The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth

With virus and trojan SPAM getting more and more advanced it’s sometimes difficult to spot a genuine email from an email that is attempting to steal your identity or compromise your computer.

Today I received a genuine email from Nationwide Building Society that goes to great lengths to try and convince you that it is a genuine email from the Nationwide. So much so that you begin to question it. They even include a post code stamp as a guarantee that it is legitimate (although all this actually does is legitimise me and not the sender.)

Nationwide are clearly driven by marketing droids that believe the more domains they have the better.

The email is from Nationwide@nationwidebuildingsociety-email.co.uk
The Reply To address is nationwidecampaigns@accessdorcan.co.uk
Within the email there are references to the following domains –
nationwide-members.co.uk
www.nationwidefootball.co.uk

All of the links actually link to http://nationwidebuildingsociety-email.co.uk/HS?a=DwerD1efdSDFsw34RSd@34)
despite the description of the link.

So, Nationwide have unwittingly made it harder to determine if something using a Nationwide lookalike domain name is legitimate or not because they are doing it themselves.

Why they couldn’t use football.nationwide.co.uk or members.nationwide.co.uk is beyond me. At least then the fact that it is a subdomain of a single nationwide.co.uk domain would add some reassurance.

Marketing Droids 1 – Common Sense 0

First they ignore you…
Then they laugh at you…
Then they fight you…
Then you win…

It’s all kicking off here with regards to SEO (and the completely pointless waste of money that SEO is).

Reminds me of when I tried my hardest to convince a marketing department that, after demonstrating their new “super cool” website, putting headline text into graphics and embedding important information inside flash animations, would render the website virtually invisible to search engines and related content searches.

Of course it fell on deaf ears as they clearly knew more about the internets than I did.

Still, to this day, if you google on the key headline message on the index of the site, the site doesn’t show up at all.

Now someone talk to me!

defsdoor@googlewave.com

May I have my Google Wave invite now please ?

Have recently installed a Funambol server. Suddenly a whole new world of PIM syncing is available to me.

Funambol is a syncml server. Syncml is an open standard designed to put an end to vendor specific synchronisation tools and has been adopted by virtually all of the major mobile manufacturers. Some already have syncml clients built into their phones (Nokia for example), but with Funambol you have the option of installing the Funambol client on most platforms also.

Even if you don’t have a mobile device that you want to synchronise with your email client, you will still find Funambol useful. I synchronise my Thunderbird (and Lightning) Contacts, Calendars and Tasks across 3 different PCs, as well as to my Nokia N97 and iPod Touch. You can even use it to simply backup your mobile device in the event of fault or theft.

There are also dozens of other syncing solutions for sharing data between server side applications, such as Exchange to Google, Zimbra or vtiger. I am waiting for the ability to synchronise multiple calendars from multiple sources in Thunderbird (with the lightning extension) as this will then allow easy and simple group calendar and appointment management.

It’s an exciting time at the moment where yet another open source platform brings another open standard to the masses. Hopefully, in just a short time, syncing devices and applications will be something we all take for granted.