Yet email now faces a mid-life crisis as young people turn to newer forms of communication, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Internal messaging systems have existed since the 1960s but in 1971 Tomlinson was helping build ARPANET for the US Department of Defence and laying the foundations of the modern internet. Tomlinson needed an easy way to send electronic messages between the various computers hooked up to ARPANET. He chose @ – generally referred to as the ”at” symbol – to designate that a message was intended for a specific user ”at” a specific organisation. The email protocol continued to develop but, for the next 20 years, it was restricted to academic and military use.

The internet was opened up for commercial use in the 1990s and email went mainstream – driven by the rise of internet service providers such as OzEmail and the birth of free webmail services such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and, later, Gmail. Businesses also embraced email, helped by the rise of the BlackBerry and smartphones.

Email had several advantages over existing forms of communication such as phone calls, letters and faxes. Email is fast, cheap, convenient and asynchronous – the latter meaning that, unlike a phone call, the receiver can deal with it when it suits them. Emails are also easier to store, search and archive than reams of paper or ephemeral phone calls that go in one ear and out the other.

The convenience of email meant it wasn’t long before we struck email overload. Today there are an estimated two billion email users worldwide, together sending about 300 billion emails a day, according to monitoring service Pingdom. About 90 per cent of these emails are junk mail known as ”spam”. It’s a problem that cuts to the very heart of email’s shortcomings and has driven many in search of alternatives.

Email’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: anyone can send an email to anyone, practically free. To make matters worse, email wasn’t initially designed with security in mind, so it’s easy for people to fake their sender details. It’s little surprise email caught the eye of scammers – letting them contact people with bogus offers that are too good to be true.

Meanwhile, other spam is designed to trick you into clicking on a link to install malicious software that steals passwords and other sensitive information.

Imagine how much junk you would get in your home letterbox if advertisers weren’t constrained by printing and delivery costs. Now imagine they ignored ”No junk mail” stickers and there was no way to stop them sending it. You would spend all day sorting through junk mail in search of real letters, unless someone was prepared to do it for you. And, thus, another industry was born: spam filtering.

Today, most webmail services offer very accurate spam filtering, as does most desktop anti-virus software. These help weed out the junk from genuine messages. Spammers have not been defeated but, increasingly, accurate filtering is making spam seem less of a burden.

But the damage has already been done and people are looking elsewhere. Efforts to reinvent email, such as Google Wave, have stumbled, but social networking sites may hold the answer.

One of the best ways to combat spam is to only accept messages from people you know. This mentality has driven many people to embrace services such as Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Facebook and Twitter as alternatives to email, especially as most non-work messages are sent to family and friends who are probably also using these other services.

Social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter were originally conceived as platforms for sharing content but both integrate with SMS and feature built-in internal messaging platforms users have embraced quickly.

Facebook has about 800 million active users, of whom more than half log in daily. Together they send 4 billion internal Facebook messages every day.

For today’s young social networking users, having grown up with the convenience of SMS and instant messaging, traditional email is often seen as too formal, cumbersome and slow, just as those who grew up with email might view the fax machine or handwritten letter. Of course, all these older technologies still coexist, they just serve different roles.

It seems email is destined to be mixed into a new social concept of a unified inbox – combining voice, video and text from various sources to the point where the message is all-important but the delivery method is invisible and irrelevant. At that point, Ray Tomlinson’s @ symbol won’t die but, rather, fade away as it is assimilated into this new way of communicating with the world.

Timeline

1971: Ray Tomlinson introduces @ symbol

1993; SMS

1996: Hotmail

1999: BlackBerry

2003: Skype

2004: Gmail

2004: Facebook

2006: Twitter

2009: Google Wave

2011: Google+

2011: Apple iMessage

Let me tell you about a browser. An innovative browser that was the first to implement new Web technologies that allowed for greater interactivity. A browser with a striking new interface. Chrome? No: Internet Explorer 6.

