Friday, December 31, 2010

PasswordStore 0.2.5 Stable

PasswordStore 0.2.5 Stable is out. 

Take a look at it at:
PasswordStore have gotten a make over soon in this version and probably in the future version 0.3.

From Eclipse to IntelliJ

Read:
I am not an Eclipse or IntelliJ user so I have no idea which is better but I have used Eclispe once a couple years back and it's UI simply sucks and doesn't catch my attention. I have forgotten the version but it seems to me Swing (Metal and recently Nimbus) actually looks quite good anyways.

I am a NetBeans user and have ever since been stuck to it like a glue. It's usually nice but once in a while irritating though. I wouldn't change from NetBeans anytime soon unless some unreasonable policy or license appears from Oracle (I'm monitoring hard on the situation).

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

France's absurd levying of tablets

Read:
How about putting levy's for every damn thing in the world ? Papers store data too. Pen writes and create data... toilet paper can be scribbled on... you can copy texts and pictures onto furnitures and underwear and clothings too.
Governments with their absurd mindsets are simply pissing off the people !!!

Monday, December 27, 2010

When patents becomes absolutely absurd

Read:
Imagine you could patent the usage of double click on buttons and options and interactive objects... which means all of us devs would be in dead trouble because we have all implemented some form of interactive objects in our lifetime.
Patents are becoming so much absurd these days that patenting, isn't increasing innovation and creativity... but the other way round.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Plugbot

Cool penetration testing device... the Plugbot.

Read:
Looks like a plug for a wall socket but it is in fact a penetration tester + scanner for networks and could be remotely controlled and could remotely and securely dump data collected to a cloud.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Defeating the Net Tyrant

There has been a lot of tension on the internet where governments try to monitor and dictate how the internet should work and look like to their own accord while disabling, reducing or removing civil liberties of the people. 

Listening to network traffics, throttling traffics, banning or blocking of sites, hiding backdoor in systems, coercion and by suspicious 'legitimate' methods of degrading Freedom and security.

A couple of ways to disempower such net tyrants would be presented in this article.

The first and most obvious way is to host your servers in countries that supports civil liberties (by law and by moral) and have a very good track record at doing so. It is includes the refusal of hosting of servers in the lands of net tyrants, thus ensuring that you would reduce a great factor of disturbance by these net tyrants and damaging their economy for data center hosting because no one wants to approach these net tyrants to host their data.

Another way is to use peer / friend based tools and repurpose them as some sort of peer/friend based variation of the internet. This technology have been in the public for some time and the most notable project is the Freenet project.

The repurposing of bit torrents into distribution peer / friend node servers are possible with the distribution of compressed folders containing web resources is another method.

The equipping modern web browsers with good plugins that can natively tap into these peer / friend network technology and seamless publish or read these resources.

The third calls for a political reform whereby the government isn't all powerful and bills and acts that restrict Freedom are abolished and a thorough reinvestigation and reinventing of the political system. The government cannot have some secret army and the actions of the government depends on the Will of the People and all accounts and acts are brought accountable in plain sight for the People to decide on. The current state of democracy are simply hypocrisy.

There are many more methods that could be used to defeat net tyrants but these three are the major ideas and techniques commonly brought up for discussion.

Remember. We do not owe anything to anyone. We have our Free Will and Rights to Live as We Want. Do not bow to Hypocrisy and Tyrants.

Friday, December 17, 2010

LastPass

Here's my personal take on LastPass Password Manager. I am not a user of LastPass myself but from the website, theoretical knowledge and video, I make my deductions.

LastPass Sesame Youtube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q-4Flnt9Hw

If you have watched the above LastPass Sesame Video, you may just end up confused by the complicated steps to simply setup LastPass sesame on your portable executable device (thumbdrives, flash storages...). You had to also use a web browser to access an email sent by LastPass to verify your setup devices and all sorts. It really is so complicated, my thought of trying LastPass sesame got put down by that video.

LastPass technology page: https://lastpass.com/whylastpass_technology.php

According to LastPass's technology page (link above), LastPass have a data centers keeping a store of your passwords and you have a local copy too. The idea of having your passwords in LastPass's hands is simply absurd. Would you trust your passwords in someone else's hands ? Anyone can claim and vow that they have encrypted your passwords and whatever in a way only you can decrypt and they can't. Anyone can vow that they don't know your master password and only you know it. I think even if it's really true, it technologically possible for LastPass to betray that trusts if they want secretly and thus putting users at a huge risks.

I am a huge advocate against leaving sensitive personal information, especially passwords, in someone's hands or servers.

For those who need solid portable password managers, you are best off having a cross-platform (better if it's Java-based) where you can simply have one running on your main desktop or work computer and the other one on your different portable devices. The password manager requires a synchronization capability where you can sync up your portable device password manager and main computer password manager. It is very inconvenient in terms where you have to keep synchronizing the password managers but at least you don't have to rely on someone's servers. You can have your password managers have different master passwords (making it hard to inflitrate all your password managers) or simply just have a single master password to all of your password managers.

PasswordStore, a password manager I built with the intend of it being portable (it's still lacking the portable and sync portion) is an interesting and useful example to review.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Not credible hosting

After the events where companies like EveryDNS, Amazon and other companies got subjugated and coerced into removing Wikileaks from US and other countries servers including France. Can these nations and servers who are easily coerced, be trustworthy hosting for any website or company or organisational infrastructure ?

Can you guarantee a safeguard that your materials would be removed the next day ? Aren't the USA servers being prided as a platform for free speech ? Look at the mess of USA. How can we trust USA, France, Sweden ... these countries as hosting nations for our contents whom they pride themselves for freedom but in the end, they gave in to pressure ?

How can we trust EveryDNS, Paypal, Amazon, Wikipedia (Removing Wikileaks Mirror article), Twitter (block Wikileaks topics from trending), Mastercard and Visa ... ?

How can we trust the infamous Swiss banks from being neutral to our money (Read: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/7bg5kc) ?

The UN is very concerned with these extreme ways of prosecution and attacking of Wikileaks and Julian Assange (Read: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE6B81RO20101209).
So who do you trust your hosting to and your technology ? Now cloud computing seems rather more unreliable as someone (if you hosted in the wrong hosting companies or countries) could shut you down.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Archos + Android is a disaster

I have just got myself Archos 7 inch variant of it's internet tablet and now I utterly regret for getting it. It's because of many factors I would explain below ... that's why hype are hype... hype are false truth !

Bad factors:
  • No official Android marketplace - Archos fault (using it's appslib market instead)
  • Because there's no Android marketplace - therefore no access to 'market://' protocol and you couldn't get standard marketplace stuff like...
    • ADOBE FLASH PLAYER 10.1
      • And therefore:
        • NO FLASH !!! - no killer apps
        • BLAME - ARCHOS
  • Android/Google does not provide a standalone marketplace installation to remedy the problem and has been an outstanding major problem in Android.
Some may claim that my views are petty but it's a big thing. People want the millions of apps on Android marketplace, not Appslib.

If Apple wants to quote or anyone wants to quote from this article... they MUST present the entire article (and in that way they are allowed to present) or else if anyone wants to quote any part without the whole of this article... is considered a VIOLATION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS and COPYRIGHTS. Please credit 'Thothtech / Thotheolh' for this article too or it would be considered a VIOLATION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS and COPYRIGHTS.