Network Lighthouse

After a bit of work the SocialMail code has been tidied up and I’m ready for another release.   But this is more than just a admin release, it’s also bringing a few new features:

• Context menus for most parts of the sidepanel, includes
  • Add, modify, remove phone numbers & urls
  • Copy any of the displayed data
  • Save attachments
• Skype integration
  • You can now launch a skype call directly from socialmail by double clicking on any collected (or added) phone number in the sidepanel.  You need to enable this in the SocialMail options window and specify a default Country for numbers that don’t know have an international prefix.   Of course you need to have Skype installed for this to work.

I hope you all enjoy this release, please post your comments to let me know how its working for you.  Download here: socialMail-0.12

-Daniel

It’s been a little quite since my last post, and to be honest not much has changed on the SocialMail front.

After a bit of reflection I’ve decided to rewrite/reformat the code before adding any more functionality, this has to be done before SocialMail can be listed as an ‘approved’ plugin on AMO anyway so now is the best time to do it.   Doing so now also gives me the opportunity to restructure parts of the program to make it easier to extend later.

The main task right now is to encapsulate to code so I’m not poluting the javascript namespace any more than absolutely required.

Other bits I’m working on are related to improving the new user experience and a new landing page for socialmail.

Oh and in case you haven’t seen it yet, check out the video that Larry (from lehsys.com) has made showing off the plugin.

SocialMail v0.1 has just been released and published to AMO. For those new to the site, the goal of SocialMail is to enhance the email experience and bring social networking features to Thunderbird.

Not much to note in this version from the previous releases, mainly house keeping changes, a few bug fixes and the most visible change being our new logo.

Thanks have to go out to my brother who did the core design and inspiration for the logo and my sister-in-law (not his wife) for the color scheme and refinement of the original concept.

GET IT HERE socialMail-0.1

This marks the end of what I wanted to accomplish in the first phase of SocialMail development, all the core functionality is there.   That doesn’t mean that development is stopping!  From here we are moving to increase the social networking functionality, bringing the networks into the email experience.

Here’s a few thoughts for what is likely to come in future versions (no promises though)

• Updating status on facebook/myspace/twitter/etc simultaneously from Thunderbird
• Viewing a contacts tweets when viewing emails from them
• Viewing contacts status and details from the individual networking sites.
• Fixing defects as they’re reported

By no means is this definitive, I’d appreciate any suggestions on what you would like to see in future versions.

One last word on release strategy,  I’ll try to post  frequent updates to this site as new features are added, but I will only update the AMO listing when fixing defects or minor feature enhancements to the current 0.1 stream.  This way I won’t be causing unnecessary updates to users who want a stable experience but those who want the bleeding edge (and it has that name for a reason) can see what I’m working on as it gets done.

I hope you enjoy this release, please post your feedback, good or bad (as long as its constructive).

-Daniel

It’s been a while since I’ve done any writing on InfoSec topics, but it’s my new years resolution to take it up again, so expect more articles on info sec stuff from now on.

DataBreaches.net have updated their list of the top 10 Data breaches of all time.   What I find most disturbing about the list, isn’t the volumes (although that’s still concerning), is that 4 of the top 10 were due to poor information management and/or lack of encryption.   The causes for the other breaches (such as insiders leaking information) are harder to solve, and as such a little more (not a lot though) understandable.

• National Archives (70 Million)
• Department of Veterans Affairs ( 26 Million)
• HMRC (25 Million)
• T-Mobile (17 Million)

With the exception of Veterans Affairs, all of these have occured in the last 2 years, when the use of disk/tape encryption technology came into the mainstream.  There really is no excuse for these type of breaches anymore, if companies made it standard practice to encrypt sensitive data where ever it lives, then that would mean that over the past 2 years there would have been 128 Million less records breached. That’s almost as many were revealed in the Heartland hack!

Of course the top 10 doesn’t include breaches that go unnoticed and unreported, and if you start thinking about that you start to wonder how bad the problem really is.

-Daniel

I’ve just discovered Ubiquity from the Mozilla Labs, and it’s showing a lot of promise for changing the way the we us the web.

From the site===

Ubiquity is an extension Ubiquity is an extension that allows you to enter commands that have knowledge of page content and return new information.
===via Labs/Ubiquity – MozillaWiki.

In essence it is a firefox extension that enables users to interact with webpages in different ways.   For example, I tried my hand at writing a Ubiquity Command “Press This”, the same as the wordpress button from the admin tools page, to that I could quickly grab interesting articles for later posting.

The code is pretty straight forward

CmdUtils.CreateCommand({

names: ["press this", "blog this"],
icon: “http://www.wordpress.com/favicon.ico”,
description: _(“Launch a wordpress page so you can write an article about the current website”),
help: “.”,
author: {name: “Daniel Thomas”, email: “danielt@networklighthouse.com”},
license: “GPL”,
homepage: “http://www.networklighthouse.com/”,
arguments: [{role: 'object', nountype: noun_arb_text},
{role: "url", nountype: noun_type_url, label: "url to reference"} ],
preview: function preview(pblock, args) {
pblock.innerHTML = “Loads a new tab for wordpress”;
},
execute: function execute(args) {
var doc = CmdUtils.getDocumentInsecure();
f=’http://www.networklighthouse.com/wp-admin/press-this.php’;
e=encodeURIComponent;
u=f+’?u=’+e(args.url.text)+’&t=’+e(doc.title)+’&s=’+e(args.object.text)+’&v=4′;
Application.activeWindow.open(Utils.url(u));

}
});

Thats it, and most of that can be stripped out.  Now that I’ve registered my code into Ubiquity all I need to do to bring up wordpress is select some text and either right click and select “press this” from the context menu or type “press this” into the ubiquity website.

Now if you want to use this code yourself, there’s a few things you need to do:

• Install Ubiquity (check out the link above)
• After restarting firefox browse to “about:ubiquity”
• click on “Hack Ubiquity”
• Paste the above code into the window, making sure you replace www.networklighthouse.com with your Blog’s URL
• Click Save to File and save it somewhere safe
• Thats it your done, try it out by selecting this article, pressing ctrl+space and typing “press this”

-Daniel