Managing Your Life Online - Part 1

(Should I have titled these series “Managing Your Online Life”? But there’s almost no distinction between my online life and my life, so I don’t feel the need.)

Some general notes first. When it comes to online life (or even life in general,) the most important thing you have is data, period. So you have to think about data accessibility, portability and protection.
Let me give you an example. If you use Yahoo! mail as your primary email, you are not OK. Your email is held hostage on Yahoo! servers. You have no way of reaching it. Even if you pay for premium services, you only get lousy POP3 service and the ability to download all your email as an archive. The keyword here is “all”. You can’t chop it up and the download is not restartable or resumable. Imagine downloading a 3GiB file in those situations! If you forward your email to another account, you won’t get a local copy anymore and you can’t forward the mail already in your inbox. It doesn’t support IMAP so you can’t remotely manage and move your email around in your mailbox. Both the web-based interfaces are so brain-dead that any form of bulk operation is tremendously hard or virtually impossible. So you tell me whether my almost 90000 email messages in my Yahoo! mailbox are accessible or not? Can I get a backup copy of my email so that if someone malevolently accessed my account and deleted all my email, I won’t be left high and dry? Can I be sure that Yahoo! will not start enforcing its own brand of sanctions against Iran and blocking my access to my email from tonight? Can I be sure that my email is not read by Yahoo itself, or not forwarded to Michael Chertoff’s or Jack Valenti’s desks as a result of something similar to the Patriot Act?
So, accessibility, portability and security are important!

Don’t trust anyone! Don’t trust corporations. Don’t trust governments. However, keep in mind that both keeping security and breaking security cost money and time (usually.) Weigh the trade offs and then make decisions. If your data is not worth anything to you, then it may not be cost-effective for you to protect it. If it’s not worth anything to anybody, then it may not be cost-effective for an adversary to try and gain access to you data.

Also remember that I live in Iran. My whole life I’ve been struggling with unreliable and lacking technological infrastructure, services and options. The situation is unlikely to improve in near or even far future. Therefore, I cannot download 3GiB from a webserver in a single connection. My connection will get interrupted. I cannot be sure that I’ll have Internet connectivity in my home for 12 hours straight without disruption because I have no grounds to sue my ISP when I get disconnected for 1 to 5 minutes every 2 to 3 hours (or 5 hours of no connectivity every once in a while.) Actually, I can’t even trust my cellphone, hard-line phone or even electricity to be available all the time (they almost always are, but I can’t expect them to, and no one will be accountable if they are not, and there are few or no alternatives to switch to in that case, and the providers know that.)

Unfortunately, I have to use Windows for all my current work and therefor I use it most of the time (who am I kidding? I use Windows almost exclusively.) But I hate Windows. Although I have to admit it was getting better and better with Windows XP and Windows 2000. It sucked a lot less than it used to. But then Microsoft went and just did it; yo and behold a beast straight from the Dungeon Dimensions: (Do I really have to name it? I’m afraid that there might be a “Taboo” on it so they can track me if I use the name!) It starts with a ‘V’ and ends with an ‘ista’! I’m not hopeless though. It’s not the OS you use, it’s how you use it and what you use it for! I count myself a proponent of free software and opensource software, and crossplatformity is a real concern for me.

One more piece of advice. Sam (no last name) never walks into a place he doesn’t know how to walk out of. You should never ever put your data somewhere you don’t know how to take it out of. This point is more important that anything else to remember and utilize. Avoid vendor lock-ins like the black plague and tomato juice mixed together! If your email or hosting provider can’t secure your data, or your day-to-day access is hard, but you can export your data in a usable manner, then you have no problems. You can pack up and move anytime you want. So, always devise an escape route before you put your data in. (Hey, that’s good “Hitman” and “Commandos” advice too!)

The above factors affect the choices I make and opinions I have.

*Expect the next parts at a time indeterminately far away.*