There’s a reason that Microsoft’s browser took over 95 percent of the Web browser market from Netscape (Firefox’s ancestor): IE6 could do things earlier browsers could not. There was dynamic HTML, CSS, and yes, it even had new security features.

But over the years, problems with all these unique capabilities reared its ugly head. Every major Web site started to target IE, to the point that the sites didn’t function correctly or fully in other browsers.

Fast forward to 2011. The hot new browser is Google’s Chrome, which has just overtaken former indie darling Firefox in global market share, according to StatCounter. Chrome can do things that no other browser can do, and Google now targets Chrome exclusively, meaning some Google sites only function fully when viewed in Chrome. Even today, you can read on the Google blog about some new Angry Birds levels that only work in Chrome.

This is disturbing, when you consider that Google has made a lot of hay about the openness of the Web; Google wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for truly open Web standards. But more and more, Chrome is becoming a conduit for Google services, to the exclusion of other browsers.

Sure, anyone can make a site that works in Chrome, so it is open in that sense. But if that site only works in Chrome and not in other major browsers, we have a lack of openness in the Web ecosystem. Anyone could produce a site that fully worked in IE6, too, but we would have the same problem: the site wouldn’t function fully in other browsers.

Instances of Chrome-only Google services are starting to appear. Most recently, with the release Chrome 15, the Internet search leader has changed just one user-facing feature—the new tab page. And it did so in a way designed to promote the company’s Chrome Web Store. This “app” store—the apps are really just Web sites—only works in Chrome. Before this, the company finally announced offline capability for its Gmail webmail service. And you guessed it, it only works if you use Chrome.

Those are far from the only cases of a Google service only working in Chrome alone; other examples include Google Instant Pages, Google Cloud Print, folder uploading and drag-and-drop in Google Docs, and Google Apps notifications for email and calendar events.

Another “standard,” SPDY, could change the whole Web into the Google Wide Web. SPDY is an HTTP replacement that compresses header data and allows persistent connections between server and browsers. It turns out that some Google sites are already using SPDY when you browse with Chrome. As with Instant Pages, the technology is available to other Web publishers to implement, but again, Google itself is the only major player to support it. Great stuff, faster Web interactions, but let’s not forget that that universal access using any software is why the Web took off in the first place.

The strategy takes a page out of Microsoft’s playbook for IE6 and magnifies it on a massive scale. Microsoft’s Outlook Web Client (the first major example of an Ajax, app-like site) let you use the search feature in your inbox only if you ran Internet Explorer. That’s exactly what Google has started doing: offer a Web service that almost works in all browsers, but requires the vendor’s own browser to fully function. Thankfully, Microsoft has abandoned these IE-only features. Let’s hope Google follows suit.

In a recent discussion I had with Hakum Lie, CTO of browser maker Opera Software, the Nordic exec expressed concern about Google’s approach.

“It’s often that [Google] launch[es] services without testing in all browsers. We sometimes wake up in the morning and see a new Google service with things we could have fixed if they’d worked with us during the development phase,” Lie said. “Now that they have their own browser, they think less of making sure it works across the board, which is a concern, because Google wouldn’t have existed if it hadn’t been for open standards. We’d probably all live in Microsoft land.”

But Lie acknowledged Google’s contributions to Web standards, “Some of those experiments are great,” he said. “We need to have experimentation going on, and we can’t demand that everything works in all browsers. But you should test in major browsers.”

Even more proprietary and locked down are the Chromebooks, which are pretty much just a browser in a box. “The problem we’re having with the Chromebook is that it’s a very closed platform,” Lie said. “We complained about Microsoft all these years, but on Windows you could actually make a competing browser.”

The same could be said for Apple iOS devices like iPads. Though Chromebooks isn’t nearly as successful as the iPad, the day all computers are Chromebooks, browser choice and openness will be a thing of the past.

