Fox News aired a report in 2006 that described how the FBI can turn on the mic on a cellphone and eavesdrop — even if the phone is turned off.

Today’s Word of the Day, government Trojan, describes efforts by various governments to covertly survail traffic of all kinds to and from suspect hard drives, including VoIP, cellphones and email.

These kinds of measures are only likely to increase as groups of all stripes turn to the Web to organize and communicate about activity the government wants to monitor. I find the “analog hacks” used here intriguing. VoIP or cellphone conversations and email messages may be encrypted during transmission but if an agency can record a target on the microphone or by using a keylogger, even quantum encryptography could be sidestepped.

Does the following sound familiar? You’re at your desk, opening email, preparing for a good solid work day. As you’re responding to one message, however, that little alert pops up on the bottom of the screen and before you know it you’ve got a bunch of open emails clamoring for your attention. And then comes the IM, which, being real time (as opposed to the several seconds elapsing between messages in an email exchange) trumps email. At the height of this madness, I’ve occasionally been exchanging email and IMing with someone simultaneously when interrupted by the phone. Guess who?

Whatever your job, if you do it at a computer you’re probably coming to terms with spending a fair amount of your day doing things that didn’t come up in your job description. (Hands up, anyone who saw “Writing and responding to email” at the top of the required tasks list?)

Ok, no surprise that email is eating our lives (not sure I even want to see the numbers on that) but did you know that you probably spend more time being interrupted from tasks than you do working on them?

This article looks at drive by interruptions and the toll they exact on productivity.

Here are a few stats:

• Interruptions crunch through 28% of the average knowledge worker’s day.
• Interruptions typically lower a worker’s IQ 10 points. (The researchers note that’s over twice as big a drop as experienced by someone who smoked marijuana. Man.)
• In a study of Microsoft employees, it took workers an average of 15 minutes to settle into a task again after an interruption.

If, like me, you telecommute you may not have the “drop-by drive-by” coworker sitting on the edge of your desk. On the other hand, family and neighbors (many, many of whom just never seem to get the “work” part of “work from home”) will typically take time out of their busy days to fill that niche.

When a friend of mine was working on his doctoral dissertation, he actually locked his door and tied himself into the chair at his computer with the belt from his bathrobe so that he couldn’t absent-mindedly wander away.

Ingenious, but it would never work today. We’re virtually strapped in at our computers but the potential for interruption just seems to get worse. Without so much as standing up, we’ve got email, IMs, RSS notifications… not to mention the siren call of the Net or even the archaic charms of the telephone.

So how to cope, get some work done and maybe even save your sanity? Well, here’s a hint: “Unplug” is number three on Lifehack’s top 50 ways to increase your productivity list. On rare occasions, I’ve closed out of Outlook and exited IM. It’s amazing how much you can get done without interr… oh, hold that thought — I’ve got to take this call…

~ Ivy Wigmore

Permanence is both fleeting and intractable on the Internet. In the print world, once the newspaper, magazine or book has been proofed and fact-checked to the point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in, the final product is just that.

Online, “stop the presses” just doesn’t cut it. It’s a nearly universal experience to have clicked “send” before the message or attachment is ready for its audience — or post, in the age of the blogosphere, YouTube and Twitter. And it’s not just novice users that wish they had thought twice before responding or composing their thoughts. Part of the job here at WhatIs.com is always making sure that our copy and links are accurate and working, whether you find our content though this blog, within our definitions or learning content or in any of the new media types that have appeared on the site over the past few years, like podcasts, embedded videos or screencasts.

Earlier today, unfortunately, came one of the moments that editors cringe to admit, where a grammatical rule was broken and a wild card character made its way into one of the few remaining digital media forms that can’t be recalled: the email newsletter. Once it goes out of the mail server, there’s no calling your words back. WhatIs.com sends out a Word of the Day newsletter (Subscribe ere), each weekday, chosen from among the thousands of IT-related terms in the database. Our editors write three questions to go along with the term, usually written to match whatever the theme of the term might be — mobile computing, open source, SAP, CRM or perhaps whatever major tech events has occurred recently.

The three categories of tech trivia include:

• a Secret Word of the Day, where we describe a term without naming it
• an IT Acronym Challenge, where we test your ability to make sense of the alphabet soup
• and a Daily Tech Trivia question, which can be about nearly anything related to technology or current events

Today’s Word of the Day was BotHunter, which meant that our questions centered on security and threat management. The final question should have read as follows:

In IT security, AAA means more than roadside assistance. A AAA server is a server program that handles user requests for access to computer resources and “AAA” services. What do the three A’s stand for in AAA server?
Answer

When I originally wrote the question, I heard “triple A” in my head when I read AAA, a symptom of depending on a certain highway assistance service for decades. In the context of IT security, however, AAA is pronounced by saying each letter separately, or “Ay Ay Ay,” spelling out the acronym. That means that “an” is correct, not “a” as I wrote in the newsletter, just as it is in our definition for AAA server. My apologies to you, dear reader, for the mistake.

