mail accounts are now fully accessible via Exchange Active Synch (EAS).  This means that Google-hosted email users (e.g., gmail.com and sterndata.com) now have push email enabled for the iPhone.  All that's required is setting up the account as a Microsoft Exchange account rather than Gmail.  Click read more to see how.

Larry Ellison explains cloud computing in a town hall presentation, including hecklers. "A cloud is a computer connected to the internet."

I've been following a discussion on Desktop Virtualization on LinkedIn's CIO Forum with a mixture of confusion, deja vu, and real excitement. 

I've finally untethered my iPhone from iTunes, at least for keeping my calendar and contacts up to date.  I'm using Thunderbird to manage email, contacts, and calendar, and using Google as a back end to keep it all synchronized between the iPhone, my Linux desktop, my Windows Vista notebook, and Google Apps on the web.