Common Paradox Tech Blog

ctmurray writes “Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days’ worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system. Earlier we discussed the Obama White House’s opposition to the lawsuit that led to this discovery.” The related links reflect our discussions about the missing emails over two years.

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I admit it: I’m part of a worldwide plot coordinated by a secret international agency. We’re the same people who covered the fake Apollo landings, JFK’s assassination, and Tom Cruise. Fortunately, some readers uncovered the truth behind the mysterious spiral.

You are right, dear UFO and strange phenomena experts who sent the emails in the gallery. It is true, this is not what happened with the mysterious giant spiral in Norway. And since you are right, I’m sharing your theories on the matter with everyone in Gizmodo (yes, these are serious emails and comments from real readers).

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If you use Mozilla Thunderbird as your email client, you’re in good company, as not only does the military use it, but they also contributed code to the latest Thunderbird 3. Alright, so it’s the French military…

With 80,000 computers in the military using it, the French government thought it imperative to adapt it to their needs—which Mozilla evidently liked, as they included some of their code in Thunderbird 3, which launched this week.

David Ascher, Chief Executive of Mozilla Messaging, explained:

“The primary changes (the military) have made allow them to know for sure when messages have been read, which is critical in a command-and-control organisation”

As well as using the open source Thunderbird, the French government is also adopting Linux as its primary OS, and OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. [Sydney Morning Herald]

Image credit: Isafmedia

eldavojohn writes with an update to the CRU email leak story we’ve been following for the past two weeks. The peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature has published an article saying the emails do not demonstrate any sort of “scientific conspiracy,” and that the journal doesn’t intend to investigate earlier papers from CRU researchers without “substantive reasons for concern.” The article notes, “Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.” Reader lacaprup points out related news that a global warming skeptic plans to sue NASA under the Freedom of Information Act for failing to deliver climate data and correspondence of their own, which he thinks will be “highly damaging.” Meanwhile, a United Nations panel will be conducting its own investigation of the CRU emails.

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Even PayPal can’t tell its own emails from spam! A cranky ex-Microsoft employee complained to PayPal about a “suspicious looking” link in an email from them, which they then treated as a phishing attack. [Eset via The Reg]

While all 69 Gmail shortcuts aren’t represented on this Gboard keyboard, the 19 that do feature on the mini-keyboard are bound to be your most-used. Search, star, archives, trash—all the majors are represented in fun Google colors.

It’s not an official Google product, with Californian film producer Charlie Mason behind the Mac and Windows-friendly peripheral, which can also be used for non-Gmail shortcuts too.

Rack up the $19.99 charge on your card, plug into into your USB port, turn on Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts option, and start saving time. [Gboard via CNET]

A new exploit allows PDFs attached to emails to take over Blackberries. Luckily, a fix is already out for Enterprise Server and Professional software, available here. [RIM via The Register]

As we know that some of you have noticed, webOS 1.3.1 changed the way that email is handled with respect to POP access. If you’re not familiar with POP (Post Office Protocol) email, essentially the way the service is ‘supposed’ to work is that computers download the email from the server but do not communicate their status back to the server (e.g. the server will not know if you’ve read the email). This stands in contrast to IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), in which read, flagged, and deleted statuses are synced back to the server and other clients accessing the same account. To deal with the amount of email that can amass on a server, many POP users choose to have the server delete messages after they’re downloaded by the computer.

Prior to the most recent webOS update, POP email status didn’t work quite the way it was ‘supposed’ to work. Email used to actually be checked back against the server, and if the email had been deleted there it was then deleted on the phone, even if you hadn’t read it on phone. From a design standpoint, that’s not ideal POP behavior, as POP is supposed to download messages and ignore what happens on the server after that. In essence, POP on webOS used to work sort of like IMAP ‘lite’ email. This worked well for users that relied on POP for their email access (many ISPs only offer POP), as handling emails in bulk on their computer subsequently handled them in bulk on their webOS phones.

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“When working in open source, people need to be careful to put their best face forward and really watch what they say in emails and at conferences.”

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a series of hacked emails and documents that were recently posted on Wikileaks are causing quite a stir in the scientific community. All told, more than 1,000 emails and 2,000 documents were stolen from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia University in the U.K. “The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with. [] Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics’ research was unwelcome: We ‘will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!’ Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday.”

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