I’m too impressed with the ability of an email confidentiality notice to actually protect information that would not otherwise be protected through an NDA or some other agreement.

Out-Law, the IT law site run by Pinsent Masons, generally agrees:

Email notices and email footers

Do not take it for granted that your confidentiality notice can be relied upon, however much care goes into its preparation. There is no legal authority on the value of these notices in email communications. When the notice is added automatically to every external communication, there is a risk that a court would consider that the venom in your warning has been diluted.

The value of the notice is that, if the disclosure of the content of an email becomes a subject of dispute, it would be possible to point a court to the existence of the confidentiality notice and argue that the recipient should have known to not disclose the contents of the message.

If your organisation decides that it is worth including such a notice, just be aware that it will be in a court’s discretion to ignore it.

But I understand that lots and lots of people in the business and legal worlds have come to expect them, especially from lawyers. The absence of a confidentiality notice could possibly make you look like you don’t know what you are doing, at least to some clients. So there may be some utility to having them for appearances sake even if they aren’t all that effective.

Business Link is a really handy site for getting template agreements and disclaimers and things. It is run by the UK government. They have a sample business email disclaimer:

This email and its attachments may be confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of “[business name]“.

If you are not the intended recipient of this email and its attachments, you must take no action based upon them, nor must you copy or show them to anyone.

Please contact the sender if you believe you have received this email in error.

I wanted something shorter as well as to drop the “any views or opinions” bit, so I came up with:

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE. This email and its attachments may be privileged and confidential. They are intended solely for the use of the intended recipient.

If you are not the intended recipient, you must take no action based upon them, and you must not copy or show them to anyone. Please contact the sender if you believe you have received this email in error.

This could be added to an email signature or perhaps could be added on by your host to all emails from your organisation.

But since the Companies Act requires that you also have you Company registration number and registered office information, all of this, plus your own contact information, adds up to a pretty hefty signature!

I was looking to add a favicon to one of my other blogs today, and discovered the Blog Icons plugin for WordPress that lets you do it relatively painlessly.

Blog Icons WordPress Codex

I made a 16 by 16 pixel favicon in png format using GIMP, the open source photo manipulation program I tend to use on the MacBook Pro. You can also use Seashore, which runs in OS X without the need for the X11 Window system.

You simply need to just download the Blog Icons plugin and upload it to your plugins folder in your WordPress install. Go to you admin page and enable the plugin. Afterwards there is a new option in your settings folder for Blog Icons.

I’m trying to harden up my blog installs and needed to generate some random passwords.  Apparently you can generate these from the Terminal, OSX’s command line interface.

Read more at Wobito: Free Random Password Generator for Mac

His code is:

> openssl rand -base64 6

This generates a 6 character string.  I wanted something a bit more secure, so I upped it to 12 characters by typing the following:

> openssl rand -base64 12

Enjoy!

Thought for the day (from a web design company’s materials):

“pay peanuts, you get monkeys”

But my thought, based on their prices:

CMS website for £8 to £15,000? Seems like you could get a better deal with finding a theme developer for WordPress or Drupal to code you up something SEO friendly (or buy a pre-built theme such as Thesis).

At the moment includes two computers as I transfer from files and programs from one computer to my new computer for my new job (a MBP!).

I’ve been thinking about security lately, especially given that I’ve switched office environments. I went from a home office to to working at a serviced office suite — one that is also used by a group of people. While the individual room I’m in has a great group of people (several from other companies) and the room is key card controlled, I still would feel more comfortable locking my screen somehow when I get up for a few minutes to stretch my legs or get a cup of coffee or a bite to eat.

I’m often running some sort of program that I don’t want to stop, hence just shutting the lid of my (new!) MacBook Pro won’t cut it. Luckily Mac OSX Hints from MacWorld has a some hints on how to do just that:

Quickly lock your screen

The other solution I’ve been using is iAlertU, which is like a car alarm for the mac and also locks the screen. If moved, the motion sensor kicks off, it snaps a pic with the built-in iSight, and makes loud noises. And it is controlled by the remote that comes with the MBP.

Via Mac OSX hints:

Use MobileMe push email with any email address

MobileMe is the new .Mac

For US based customers, AT&T Mobility will offer the new iPhone without a 2 year contract for $599 for an 8GB and $699 for a 16GB. [Link - No-contract iPhone on the way]. But the article reports that the iPhone would still be locked to the AT&T network — so some sort of Jailbreak would be needed for those looking to buy and use a different carrier.

In the UK, it looks like o2, the exclusive iPhone carrier, will have a Pay-as-you-go option for the 3G iPhone as well. [Link o2 PAYG iPhone page].

InfoWorld reports that the next version of OSX — codenamed Snow Leopard — will have more of an enterprise focus. [LINK - Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Apple's secret business weapon?]. This ties in with more enterprise support for the new iPhone 3G, to be released on 11 July 2008. Snow Leopard is predicted for summer 2009.

After way too long of a break, posting will start up again…