Yes, I did get get a copy of Leopard on Friday. Do I like it? In short, I love it. I’m not going to go into an in depth review, I’m only going to touch on a few things. First, data detectors are the shizzle. What are data detectors? Well, I’ll let Apple describe it: Say you get an email invitation to dinner. What if Mail recognized the address of the restaurant and let you map directions on the web?

Well, I am safe and well in Los Angeles this week. Sunday night we noticed that the air outside smelled like something was burning, and there was of course very strong winds and low humidity. Monday I left for work like normal and turned on KBG (yes, I get KGB all the way up here in L.A., it’s kind of cool). Dave had been evacuated from his home and wasn’t at the radio station, the rest of the DSC was giving updates on the fire and intermittently feeding from KOGO.

It just makes for a bad day. Renew it ahead of time like you’re supposed to so you don’t freak out at the last minute.

Today on The Privacy Blog Lance mentions that recently over 100 government e-mail logins were posted online and specifically mentions how with Exchange or IMAP people’s lives are kept in their e-mail accounts. Not only Exchange or IMAP, but also any webmail system. It was demonstrated at BlackHat this year that it’s trivially easy to hijack anybody’s webmail session (hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc) just as long as they are on the same local network as the attacker.

Over the past few days Skype has had a major outage. Now, I realize that Skype is incredibly popular, most notably because their video/voice chat service has an incredible knack for getting around pesky firewalls and routers that routinely block other services. But this simply underscores the need for decentralized networks. Instant messaging is at a crisis in this world. Right now if AIM goes down millions of people, most of the Internet, will be without IM service.