Like any multinational business, Google wants to dominate anywhere it can. It already does this in search. And don’t get me wrong, Google has done a lot of fantastic work. Chrome wouldn’t be as popular as it is if that weren’t the case. It’s my PCMag Editors’ Choice because it’s orders of magnitude faster than its predecessors. The arrival of Chrome on the scene has made all other browsers get better, too. But I only hope that these improvements don’t come at the price of true openness and interoperability.

Common Problems with Passwords

Use Different Passwords Everywhere

Why would you do this when it’s so easy to just type “fido” at every password prompt? Here’s why: If “fido” gets cracked once, it means the person with that info now has access to all of your online accounts. A study by BitDefender showed that 75 percent of people use their e-mail password for Facebook, as well. If that’s also your Amazon or PayPal password and it’s discovered, say good-bye to some funds, if not friends.

Remember the Underwear Meme

The saying goes like this: Passwords are like underwear. You should change them often (okay, maybe not every day). Don’t share them. Don’t leave them out for others to see (no sticky notes!). Oh, and they should be sexy. Wait, sorry, I mean they should be mysterious. In other words, make your password a total mystery to others.

You can make your password sexy if you really want, however. I won’t judge.

Avoid Common Passwords

If the word you use can be found in the dictionary, it’s not a strong password. If you use numbers or letters in the order they appear on the keyboard (“1234″ or “qwerty”), it’s not a strong password. If it’s the name of your relatives, your kids, or your pet, favorite team, or city of your birth, guess what—it’s not a strong password. If it’s your birthday, anniversary, date of graduation, even your car license plate number, it’s not a strong password. It doesn’t matter if you follow this with another number. These are all things hackers would try first. They write programs to check these kinds of passwords first, in fact.

Other terms to avoid: “god,” “money,” “love,” “monkey,” “letmein,” and for the love of all that’s techie, if you use “password” as your password, just sign off the Internet right now.

Strong Password Solutions

How to Build Strength

To create a strong password, you should use a string of text that mixes numbers, letters that are both lowercase and uppercase, and special characters. It should be eight characters, preferably many more. A lot more. The characters should be random, and not follow from words, alphabetically, or from your keyboard layout.

So how do you make such a password?

1. Spell a word backwards. (Example: Turn “New York” into “kroywen.”)
2. Use l33t speak: Substitute numbers for certain letters. (Example: Turn “kroywen” into “kr0yw3n.”)
   
3. Randomly throw in some capital letters. (Example: Turn “kr0yw3n” into “Kr0yw3n.”)
   
4. Don’t forget the special character. (Example: Turn “Kr0yw3n” into “Kr0yw3^.”)

You don’t have to go for the obvious and use “0″ for “o,” or “@” for “a,” or “3″ for “e,” either. As long as your replacement makes sense to you, that’s all that matters. A “^” for an “n” makes sense to me.

Other Tips

Choose something simple to remember as a password, but whenever you type it, put your fingers on the wrong keys—maybe one key to the left or right. Then a password like “kroywen” becomes “jeitqwb” or “ltpuerm.” This is only going to work for non-perfectionist touch-typists. And skip this tip if you type passwords on your phone; you’ll only sprain a thumb trying to be inaccurate instead of letting the inaccuracy flow naturally.

Another option is to pick a pattern on the keyboard and type based on that. For example, a counter-clockwise spin around the letter d could result in “rewsxcvf.” Throw in some random caps and numbers to really lock it down.

Perhaps the easiest thing to remember is an acronym from a phrase of your choice. “We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning” becomes “wdstfiwab” based on the first letters of each word.

Remember, the longer the password, the stronger it is. Always. Something more than 15 characters is very difficult to remember, but it’ll be a breeze with a mnemonic.

Third-Party Passwords

If you don’t trust yourself to create an unbreakable password, there are plenty of tools that will make one for you. The PC Tools Secure Password Generator, for example, makes one based on your criteria: how long, include (or don’t) mixed case, numbers, punctuation, similar character replacement, etc. It even provides a phonetic pronunciation guide that you use as your mantra while typing the password, for example:

aA7ApUp# is MIKE – ALPHA – seven – ALPHA – papa – UNIFORM – papa – hash

Password Testing

If you’re worried that your password of choice isn’t strong enough, check it at How Secure is My Password?. The site will even tell you how long the average PC would take to crack it. For example, cracking “kroywen” would take 13 minutes, “kr0yw3n” would take about 2 hours, “Kr0yw3^” 15 days, and “MA7ApUp#” about 3 years.

