I learned quite a bit on digital signatures this weekend.I also generated a free email signing certificate from http://www.cacert.org .It is community driven non-profit organization running out of Australia.
After reading a lot and experimenting i finally stumbled upon this article of how to use it in Outlook 2007.Be sure to read about it @ http://wiki.cacert.org/EmailCertificates
Then I finally was able to send my first digitally signed email :-).
Then I thought of using it a lot but came to know that if you send any signed emails to a webmail accounts like Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail etc the end user gets an attachment(smime.p7m) with a blank body line.Now to open this attachment you will need to download a viewer for it from http://www.cryptigo.com/p7mViewer/

Overall after spending about 12-14 hours reading about it and experimenting about it I feel that it is too difficult for average used to use Digital signatures.
The idea is great and we should use it but i believe the learning curve for people is going to be huge and it will take sometime before people actually start using it.

posted at: 22:33 | category: /cuttingedge | permanent link to this entry

Have you felt the need to leave comments on someones blog or felt that one login should work on many sites.At the same time have  you worried that if you lock yourself with one login and password at some centralized authority like Microsoft passport.
There is a very elegant solution to this and most likely if you are are Yahoo or AIM user you already have what you need to start using OpenId.
In simple terms OpenId allows you to login into any site that supports OpenId and at the same time it does not lock you with a particular certifying authority so that you are free to move to other certifying authority as you please.
If you are a yahoo user you can sign up for using openId by going to the website http://openid.yahoo.com and then just login with your regular Yahoo userid and password.
Once you have done that now when you see any site with the logo as then it will ask you about "OpenId Url:" , in the text box just type in yahoo.com and you will be taken to the Yahoos website to authenticate yourself and then brought back to your original page and you will not need to sign in.

For a video of how to use Open Id you can go to the following screencast @ http://simonwillison.net/2006/openid-screencast/

posted at: 23:46 | category: /cuttingedge | permanent link to this entry

No it is not Linux or a flavor of Unix.It aims to be an OS , which is binary equivalent to Windows.
I downloaded the live CD iso image and played with a little.
I booted with  it on my laptop but it did not boot.
Then I tried it in VirtualBox and was pretty impressed with how much progress has been made by these developers.
I played with for some time and unfortunately  it is not ready for prime-time as it is alpha software.Some of the main bottlenecks are limited or no network/wireless support at this point.
Also there is no support for USB/SATA.
But in future I will definitely look forward to using this especially in situations where in there are no viable alternatives to some software on Windows .
More details about ReactOS is @ http://www.reactos.org/

posted at: 05:13 | category: /cuttingedge | permanent link to this entry

Over the last couple of years I have made multiple attempts to move over some of my friends/family and myself for secure email and communications via tools like GNUPg.But I think because of lack of ease of use it just doesnt go anywhere.Anyways I'm trying to see if I can restart that attempt , my main reason for renewed interest is mainly to put personal data like home address/phone number etc on my website encrypted so that only folks that I trust can see my data especially in my FOAF file.
I use GnuPG for *nix platforms and Gpg4win on Windows.
My public key is http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/keys/bhavesh.asc
Be sure to install the firefox extensionFiregpg as it will make your life easier with online mails like Yahoo/gmail etc.

posted at: 00:14 | category: /cuttingedge | permanent link to this entry

If you want all your blogposts generated by pyblosxom to xfolk(Microformat) compliant then you can make the following changes marked in Bold to your story.html in the flavors directory.

posted at: 03:10 | category: /cuttingedge | permanent link to this entry

Recently I wanted to check out the semantic web concept as I strongly believe that over the next couple of years we will be moving to semantic web as that seems to be a natural progression of loosely coded html and data scattered in various formats like text/html etc.
Anyways , FOAF is a nice concept similar to various other YASN(yet another Social Network) like myspace/linkedin etc the only think is that it is open in the sense that there is no company behind it who can lock your data.
I created a FOAF file describing myself and it is located at My FOAF.To read this you can use a FOAF explorer
You can read more about semantic web at http://semanticweb.org or more about FOAF at http://www.foaf-project.org/
There is a nice addon for firefox for semantic web it is called Semantic Radar

posted at: 04:31 | category: /cuttingedge | permanent link to this entry