Month: February 2007

2.8 Billion Reasons to Do Better

Padlock by JohnathSo PC World is running an article by Robert McMillan about phishing. It’s not a bad article or anything, it cites the antiphishing workgroup and various Gartner research in non-inflammatory ways (phishing is up 700% year over year, losses for 2006 estimated at $2.8B USD), and basically concludes that the current state of the internet, vis a vis your[1] financial information, is somewhere towards the “festering cesspool of thievery from which no good thing can escape unscathed” end of the spectrum. Pretty standard stuff.

If Robert McMillan should be chastised for any part of it, it is his closing sentence, wherein he takes the too-obvious way out, no doubt because he was reaching his wordcount ceiling, and what the hell else is he going to say:

But to combat ever-adapting phishers, your best protection remains…you.

It’s not Bob’s fault, but this is a pretty awful way to leave things. How on earth are people supposed to do what he asks, particularly when all the evidence he’s just cited points to how profoundly they can’t?

Continue reading “2.8 Billion Reasons to Do Better” →

Day 2

I have officially begun. Friday was my first day of paid work with the Mozilla Corporation, and it was tiring. As expected, it mostly revolved around logistical stuff, though I did find some time with beltzner in the afternoon to watch an hour-long introduction to how Mozilla builds a DOM tree (thanks Johnny!)

Basically, what Friday allowed me to do was get my feet sufficiently under myself to come up with this:

bubbl.us Mindmap

I haven’t, historically, done much with mindmapping and other “thinking aids” but right now there is too much bubbling around to keep track of, so it seemed like a useful exercise. Attentive readers will note that the current list of thoughts is both incomplete and horribly short-sighted, stretching out a month at most. This is deliberate – I think it relatively stupid to hop on board on day 1 and to start making long term plans on day 2. I suppose someone will tell me that this makes me an “analytic” personality type, or some such, obsessed with having all the information before making a decision. I would suggest that this is grossly overgeneralized (as personality-classification schemes always, perforce, are) though I will confess to a preference for having some information before making any momentous statements of direction. I have always been nutty that way.

On a personal note, the first day (and, indeed, those leading up to it) has been grand. People at Mozilla are welcoming and congratulatory, people at IBM are well-wishing and congratulatory and, on balance, my LinkedIn profile has never been happier (though it is notably wanting for some more 1-degree-of-separation Mozilla love).

I really do think this was the right move to make, I’m pretty excited to be getting going. I’ll be heading to New York in early March with beltzner to talk to some of the people in the CA/Browser forum, and then later in March I’ll be in Mountain View to meet with some more of my newfound comrades-in-arms. In the meantime I’ll be trying to knock down that web of questions while simultaneously, no doubt, adding whole new subtrees. If anyone reading this wants to point out answers to some of the leaf nodes in that web, or alert me to obvious swaths of unmapped work, I can now officially be reached at johnath@mozilla.com. Huzzah! (Yes, my home email still works just fine, too).

[Update: Yes, the map was made with bubbl.us, mea culpa for not providing tasty linkage. ]

[Update2: Yes, the Johnny Stenback video is available online here. ]

Getting the Band Back Together

Internet UserSo it turns out that Mozilla, having been an open source project before it was a foundation, let alone a corporation, has a pretty heavy IRC presence. IRC is (reasonably) universal, (reasonably) democratic, and (usually) free, so it’s a natural fit.

But several of the people who read this blog, and you know who you are, will recall that even before Mozilla existed, there was an IRC presence of a different sort in #42. I acknowledge that I wasn’t there from the very beginning, but I was there when people like Lemmyn and AuntieMae were still around, I was there before we left QNet, and without meaning to upset anyone, I will remind you all that this stuff was happening > 10 years ago. Heck, this page is 7 years old, and that was very late in the game.

But I digress. The point is this: I am, by virtue of my newfound employment, and indeed have been for some time, a perpetual resident of irc.mozilla.org. And wouldn’t you know it, my mIRC install still wants to auto-connect to #42 wherever I go. I’m the only one there at the moment, of course. But that could change.

I remember when Heather and Linds tried several years ago to get things up and running again, and I think it mostly fizzled out because people had forgotten how to have a conversation that way, and besides which, you couldn’t really count on anyone actually being there. Well I may be idle, or I may be otherwise occupied, and I may be uninteresting even when I am present, but I can offer some reasonable level of assurance that for a high percentage of the next several years, I will be lurking in #42.

You could come join me, if you wanted to.

And of course, if you happened to have some code, writing, bugs, or ideas to contribute to Mozilla’s various projects while you were there – well everything would just be that much more convenient, wouldn’t it?