You can tell from these results that mixing capital and small letters are better for strength and more characters (eight instead of seven) also make a huge difference. Adding a single capital letter to the end of “Kr0yw3^,” such as “Kr0yw3nZ,” boosts the crack time to 3 years. Throw another special character in (“Kr0yw3^Z!”) and it jumps to 237 years.

Password Tracking and Changes

It’s easy for me to say that you should use a strong password and then expect you to remember that messy non-word string of characters. But how dare I suggest you use a different password on every site you visit and account you own. That’s madness!

Or is it? Here’s a simple trick that would make your already steroid-strong password even more muscular, while individualizing it for each entry. Simply take the first three letters of the site or service you’re entering and append them to the beginning or end of your strong password. On Amazon, you’d have “Kr0yw3^AMA.” Your e-mail could be “Kr0yw3^EMA.” Facebook would be “Kr0yw3^FAC.” Notice I always use all caps for the appended letters, just to crank up the security. This can work for banks, shopping, social networks, you name it. It’s like creating a thousand passwords you can remember easily.

Every few months, you should change all of your passwords—everywhere. Even if you made a password that would take a few centuries to hack, you might have shared it with a co-worker or boyfriend or girlfriend, right? What happens when they become ex-coworkers or an ex-BF or ex-GF? Yeah, you can probably guess.

You could change your base (“Kr0yw3^”), which might be easy if you based it on an acronym for a longer phrase. Or you could change the appended letters by moving them to the front or even the middle (“Kr0yFACw3^” for Facebook). Perhaps switch to the last three in the service name (“OOK” for Facebook.) You could even stick in the date of the change. It’s your call.

You’ll be most annoyed when you encounter that select few sites that only let you have a short password of four, six, or even eight characters. What might have seemed easy before is going to soon becoming a vexing problem when you embrace the might of a strong personal password paradigm.

The Right Advice is Wrong

Some experts will tell you to do a couple of things that go against conventional password wisdom. And the reasons are simple: productivity.

For example, I read a treatise on why you should write down your passwords, especially if you actually go the distance and use a unique string of characters for every log in. The amount of time you could lose trying to remember each password whenever you have to type it in may not be worth it. Just try to keep the list somewhere that’s not readily accessible, such as in your wallet. A desk drawer at work is not optimal for keeping out snooping co-workers.

Related advice from a Microsoft researcher says that having multiple passwords is also not worth the effort. Or, more specifically, the indirect costs of the effort of tracking them all. That’s right, that big list of passwords I just said to put in your pocket? Maybe it’s not worth it.

Of course, all such worries are moot if you follow the advice above and create super-seekrit-strong passwords that you can easily remember.

Pro tip: choosing “password” as your online password is not a good idea. In fact, unless you’re hoping to be an easy target for hackers, it’s the worst password you can possibly choose.

“Password” ranks first on password management application provider SplashData’s annual list of worst internet passwords, which are ordered by how common they are. (“Passw0rd”, with a numeral zero, assent much smarter, ranking 18th on the list).

The list is somewhat predictable: sequences of adjacent numbers or letters on the keyboard, such as “”qwerty and “123456″, and popular names, such as “ashley” and “michael”, all are common choices. Other common choices, such as “monkey” and “shadow”, are harder to explain.

As some websites have begun to require passwords to include both numbers and letters, it makes sense varied choices, such as “abc123″ and “trustno1″, are popular choices.