If you’re further interested in the correct pronunciation for some of the most commonly mispronounced terms in IT, make sure to consult our guide, How do you pronounce IT? You can see the correct phonics and hear the word spoken aloud by yours truly. Leave us a voice message if you disagree, approve or want to add to the list.

I’ve been using different online freemail ever since I left the comfort of my collegiate email account. Hotmail and Yahoo were the default options back in the mid-90s when I graduated and, for many years, despite the increasing spam, I stuck with them.

When .Mac was introduced in 2002, being a long-time Apple user, I jumped on that bandwagon. I have to admit, however, that even with Apple’s update of the Web-based email client to a richer, AJAX-heavy interface, gmail is now my clear preference. The fact that it’s free and has a much higher storage limit are almost besides the point; I can access gmail on the go and it doesn’t constantly time out, not to mention the seamless integration of gchat with other gmail users.

It’s quite possible, even likely, that Steve Jobs & Co. will update .Mac, including email, when the iPhone is released at the end of the month. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled. Recent reports of a dangerous hole in Google Desktop, along with the constant flow of spam and the malware occasionally associated with it, have kept me looking for better way to secure my online messaging, especially when I exchange email with someone who desires a digital signature or encrypted email.

Enter FireGPG. Thanks to popurls, which I love to use to get a snapshot of the Web’s “hive mind” at any given time, I found this great Firefox extension that allows you to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify your gmail. Just head over to firegpg.tuxfamily.org to download the extension. Of course, as the developers of FireGPG note, it’s just a key management tool. If you’re unfamiliar with PGP, you can review our definition for Pretty Good Privacy. GnuPG is quite similar to PGP, with the notable difference of being free sofware released under the GNU General Public License. GnuPG is managed by the GNU project, with complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC2440. You can download GnuPG here.

Make sure to review Dmitri Popov’s excellent post at Linux.com for more information, if you’re interested in trying FireGPG out.

Enjoy your privacy!

 Mike Musgrove set off a blogswarm last week with an article called ”E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’.”  

 The buzz is about email bankruptcy.  What is email bankruptcy? Mike Musgrove defines it as “swearing off e-mail entirely or, more commonly, deleting all old messages and starting fresh.” 

MIT Professor Sherry Turkle has been credited with inventing the term.  She talked about declaring email bankruptcy in this 2002 interview with NY Times columnist Costance Rosenblum. She also called it a “fantasy.”

But then along came venture capitalist Fred Wilson — who went ahead and actually did it.  Yay Fred!

Fred Wilson is the managing partner of two venture capital firms, Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures. (Hint: You’ve heard of Feedburner? How about del.icio.us?)

Pretty clever that a VC would title his blog post “Declaring bankruptcy.”  

“I am so far behind on email that I am declaring bankruptcy.
If you’ve sent me an email (and you aren’t my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again.
I am starting over.”

Pretty clever of Mike Musgrove to get the grandfather of the Internet, David Farber, to go on record saying that poor Fred should get out of the technology field.

“For a venture capitalist to say something like this — he should get out of the technology field.”

BLOGFIGHT!

For the record, I’m in favor of the concept behind email bankruptcy.  Also for the record, I don’t think their quarrel has anything to do with email.

The real argument is about words and organizational style. 

There are some folks who live to color code. They have Outlook rules and folders within folders. They like structure and order and will do everything they can to control the contents of their inbox.

Then there are folks who like the junk drawer approach. They never sort their mail.  They like to see what’s coming in and they want it all in one place. To these folks, inboxes — like all junk drawers — need to be cleaned out periodically.

Both organizational styles are valid.  It’s sort of like left-brain / right-brain thinking.  Remember the ant and grasshopper? One isn’t better than the other, they’re just different.  Same with communication technology. Telephone, snail mail, IM, email…they all have their uses.  So it’s not the technology we’re really talking about, it’s what’s socially acceptable for how a person choses to manage the technology.

Some people think email = priority.  In their minds, every incoming message has an exclamation point. They will eagerly drop whatever they’re working on to offer a quick reply. Other people prioritize thier time differently. They see email as a daily chore.  Ok. I get that part. Different strokes for different folks.

So what’s all the fuss?

The word “bankruptcy.” 

Dr. Turkle used the word bankruptcy to describe “starting over.” Unfortunately the word also means “utter ruin and failure.”  It implies the person is incompetent and a loser. Pretty harsh condemnation for just having a different organizational style.

So let’s change the words.  Do-over is so much friendlier.

Google has done it again. As useful as millions have found Gmail freemail to be, it’s even better now: users can now access Gmail through their mobile phones, as described by this press release. Simply point your phone’s Web browser to gmail.com/app on a Java-enabled mobile phone and download the application. It’s quite fast, with pre-loaded messages, easy scrolling, reduced but useful keystrokes for reading, composing and searching and even features attachment support that automatically resizes to the phone. You’ll need to check the requirements for Gmail Mobile first, crucially J2ME, but if you’re a Gmail user, this is pretty cool.