I have been using Gmail for a long time and one of the features that I enjoyed has been the ability to retrieve mail from other accounts automatically, which makes consolidating your various email accounts a cinch. Otherwise, you have to set up many different accounts on your mail client, if you have several accounts to keep on top of, like me.

Suddenly, during December last year, I noticed that this feature was not working anymore and I was not sure what was causing it. First I checked to make sure that my mail server had not caused the problem. After spending a bit of time looking through the server authentication log, I did not see any problems with the user credentials. A few head scratches later, I found the culprit in Gmail itself.

Apparently, there was a change in Gmail settings in the way it treats self-signed certificates. The accounts that I checked through Gmail are hosted by a mail server that I control, using self-signed certificates. It was fine for a while, but now Gmail thinks that no SSL security is better than using a self-signed certificate.

Considering how many CAs have been compromised lately, I feel that making people drop SSL encryption because their certificate was not signed by a registered CA is a little on the strange side.

First day of 2013. It will be an interesting start of the year, with many things already underway. There is the “fiscal cliff” issue in the US and there are a lot of other stuff going on in other parts of the world. Let me also say that the Mayans were not proven wrong, since they never made the prediction in the first place. So let this new year be filled with broken promises, wrong predictions and failed resolutions!

For my day to day travel, I often take a 3G dongle as my own personal internet connection which does not get monitored, filtered and restricted, unlike the wifi connections available at the places that I am currently working. I carry the dongle with me everywhere I have my laptop, in case I need to connect to my server through SSH (work internet only permits ports 80 and 443).

Last year, after using a Huawei K3565 dongle from Vodafone, I purchased a Huawei E5832 wifi modem so that I can use it with other devices and share it with friends occasionally. I did not have any problems connecting it to my MacBook Pro on Snow Leopard. It worked flawlessly.

Last week, I acquired a new MacBook Air with OS X 10.7 Lion pre-installed and for the life of me, I could not get the modem to work via USB (still works as a wireless router of course). I sometimes connect the dongle directly via USB when the battery is going flat so I can keep using it regardless of the amount of charge left in the battery.

One suggestion in Whirlpool is to install the connect software from Three http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1751706 but cancelling it after it has installed drivers for the modem. I find this a little slack from both Huawei and Virgin to not have the USB connection issue resolved.

If you follow the suggestion to download the Three software, the post suggests that this method works.

This is a topic that has been written about many times before, but so far there is no good replacement that I have seen, other than oauth. Password security has been proven to be the weakest link in many organisations’ security schema.

The recent case of security breach at Gawker Media is a case in point. It proves that passwords get reused for other websites in quite a few cases and that people often choose really obvious and weak passwords.

However, until there is a replacement, the best case scenario is to use a strong password, but strong passwords are hard to remember. If one has a different password for every site that requires registration, then each person would have quite a few complex passwords to remember. This is why people choose weak passwords and reuse passwords across sites.

I guess rule number one is to not use your banking password for anything else. So, in a sense, one can have multiple tiers of security depending on the importance of the sites. This, however, is quite tricky to define since people place different levels of importance to different sites.

Let us hope that there is a new scheme around the corner to allow for better security all around.