More Chain Letter

Kudos to Virtualpolitik pal Chris Soghoian for raising awareness about security flaws in Google's Gmail service by sending "An open letter to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt." As the New York Times explains, Soghoian's rhetorical strategy was aimed at Google because they already had developed https encryption, although this level of security was not the default option for Gmail users. By publicizing an easy fix rather than one of the more intractable problems in cloud computing services, the group of "38 researchers and academics" present themselves as corporate-friendly cyber-moderates.