Waiting for Godot- version 2.0

[captainsblog]

So we simply lurve (and you should, too) our friend firynze, who, disguised as a mild-mannered editor for a great metropolitan magazine, defends the publishing Metropolis in her free time as editor and sole proprietor of the online publishing house Candlemark & Gleam.

Their latest title came out on Wednesday! Yay!  Only ten bucks for a .pdf for now and lifetime rights to put it on a NooKindlePadThai whichever of those I wind up getting later. Yay!

They take Paypal! Yay! Probably that costs the author and the house less than credit card interchange fees, right? (Um, no, they're exactly the same in this case, but hey.)

The Paypal transfer went in Tuesday night! Yay!

Stop yay-ying.  It's three days later and my "available balance" is still 0.00 US, even though they put a hold on the ten bucks as of first thing yesterday morning and it's FAH. KING. POSTED as a debit against my checking account as of now.

From the look of some of the online complaint sites (most of which are, admittedly, shills for online merchant accounts), this is not unusual, and could, in fact, be much worse.

Still. Buy the book. Susan and Kate will not disappoint.

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Then, thanks to another friend, I know all about the latest important update from the Book of Face:

Facebook finally provided a way to keep any random jerk in the café from hijacking your account. But you have to go out of your way to enable this protection, and you might have to wait. Still: Jump on this.

Facebook has at long last offered an option to use the encrypted "HTTPS" protocol, a feature it will begin rolling out today but won't finish for a "few weeks." You should check now if it's available, and sign up as soon as it is enabled for your account. The performance overhead is minor—zippy Gmail, for example, uses HTTPS for everything—and it's an important step to keep your Facebook account safe from being hijacked on an open or poorly secured wireless network.

By default, Facebook sends your access credentials in the clear, with no encryption whatsoever. Switching to HTTPS is important because a browser extension called Firesheep has made it especially easy for anyone sharing your open wireless network—at cafe or conference, for example—to sniff your credentials and freely access your account. One blogger sitting in a random New York Starbucks was able to steal 20-40 Facebook identities in half an hour. HTTPS solves this longstanding problem by encrypting your login cookies and other data; in fact the inventor of Firesheep made the software to encourage companies like Facebook to finally lock down their systems.

You can sign up for Facebook HTTPS by going to Account Settings and then selecting "Account Security," third from the bottom. Then click under "Secure Browsing" — if it's there. Facebook says everyone should have this by the end of the day, but in the meantime you might be missing the relevant option toggle.

(Thanks to murrday, in her mild-mannered real identity, for being the first to reveal that.)

So of course, during my overnight rerun of Late Night With David Insomnia, I went there and did that- or tried to.  Sure enough, it hadn't rolled out to me, and still hasn't.

But do it. This is the Internet, where hackers are hackers and sheep should be nervous.

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Meanwhile, the one goddam thing I DON'T want- yet another iTunes update, after being forced to install 10.1.1 last week when the whole shootin' match crashed, is ALREADY popping up and bugging me to go all 10.1.2.

To which I reply to whoever took Steve's Jobs: 4.k.U.

Comments

[bktheirregular]

I'm in the camp that thinks that for iTunes 11, for Windows at least, they need to start over from a blank piece of paper. And while they're at it, maybe use a user interface that behaves somewhat like the other programs on the operating system, like just about every other software maker manages to do...

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Re: Candlemark & Gleam's latest offering: worth every penny. I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

Re: iTunes. You don't have to install anything, you know. It's mainly to support the CDMA iPhone.