Geekblok

Many people use Google’s email service Gmail nowadays. But, like with any webmail service, how is your privacy guaranteed? According to GoogleWatch, Gmail is too creepy. Luckily, you can do at least something to gain some privacy back by encrypting your emails.

The geeks who use mutt or pine (or thunderbird for the matter) as their mail client probably have seen that you can easily add gpg plugins to encrypt (and decrypt) emails, yet with web based solutions, this gets a little harder. FireGPG, a Firefox extension, makes it possible to use GnuPG (gpg) for Gmail aswell. You do need to have gpg installed on your system (and of course you need Firefox), but after that, it works fairly easy.

The plugin basically works for all web based mail clients (Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, etc.) yet with Gmail, you’ll get a set of extra buttons, making it yet a little easier to use. Just select the text when of your email and hit the “Crypt” button from your right-click menu (under FireGPG). Select the recipient’s public key and hit the Ok-button. Now you’ll get the encrypted text that you can copy and paste into the email.

Too bad not many people see the need for email encryption and will throw the non-argument “if you have nothing to hide, you don’t need encryption” right back at you. Please do try to explain the need for encryption to them and start using it for everything!

Flickr is a great place to store your photos. You can keep pictures private or share them with friends, family or the entire world.

But sometimes, those four levels of privacy are not enough. Imagine you have pictures of your wedding and you don’t want the world to see them. Yet you do want to share them with your not-so-tech-savvy uncle who provided the awesome car. Too bad he refuses to sign up for a free Flickr account. This is where Invitr steps in. It allows you to share private pictures with anybody who has an email account (and that most likely includes uncle Bob).

After logging in with your Flickr account, you can select the pictures you’d like to share. Select them all, add the email address(es) and set an optional expiry date. After that, the recipients will receive an email with a unique link that shows them your lovely wedding photos (or any other photos you might have selected).