The geeks come out at night

I have a geeky side, I admit it. I majored in computers in college but ending up with a Master's in education, so technology only plays a supporting role in my work day. However, get me in front of the computer at home and I can geek out. Right now I am fascinated with the concept of open source applications. This is when a company or group decide to create an application and instead of putting locks on the "code" they distribute it and encourage others to take it apart and use it as they wish. For the most part this means that there are a lot of free applications out there. Here are some of the coolest:

Thunderbird (email) Firefox (browser) - These two application are a good replacement for IE and Netscape. The email client works so well with multiple accounts and has a lot of fun features. The browser supports tabbed browsing. I won't go into it here, but this is an awesome feature.

Gaim - Basically it is one application for all your IM sessions. Only one program needs to be running instead of 2 or 3. It is good, but it doesn't support all the features of the original IM apps.

OpenOffice - This application has all the features of Microsoft Office (the whole package) but is free! I haven't used it much but it looks strong.

So in the course of the past few weeks, I have been reading about email security. The Thunderbird email client has an add on called Enigmail that works based off another program called GnuGP. I won't go into the details here, because I am still not sure how it works, but basically it ensures that your email is only read by the intended recipient and that recipient can be sure it is you who sent it. The best reference to why we should encrypt our email was an analogy to unencrypted email being that of a postcard that anyone can read enroute.

So I get it in my head that I need security and attempt to install what has to be the most user unfriendly piece of software known to man. I had to edit my Windows registry, create config files. It was very difficult and I was constantly afraid I was doing irreparable damage to my system.

I get it working, but it is only then that I realize that both sender and recipient nees to be using the protocol. So since no one is using this stuff, it is useless. Oh well...

Some good info. on email security:
Email security privacy digital certificates