Friday, 13 February 2009

Rogers sold my email address

One of the advantages of having my own domain name is that I can give out a different email address to every company that wants my email.  I use a pattern to generate these addresses, they're not one-word somethings that a spambot would guess.


Yesterday, I recieved an email from netmarketingcanada.com with links that point me back to netmarketingcanada.com to unsubscribe and view things.  They're advertising.. 30% off.. something... my email client doesn't load the remote images (also from netmarketingcanada.com) so I can't see the majority of their email, but that's not the point.


The email was TO the email address that Rogers Canada (and only Rogers Canada) has for me.  So, a big thanks Rogers for selling my email address to spammers. I don't remember seeing "will sell your email address to spammers" in their privacy policy, but perhaps it has been updated and someone could point me to that clause?


Wednesday, 11 February 2009

iPhone Bliss

I have three beefs with my iPhone:

  1. I can't use gtkpod or other software to sync my music, because it's running firmware >= 2.0

  2. Disregarding music, I can only sync everything else (contacts, whatnot) in Linux over ssh to a jailbroken iPhone (requires remote mounting via. sshfs), even if the phone is sitting beside, me plugged into a USB port.

  3. 1 and 2 should happen automatically as soon as I plug in to USB, I shoudn't need to drop to a terminal and type stuff.


Happily, there is a solution for all 3.  Here, I'll talk about 1 and 2.