firehose

A plaintext draft of an encrypted e-mail saved on Gmail servers, despite settings for no drafts to be saved.

If you're sending encrypted e-mail with the default Mail app on OS X Mavericks, your setup may be saving plaintext messages on the mail server. Mac-based users of the GPG encryption app began noticing this unfortunate behavior in October when using Gmail. Even after unchecking the "Store draft messages on the server" and "Store sent messages on the server" checkboxes, the changes would mysteriously vanish.

On Thursday, independent privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani was shocked to make the same discovery after finding that GPG-protected e-mails he received from others were stored unencrypted in the drafts folder of his Gmail account. The messages had been automatically saved immediately after he hit the reply button, just below where he would type his response. Like other Mavericks users, he had specifically configured his system not to save such messages when using the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) in Gmail. Without warning, the unchecked checkmarks inexplicably reappeared.

"This is an example of things falling apart at the seams at the integration points," Soltani told Ars. "A lot of people don't use the Gmail browser. They just use Gmail for IMAP. I just happened to have Gmail in the browser opened. Most people wouldn't know about it. I was really shocked."

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For Valve's Gabe Newell, a person's degree or list of credentials isn't always the best predictor of how successful an employee they will be, according to his recent interview with The Washington Post.

In response to a question about the company's penchant for hiring mod makers, Newell said he believes "traditional credentialing" has little "predictive value" to how successful someone will be or what they can do with their skillset.

"You can give ten people the same set of forum posts and only one of them will actually take it in a productive direction," Newell said. "So the fact that somebody has been able to build something and ship it and not get sort of bogged down and give up and then deal with the gush of responses you get, filter through that in a useful and productive way and iterate is really the core of product design and development in our world."

Newell suggested that proven ability should be taken more at face value rather than scrutinizing a diploma or list of grades, giving the example of an Ivy League Ph.D. not being a guaranteed mark of success within Valve's space.

"Most people who end up being successful have good grades, but it's orthogonal — there's no extra information than if they put together a website and have bunch of fans who love coming and seeing what they're doing," Newell said.

Valve's boss added that the company's decision to foray into multiplayer games was largely the result of employee decisions on how to spend their time. This also led to the company's decentralized command structure and decision-making processes — while one group of people wanted to continue working in single-player titles like Half-Life, another group chose to try and make the jump to multiplayer games and build Steam.

"There were a bunch of people internally who thought Steam was a really bad idea, but what they didn't think was that they would tell the people who were working on Steam what to do with their time," Newell said. "So the key thing was that people bear the consequences of their own choices, so if I spend my time on it the only persons time I'm wasting is mine. Over time, I think people sort of recognize how useful it is for people to vote with their time. There is a huge amount of wisdom in people's decisions about what they personally want to work on next."

An Arabic-language ad for Vodafone Egypt features a babbling puppet named Abla Fahita, a widow trying to reactivate the phone line used by her late husband.

Egypt’s crackdown on support for the Muslim Brotherhood turned surreal this week as prosecutors agreed to investigate the allegation that a puppet that babbles nonsensically in an advertisement for a multinational phone company was in fact sending coded instructions to Islamist terrorists.

Prosecutors said in a statement that officials from Vodafone Egypt, the local branch of a phone company based in Britain, were summoned to respond to a complaint about the ad filed by a counterrevolutionary video-blogger and singer who calls himself Ahmed Spider. In an appearance on Egyptian television on Tuesday, the little-known blogger spent nearly an hour dissecting what he called the secret codes embedded in the ad, in which a puppet widow named Abla Fahita tries to reactivate the phone line used by her late husband.

In an appearance on Egyptian television, a little-known blogger explained his conspiracy theory that the puppets in a Vodafone ad were sending coded signals to terrorists.

The ad shows the Muppet-like Abla Fahita babbling to a friend on the phone while her daughter, Karkoura, looks for her dead father’s SIM card. The company explained in a statement that the ad, first broadcast and posted on YouTube last week, was part of a marketing campaign “aiming at explaining how to reactivate a Vodafone SIM card.” The blogger’s reading, the company said, was “irrational” and based on “mere imagination.”

According to Ahmed Spider, however, the opening image of the ad, a four-pronged cactus decorated for Christmas, was intended to inspire attacks on Coptic Christians when they celebrate the holiday next week. A red ornament on the cactus, he claimed, represented a bomb, and the number of branches was a reference to the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in Cairo, where hundreds of Islamists were killed in August when the security forces attacked a sit-in — Rabaa means “fourth” in Arabic.

As the Cairene news site Mada Masr explained, a Vodafone spokesman, Khaled Hegazy, phoned in during the live broadcast to reject the allegations theory out of hand. “I don’t know what to say,” Mr. Hegazy added. “I’m sad that we have reached this level of thinking.”

The figure behind the allegations first rose to prominence in 2011, when he accused prominent supporters of the revolution of being Freemasons and filed legal complaints against the activist bloggers Alaa Abd El Fattah and Bahaa Saber, who were subsequently arrested by the military government that ruled Egypt after Hosni Mubarak was forced from power. The British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr noted in a post on her blog about the puppet imbroglio that his attacks on the revolutionaries were amplified by the television polemicist Tawfik Okasha, who has been called “Egypt’s Glenn Beck.”

The accusation that the puppet was being used as a Brotherhood mouthpiece also spread widely on Egyptian social networks. As the Cairene blogger who writes as Zeinobia reports, a Facebook page set up by supporters of the security forces with more than 600,000 followers called for the puppet masters to be arrested for “using unknown symbols and codes.”

The government’s move against what The Economist termed “the Muppet Brotherhood” was widely mocked by English-speaking bloggers, journalists and rights advocates in Cairo. Writing on Twitter, several suggested that the interim president installed by the military was himself little more than a puppet, while others shared Photoshopped images of the puppet in the hands of state security and made references to the Mubarak-era conspiracy theory that shark attacks at an Egyptian resort were part of a plot by Israeli intelligence.

One cartoon posted on the puppet’s @AblaFahita Twitter feed showed an interrogator confronting her with a photograph of Kermit the Frog while saying, “Spider said in his report that you’ve received generous funding from an American mason, isn’t that right?”

None of the Internet gags, however, quite prepared Egyptians for the surreal exchange broadcast late Wednesday, when the satellite channel CBC gave the puppet an opportunity to respond directly to her accuser live on the air.

Appearing via Skype, in character, Abla Fahita confronted Ahmed Spider with the apparently unassailable argument, “I am a fictional character.” According to Zeinobia, who suggested that this dialogue just might herald “the end of human civilization,” the blogger replied with a promise to have the puppet jailed.

The Egyptian satellite channel CBC gave the puppet Abla Fahita a chance to directly confront the blogger who has accused her of sending coded messages to terrorists.

Reflecting on this outburst of paranoia in Egypt, Ms. Carr, the Cairene journalist, observed sadly that “this grand civilization of 7,000 years is once again being held hostage by buffoons.”

“Thus,” she added, “we have the Public Prosecutor accepting a complaint about a finger puppet while nobody has been charged for the deaths of nearly 1,000 people at Rabaa, because the current mood is almost fascistic in its reverence for the state and for state hegemony and for state opponents to be eliminated.”

A version of this article appears in print on 01/03/2014, on page A6 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Egypt to Investigate Whether TV Ad Puppet Is Sending Coded Instructions to Islamists.