A beautiful confidentiality notice

I just received an ad, and this was the included Confidentiality Notice. While it contains the usual violations of common sense and legal theory, I really love the last line. Go ahead and read it.

Confidentiality Notice: The information contained in this e-mail transmission is intended only for use of the individual or entity named above. This e-mail transmission, and any documents, files, previous e-mail transmissions or other information attached to it, may contain confidential information that is legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail transmission, or the employee or agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, dissemination, distribution, copying or other use of this transmission or any of the information contained in or attached to it is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail transmission in error, or you do not wish to receive any further communications from us, please immediately notify us by return e-mail transmission or by telephone at the number above or at the address above, and destroy the original e-mail transmission and its attachments without reading or saving it in any manner.

So, if I do not wish to receive any further communications from them, then I can reply to the email and request to be left alone, or I can call their phone number (which was not included in the email, contrary to the notice), and all is good. But wait! I also have to destroy the email, without reading it. Huh? How the hell am I expected to get this far in the email and follow the instructions, without reading it?

I just love this stuff sometimes.

Pound, SSL, and real Certificates

I have written an update for this at Pound, SSL, and real Certificates, redux.

Recently, I have been working with setting up some web servers, using Pound as the front-end. The idea is that there are multiple back-end servers, and the single front-end that controls which server requests go to. One of the problems is using SSL for HTTPS pages. All of the documentation I can find online covered creating a self-signed certificate.

But if anyone has followed the self signed certificate problem knows that this is not a great idea, especially if the site is to be used by anyone.

Poking around, I finally found my answer, partly through an older post on the Pound mailing list.