Lotus Notes implicated in lost White House emails

Read this Ars Technica article

Now its an utterly plausible defense to claim that "Lotus Notes Ate My Email". Or even "Lotus Notes' obscure lock-in prevented any/easy audit workflow to be attached to the back-end systems".

Notes Hater is presently waiting for the call to testify to the appropriate senate committee.

F*** you IBM - you should be embarrassed for your part in this event.  

Anti-Notes Cafepress store....

Apparently we're OK to sell thru cafepress.  As long as we do not infringe on copyright, we'll be fine.  All the art is and will be from scratch, and we're against a product* not an individual or group of individuals (protected or otherwise).

Maybe we can't suggest that Lotus Notes of a bag of crap, but we are fine with somewhat less offensive claims, and no infringement on "Lotus Notes" the trade mark in respect of products.  We're fine under 'right to parody' I guess. And if we get a letter asking us to stop, IBM would know as well as we do that we'd publish it and bask in the attention.

Enjoy : http://www.cafepress.com/noteshater

We'll be loading more merchandise in time for May 13 (Intl Notes Hater Day).

* We expect that products will be elevated to be protected under the constitution shortly.

"Notes Free" art

Notes in the press

Check out minutes 20 to 22 in the below podcast for some nice Notes
coverage. Nothing beats the English sense of humor. You can play the
podcast from the site.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/audio/2008/jan/08/tech.weekly.podcast

Lotus Notes: every day with you is like a stepping on a rake

 

Can someone with some artistic skills make a stylized person steps on rake image to add to our materials ? Maybe with a caption of "Lotus Notes"? Thanks.

Great work IBM, backdoors really make your product secure

If this is true, then the workers of the world should unite and declare 2008 to be the last year for Lotus Notes as a product.  Materials for May 13, international Notes hater's day really should be fun...

Images in part based on art of  Roti De Veau (http://irtc.org/stills/2003-08-31)

Notes - The Premier Collaboration Tool

Lotus Notes is, unquestionably, the premier collaboration tool available today. Hands down.

No other tool is so painful to use, so horrific an experience that the mere thought of using it compels you to step away from your computer and ... talk to somebody. Actually engage another person in direct, interactive communication. In person or by phone it matters not. More than any other product available today, Notes stops us typing and gets us talking. It is truely the collboration tool that engages people in high bandwidth communications.

IBM is to be saluted for swimming so boldly against the electronic communicaions tide. So retro in concept, so elegant in simplicity, so much more effective than the product.

Mathematically proven value of Lotus Notes

LOL. By a Lotus Notes hater back in December.....

Materials for Notes Hater Day

So stickers are a good idea for Notes Hater Day (May 13, 2008).  Stick them around your office.  Particularly on things the boss is fond of.  There are a few cheap sticker printers you can use like this one.

Little to complain about

I "use" notes all the time and I have very little to complain about. Of course, that's because it crashes so many times a day that I never get to do much with it.

Yes, MacBook Pro, I would like to Force Quit Lotus Notes yet again. No, it's not responding again. Yes, this is the 3rd time today. No, it doesn't seem I'll receive any relief anytime soon.

I wont have much trouble not using notes on Notes Haters Day, I can't use it any day really.

Someone please free me from IBM's death grip. All I want to do is read my email.

Notes Lovers moving against us!!

Right we are hearing rumblings.  It seems that Notes Lovers (shameless bunch of cowards) are organizing to to defeat 1st Intl Notes Haters day on May 13.  Not only are they planning counter measures for the day itself, but also planning a campaign of FUD around Lotus Notes.  Our spies tell us that T-Shirts are being commissioned, and professional spin doctors are being positioned at water coolers throughout the US to whisper things like "isn't Notes great" and smile at people.

As if those depraved tactics were not enough, we also understand that their rear-guard action is to announce that Notes will be got rid of in the multiple companies taking part, but sufficiently far ahead to require no action now.  Moreover the whole point of this statement is to diffuse dissent against the oppressive product.  The history of freedom struggles has shown over and over that political action can be negated in this way as many give up the freedom struggle as they equate a statement to deliverable.