SplashData created the rankings based on millions of stolen passwords posted online by hackers. Here is the complete list:
* 1. password
* 2. 123456
* 3.12345678
* 4. qwerty
* 5. abc123
* 6. monkey
* 7. 1234567
* 8. letmein
* 9. trustno1
* 10. dragon
* 11. baseball
* 12. 111111
* 13. iloveyou
* 14. master
* 15. sunshine
* 16. ashley
* 17. bailey
* 18. passw0rd
* 19. shadow
* 20. 123123
* 21. 654321
* 22. superman
* 23. qazwsx
* 24. michael
* 25. football

SplashData CEO Morgan Slain urges businesses and consumers using any password on the list to change them immediately.

“Hackers can easily break into many accounts just by repeatedly trying common passwords,” Slain says. “Even though people are encouraged to select secure, strong passwords, many people continue to choose weak, easy-to-guess ones, placing themselves at risk from fraud and identity theft.”

The company provided some tips for choosing secure passwords in a statement:

* 1. Vary different types of characters in your passwords; include numbers, letters and special characters when possible.
* 2. Choose passwords of eight characters or more. Separate short words with spaces or underscores.
* 3. Don’t use the same password and username combination for multiple websites. Use an online password manager to keep track of your different accounts.

Its chief technology officer Dave Fellows won solutions architect of the year, and the company was named BizSpark partner of the year and jointly won software exporter of the year with Auckland cinema software firm Vista Entertainment Solutions.

GreenButton’s application can be built into software products and lets computer users access supercomputer power at the click of a button as they need it and without having to invest in their own systems. It has teamed up with Microsoft to use its cloud computing platform, Windows Azure, to provide the processing power.

Other firms to scoop up awards last night include Wellington Microsoft developer Intergen, Wellington IT services firm Datacom, online business consultancy Provoke and Telecom’s IT services firm Gen-i.

In July, GreenButton was named as the global winner of the Windows Azure independent software vendor partner of the year award.

It said in August it was working with Disney’s animation giant Pixar to make its movie rendering software available to anyone over the web.

GreenButton investors include the Government’s Venture Investment Fund, Movac founder Phil McCaw, and Datacom founder and rich-lister John Holdsworth.

Its founder and chief executive is former Weta Digital head of technology Scott Houston and its chairman is Fonterra’s former chief information officer Marcel van den Assum.

Former Sun Microsystems executive Mark Canepa is also a shareholder and director.

iPhone will be available at Telecom retail stores and online at telecom.co.nz/iPhone. Customers can pre-order iPhone 4S at telecom.co.nz/iPhone, and Gen-i clients can pre-order iPhone through their client manager.

iPhone 4S is the most amazing iPhone yet, packed with incredible new features including Apple’s dual-core A5 chip for blazing fast performance and stunning graphics; an all-new camera with advanced optics and full 1080p HD resolution video recording. With the launch of iPhone 4S also comes the launch of iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system with over 200 new features; and iCloud, a breakthrough set of free cloud services that work with your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices.

“We are delighted to bring the innovative iPhone 4S to Telecom New Zealand customers,” said Telecom retail CEO, Alan Gourdie. “With the capability and performance of Telecom’s mobile services, customers will enjoy using the many new features of iPhone 4S on our network.”

From 12:01 AM on Friday, November 11, customers will be able to purchase iPhone 4S from Telecom’s concept stores in central Auckland (167 Victoria St West) and central Wellington (42 Willis St). Customers will also be able to purchase from Christchurch (Moorhouse Ave) and Dunedin (101 George Street). iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS will also be available from all other Telecom stores nationwide from November 11 from 9:00 AM.

More information: http://telecom.co.nz/iPhone

If you haven’t noticed yet, there will be a serious issue in the availability of hard drives. This is because of the major flooding that has occurred in Thailand. While this natural disaster is incredibly unfortunate for the people of Thailand, we also will see the supply chain impacted significantly for hard drives and other sub-components. Some ship dates at one of the largest server and storage brands in the US now list estimated ship dates after March of 2012.

