BE WARNED! MicrofiberUSA.com does supply good product (or at least used to), but their ordering system sucks. If you’ve ordered in the past, when you check out you will find the last billing address you used entered for you. Sort of, because the state will not be entered. If you miss this and try to place your order the system will complain and in the mean time WILL RESET ANY VALUES YOU’VE CHANGED, including changed quantities, addresses, etc. As a result of this, an order of mine went to our old address and was lost.

There is also no way to change your password on the site from the rather short one they supply by default.

I’ve contacted the company about these issues and received no response.

Or maybe “Should Be A Critical Element…” Because American business by and large doesn’t really care about security very much.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier we learn that the Indians are pushing to get the encryption keys to RIM’s BlackBerry system. What this means is that the messages sent to BlackBerrys in the field could be decrypted by the Indian government. Strangely, only non-corporate users are at risk for now.

How long do you think it will be before other governments get the keys in exactly the same way as the Indians did? How long do you think it will be before a corporate user is thought to be enough of a security concern that even corporate users must turn over keys?

The reason why this is significant for the BlackBerry vs iPhone situation is that the iPhone works differently. It doesn’t pass all messages through a server. It behaves like a computer connected to the internet, with a regular email client. So, as soon as someone is allowed to create an email client with encryption capabilities we will have secure mobile email. Apple has released the iPhone SDK, and is expected to unveil applications along with an improved version of the iPhone in June. It might even happen that Apple builds encryption into the mail client themselves.

The problem for RIM is that there is no way to do full decryption on the BlackBerry without doing it on their server, at least with their current software. Creating this after making deals with governments to provide access will be impossible.

So, if you believe in having privacy, and you conduct business overseas, it looks like BlackBerry isn’t the best choice.

Now that we live in a new, larger, house my wife and I get to do something we’ve wanted to do since we got together:Throw parties!

We had a small one around the time of Susan’s birthday, and it went fairly well. So we decided to throw one for Cinco de Mayo. At the same time, Susan decided to try evite.com, an online invitation management site. Being an avid scrapbooker, normally she will spend a lot of time hand crafting paper invitations, but the problem with them is getting people to RSVP. We thought the online system would make it a bit easier for people.

The party is tomorrow, and out of the original 31 invitations, 26 looked at the invitation. The system tells you when an invitation was viewed. Out of those 26, 24 gave an answer of yes, no or maybe. We have 11 yes, 5 maybe, and 8 no.

We invited a lot of folks we don’t know especially well, and people who live quite far away so I’m not surprised at the response rate. What is interesting to me is the 5 people who never looked at the invitation. Did it end up in a spam folder? I had one guest whose invitation did end up there. That’s the problem with the people who show up as non-views. You don’t know whether they got it or not, and are stuck with calling to ask. I suppose there’s no real way around this, though.

Otherwise the system works pretty well. It sends out reminders, and it provides a nice way to update everyone with a single message - handy in case of changes. It also provides really nice functionality for people to say how many they’re bringing, and to allow them to invite their own guests if you want. Since you need only an email address, it’s also very easy to add people.

Still, there are a few things that need improvement:

1. When you invite a couple, you can have four or more email addresses between work and home for each spouse. These days you don’t know who checks what when, or what gets filtered where. It would be nice to be able to tie multiple emails to one invitation so that when they respond for one email address they’re responding to all of them.
2. A “what to bring” function would be nice - lots of people offer to bring stuff, and a separate area where people could list what they’re bringing would be nice. This would prevent, say, everyone bringing the same side dish out of ignorance.
3. Adjustable settings for who gets reminders and how often would be nice. We all know people who need more prodding than others ;-)
4. Adjustable party info by group. Say, you’ve got an event where you’ve got family coming over to open gifts at 2, but regular guests are invited for dinner at 5. There’s no way to do that.

Overall I like the system and I’m already itching to throw another party to play with it!