These people are SCUM - do not listen to their hollow promises!!  Only when the bloated Notes servers are push out the windows of office blocks world wide, and smash onto the sidewalk of history will we believe it - fight to the bitter end!!!

Announcing the first International "Lotus Notes Hater Day" day: May 13, 2008

We have only just started planning this, and are at the ideas stage only. We'll blog later when plans are firmer. Put it in your diary though: May 13, 2008.

For now though, we are imaging at the very least everyone refusing to use Lotus Notes for the entire day. This could mean taking the day off and setting a filter to delete all email that is incoming for the day. Or (for the chickens amongst you) you could set an auto responder (out of office thingy) that suggests you are "not answering Lotus Notes email today as it is International Notes Hater day". 

Other things you could do are go wild with expenses (massages, grog, gambling) and send a greeting card with the expense claim folded inside.  Perhaps also an inscription - "you stiff me with Notes, I'll stiff you with expenses" for the greeting card.

At the very least, make sure you greet him/her with "Get rid of Notes you A**hole" when you get the chance. If you're chicken, do it with a smaller posse of disgruntled go-workers:

If the boss takes the day off in anticipation, then feel free to do it all on the next day he/she is in the office.

Lawyers selecting Gmail over Notes

Read about it here.

An excerpt from the entry in question ....

Google's recently acquired Postini, a leading communications security and compliance company, and added policy management and message recovery to Google Apps. This allows a firm to establish rules to automatically handle messages by sender, recipient, attachments or the contents of the message.

For example, e-mail messages with specific words can be blocked from reaching external addresses and custom filtering rules can be added to complement the spam and virus protection already present. Also, a firm can search for messages across its entire domain and recover deleted e-mail on a 90-day, rolling basis.

Ed Brill (a fellow paid by IBM to puff Notes) has a blog which has an entry (comment 14) that led me to this.  So many crazy people out there!

Lotus Notes - The Asbestos of Enterprise IT

Here linked a blog article. An oldie but goodie.  Something to tide you over until the revolution is started.

The author has harvested the responding negative commentary from the web and posted to the bottom on the blog entry with further words from him. A good read, especially in how IBM are willing to spin in favor of Notes, when they know that it is one of the most hated pieces of IT infr

Welcome to the revolution!

OK, there's a new regime in charge of the blog now. The old fools who liked Lotus Notes are gone, and frankly good riddance to those hijackers.

We are many, and are now dedicated to the elimination of the piece of software worldwide and the liberations of millions of corporate employees worldwide who have lost hope and are utterly trapped in miserable existences. 

There will be a program of events lined up this year to protest Lotus Notes on the streets in multiple countries and to demand that Governments of the world help in the vanquishing of this beast.  Have hope comrades, there are technologies for email and groupware more suitable for purpose and actually pleasant to use out there . . . we will free you, as many have been freed before.

Stand by to rise up and protest.  This blog will coordinate actions against the evil corporate overlords that force us to Notes.

The revolution is happening this year!!! 

Quitting too!

Well, colleagues have been unrelenting in their criticism of the directions I'v taken the blog in. I'm told I made promises to continue the tone of the last guy that left, and I have not done so. Thus I am quitting too.  Sayonara folks, I'm off to work with people who appreciate good, cohesive groupware, and the controls it affords management. Unfortunately, I promised to relinquish the blog to others in the event of my leaving. Stand by ... 

feeds!

its only appropriate that this blog is like notes, in that there is no
support for feeds!

[Ed: thanks email contributor. it is true - there is no RSS. It is because blogger has no anon capability for posters as yet]

Prevent Copying - a feature other email system do not have!!

OK, so I am getting a lot of heat from colleagues who don't appreciate the new tone of this blog.  The last guy, they say, had the tone right, and it is suggested that not in sync with that.

They claim that Goats is a terrible demoralizing product and is not as secure as is claimed by its advocators.  Particularly, the confidentiality feature is a load of hot air.

This morning's blog entry is going to dispel that myth once and for all.  LOTUS NOTES CAN HONOR CONFIDENTIALITY....

Here is how you can see it for yourself.  Type and email as normal. Before hitting send, go to the "Delivery Options" button. In the panel that pops up, click the prevent copying button as highlighted below.

