I recently discovered a searchable Sarah Palin email archive thanks to a post I found on reddit. I was inspired by the comments to further increase the accessibility of the collection. That is why I’ve gathered them, converted them to plain text and plopped em’ into one compressed file. Enjoy!
When I received my invite to Google Voice several months ago I wasn’t all that excited. Having been a Grand Central user I thought I knew what to expect so I let the invite sit in my inbox for a while. That was a mistake. Not only did the folks at Google clean up the interface, they also added a few features like voicemail transcription and SMS.
While looking through the settings I noticed an option to forward SMS messages to your email. 
That’s a nice feature but what might not be so obvious at first is that you can also respond to those emails to text the person back!
This gives us access to a carrier independent SMS-to-Email gateway from our own apps. All you have to do is set up an email address that forwards email to a script of your choice (how you do this depends on your host). The script then parses the email and takes action depending on the contents (the SMS) and optionally responds to the user.
It sounds fairly simple and it is but there’s a couple caveats. First, you might notice that the email address above isn’t editable. For some reason unknown to me the SMS forwarding address has to be the same as the voicemail notification address. This means you’ll either have to give up voicemail notifications or your script will be responsible for forwarding them to their proper destination.
It’s not important that voicemail notifications be enabled, only that the notification address is set correctly.
The notification address defaults to the one on file for your Google account so you’ll need to add a new “alternate” address for your script to Google Voice. This means you must first set your email up with a normal inbox so that you can confirm it. Only after it has been confirmed should you change it to start forwarding to your script.
The first time someone texts your number, Google appends an extra tip to the message body so it’s important to use the message only up until an optional new line character. In case you want one script to handle more than one number, or if you want to grab the number of the user, both the “to” and “from” numbers are included in the reply address (e.g. 17077098226.17775551234.59P8fXqLuM@txt.voice.google.com).
Here’s a working example for you to play with. If you text my Google Voice number “(707) 709 – 8226“, your message should appear in the box below. You can reload the page or click the box to refresh it. If the load is too high or if there’s much abuse I’ll have to disable it but for now go ahead and try it out.
Example is now disabled.
So I’m browsing my news feeds this afternoon and what do I see? Reddit has apparently removed a top story that wasn’t favorable to their parent company. What was this story? That Sears seemed to be selling a grill to cook babies!
The story in itself is hilarious and disturbing. Even more disturbing isn’t the fact that Reddit tried to bury the story but rather the incident shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
A couple weeks ago (Aug. 6th) I found a couple XSS vulnerabilities in the Sears site and promptly reported them. After speaking with several supervisors and to Risk Management, I ended up being transferred to the Director of IT. He was very nice and quickly offered up his email so I could send in some examples. When I sent them I added that they probably weren’t the only holes in the site. I assumed that it would end in some sort of security audit of the site.
Fast forward a couple weeks. The company is now the laughing stock of the web due to another vulnerability. When I reported similar vulnerabilities in another Fortune 500 site, I received a reply that included the following -
The (redacted) is aware of the many threats to the security of consumer data and takes the protection of that data seriously. It is our goal to ensure that when consumers submit information that it reaches its destination safely, protected, and unchanged. We have taken proactive steps in the development of (redacted) to incorporate industry standards and best practices for the treatment of consumer information such as the use of SSL for the transmission of personal content and other measures, both active and passive. In addition, we have engaged recognized independent security firms to perform security testing of the site to identify any potential gaps or risks. Because of the number and types of reviews we have performed on the various elements of the site, we feel confident in its security. Nonetheless, we continue to review and monitor its behavior to provide our consumers with the highest levels security.
It went on to say that if I had any other concerns in the future, I could contact them again. They tell me that they’re confident in their sites security despite the fact I was actively seeking them out to report vulnerabilities.
Anyway, back to Sears. While no harm was done in this case, there most certainly could have been. It should serve as a lesson to companies such as the “confident” one above. Take both your users and their security seriously.
Macintosh customers continue to benefit from the spirit of cooperation between Apple and Microsoft, with new versions of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express adding to the growing number of ‘Macintosh-first, Macintosh-best’ products coming from Microsoft.
That quote was taken from Microsoft’s website as it appeared in 1996. I wonder how he feels about that “spirit of cooperation” now. He’s also quoted on another part of the site as saying IE is the best browser in the world.
Lately I’ve been noticing that many of the popular posts around the web that get Dugg, Slashdotted or otherwise go viral, all seem to end up with one thing in common. The following trackback -
story has entered the popular today section on popurls.com…
The first time I saw the popurls site was in one of my news feeds. I checked it out briefly and it looked alright, but I didn’t have any reason to use it over my current aggregation services. I closed the tab and thought I had seen the last of it. I was wrong.
It started appearing everywhere in the form of genuine grade A spam! Now it’s one thing to launch a service and market the hell out of it. Just do it the usual way by begging techcrunch to write about you or jumping in a pool with your clothes on for digg’s. Don’t do it by spamming more than 11,000 times! By doing so, you have just put yourself on the same level as viagra and porn. Although given the numbers those two things pull, maybe that’s not such a bad place to be. Hmm…
Even though I think it should be strictly opt-in, I went searching on their site for a way to opt out of this nonsense. Guess what? There isn’t one.
Anyway, it got me to thinking. What qualifies a comment as spam? Is it merely the content itself or the perceived usefulness of that content to a publications readership? All I can tell you is that popurls is useless to me as both a blog consumer and now a publisher as well.
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