In terms of news, one report puts production offline for the rest of 2011 and a statement from Seagate confirms that supplies will be short of expected demand. I had a chance to check with a few storage companies to get their perspective on this event, and there is a consensus that the impact will be significant. Drew Meyer, senior director of product marketing at NETGEAR told me that they have an inventory to go through the current quarter (Q4) of 2011. However, immediately, pricing for drives has increased as much as 70% in the last two weeks. Sourcing drives independently may become attractive to NETGEAR customers, as the ReadyNAS series of disk product have diskless options that allow the customer to source drives on their own if they choose and can purchase outside of the price fluctuations.

ioSafe, makers of ruggedized storage devices, had similar commentary. Robb Moore, CEO of ioSafe confirmed that this will have a widespread ripple effect in the industry. Moore further went on to say that some external hard drive manufacturers will have to exit the market entirely. Storage is a widespread market of systems with high margins as well as low-end solutions with rock-bottom margins; yet, they may use the same commodity disks underneath it all. Moore goes on to predict that higher-end (which command higher sales margins) systems will likely be less impacted by the supply shortage compared to external drive systems. Like NETGEAR, ioSafe has an inventory to cover the immediate future for their storage products.

I take particular interest in this situation as I spent the majority of my career working for a supply chain execution solutions company. I’m quite familiar with how the supply chain works, and I can confirm that it is very efficient. And what that means is that if there is an interruption in the network, the gap can be felt immediately. This is because inventory sitting on a shelf doesn’t really make any money. I’ve worked on projects at multimillion distribution centers and had process engineers watching every motion with a stopwatch and calculator to ensure the efficiency targets are met. The problem here is an assumption of a constant inbound stream of product. In the case of the hard drive situation, we are likely facing a serious interruption to how the drives (both rotational and solid state) are manufactured and components are sourced.

What can the typical administrator do? I posed the question just this year on whether parts on the shelf are a good idea or not. While people are split, it’s pretty clear that a large stash of drives to satisfy months and months of disk consumption isn’t practical. One or two miscellaneous parts here and there have a much more clear case. This is a great time to reduce our storage consumption. This can be via deleting old data, moving it to a storage cloud, leveraging deduplication, virtualizing, consolidating resources or simply revisiting retention policies.

While I don’t think this supply chain issue will cause significant issues like server and storage companies unable to execute warranties,

Apple have announced that iPhone 4S will be available in New Zealand and 14 additional countries on Friday, 11 November. Customers will be able to pre-order iPhone 4S beginning on Friday, 4 November.

The updated iOS 5 includes Notification Center, a way to easily view and manage notifications in one place without interruption and iMessage, a new messaging service that lets users easily send text messages, photos and videos between all iOS 5 users. iOS 5 will also be available as a free software update for iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS customers.

iPhone 4S includes a new camera with the advanced optics. iPhone 4S includes a new custom lens, a larger f/2.4 aperture and an advanced hybrid IR filter that produce sharper, brighter and more accurate images. The Apple-designed image signal processor in the A5 dual-core chip is built for performance, and coupled with the features built into iOS 5, makes the camera one of the fastest on any phone. With iPhone 4S, the Camera app launches much faster.

New features in the Camera and Photos apps give you instant access to the camera right from the lock screen, and you can also use the volume-up button to quickly snap a photo. Optional grid lines help line up your shot and a simple tap locks focus and exposure on one subject; and the new Photos app lets you crop, rotate, enhance and remove red-eye, and organize your photos into albums right on your device to share them on the go.

Beginning Friday, 11 November, iPhone 4S will be available in Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Malta, Montenegro, New Zealand, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania and South Korea. iPhone 4S is available today in 29 countries around the world and will be available in more than 70 countries by the end of the year.

iPhone 4S comes in either black or white for a recommended retail price of NZ$ 1,049 for the 16GB model, NZ$ 1,199 for the 32GB model and NZ$ 1,349 for the new 64GB model. The company says iPhone 4S will be sold through the Apple Online Store and select Apple Authorised Resellers.

The iPhone 4 is now available for NZ$ 899 and iPhone 3GS is available for NZ$599.