The recipient of the email, will not be able to print, forward, reply-to or cut/paste content from

 the email. See below for a screen shot of the dialog that pops up when you try to forward such an email:

Thus confidentiality on ANY MATTER can be assured.  As a sender of an email, you have assurance that no recipient share the content of the email whatsoever.

Indeed, there is ample precedent in the US legal system, for court cases hinging on Lotus Notes security.  "Your honor, the defendant cannot possibly have a copy of the email in question because, it was sent with Prevent Copying ticked" ...... "OK then, Guilty!"

Microsoft Exchange and Google Gmail do not have this feature. Because of this hundreds of criminals go free every year, and thousands of secrets are leaked to the web.

Goats' Quality level 8 and the idiomcy of Google.

Goats is pretty secure. Everyone knows that right? I challenge anyone to disprove this.  

Proof for me is in the above dialog.  I'm not sure I know of any products out there that use Quality Levels greater than 8, while there are many that use Quality levels 1 to 7.  Eight is better by the way, than 1 through 7, though not as good as 9 or above (if they exist at all).

Google (pretenders to the throne of enterprise email) have a laughable password strength detector. Here are some pictures...

The gall of Google wanting to coin new idioms for password strength ("Too Short", "Fair", "Strong") when industry standard ones (Strength levels 1 thru 8 or higher) prevail, is limitless.  They undoing though is when I type in the first generated Goats offering - XmXXfvt to the Google password field and suggests it is too short:

Do they have no shame?  IT WAS QUALITY LEVEL EIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Random password reentry - why?

A lesser know AI feature of Goats is the random lock of the window, and request for reentry of password.  Many might confuse this with a bug, as it can happen while a person is actually typing something. It is, to be sure, a different paradigm to the established practice of locking the screen when user has not been typing for some time. The Goats way though is best practice. It is obvious really, as a beast utterly impervious to attackers, it is constantly vigilant to stray neutrinos and their ability to see what is being typed.  Only the seemingly random window lock (and password dialog above) is what thwarts these little suckers. 

Good work IBM.

[ people perhaps noted with my earlier note that I am trying a more positive style to the last guy, this one hopefully continues that trend.  Nested Form Events is hopefully just the fist of many ]

Attempt to execute nested form events

You beauty. All technologies should have a dialog like this.

Shock frikin horror, Goats locks you in more way that one...

I'm leaving my current employer. Its been a few years, but I thought going would be easy to implement once the idea had been pondered and notified. Lock-in to Goats is IBM's huge F.U. to enterprises worldwide, but it turns out administrators can tweak some Orwellian switches to actively hamper your exit....

So I have to hand the editing of this blog to another, vowing to never work anywhere that uses Goats again. That blasphemous posting a couple of days ago was not me... the site was hacked by aliens. 

Netscape Navigator?

Goats is old school, not doubt about it. From it's pale blue color scheme to it's over engineered user preferences that don't offer much preference, it's stuck in the early nineties. But why is Netscape Navigator a browser option as of version 7.0.2? Didn't Netscape die ages ago? I know, I know, technically Netscape's browser development only folded up a few months ago. My guess is the Goats engineers at IBM forgot about this lonely preference pane, since there are a hundred other meaningless windows.

Ode to Martin

Our Luminary, which art momentarily in San Francisco
Google ranked #1 be thy Name
Thy Crested Butte come
Thy will be done, in IT dept as it is in your Signature Series
Give us this day our daily IMAP
And forgive us our groupware, as we forgive them that groupware against us
And lead us not into Microsoft
But deliver us from IBM
For thine is the blog, and the patterns, and the books, for ever and ever. Addison-Wesley.

Not my favorite email client

Welcome blog readers.  I'll chat about various things, but Lotus Notes may figure a lot.  Today, I'd like to praise the dialog that pops up a month too early, but every time I start Goats.  Yes, IBM, I will change my password. Perhaps nearer the time though. I have already watched it pop up for the last 20 days, and I have a few more to go until I am forced to choose another password.  So please, a round of applause for the premature change-your-password dialog :

 

Great work IBM.  May you continue to lock in and demoralize your customers for ever.