Monday, April 23, 2007

I have trying to develop a way to make the encryption of sensitive documents as seamless and effortless as possible for non-techie people.

There are brilliant applications available for people to use and they are very easy to set-up.

The problem is that secure volumes and folders are set-up as separate areas for the storage of sensitive documents, with the result that either they are not used or some sensitive documents are left out.

The solution is to make the secure volume the default area for these individuals to store all of their data and for most windows users, that means the My Documents folder.

I used Truecrypt to create the secure volume. It was setup using a meaningless file name in a non-descript folder on the C: drive. Normally, I would have used a separate physical disk for this volume but it was a laptop with only a single hard drive.

I then moved the My Documents folders for this user into the secure volume after pruning out some default save folders for iTunes and Google Video.

The trade-off for using the my Documents folder is that a lot of non-secure items will be saved to this location (Christmas lists, letters to family and friends) but it will also be the default folder to hold all of the sensitive items that need to be secured. The user does not need to make a decision whether or not the document being saved is needing encryption.

As long as the TrueCrypt password chosen is of a reasonable length and memorable, this fellow is safe from prying eyes for those items that need to be secured.
This is very scary.

Can we now discount the U.S. as part of the first world? Move them down the chain to those groups who pray to jeeps in the South Pacific?
I have just returned to twitter

I joined a couple months ago and let it sit. I have joined and used things like this before and never found them to be beneficial (buddyping comes to mind). I still believe it is a stalker's dream site.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Been working on the new ScotLUG t-shirts for the Paisley Beer Festival.

It was work acheived through a number of people. Mike Quin took my original idea and refined it into a decent piece of work.

I put the fonts I liked past the folks in IRC and they chose the ones they wanted.

Lucinda Sans and Magik.

The t-shirts will be ready in a week and hopefully Linux Format will run the picture again.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

I have just found Epica leather bound journals, which is serious notebook pr0n. They look fantastic, straight out of a museum or a Myst episode.

The only problem is that I would never write anything in these journals. I have a problem in marking up a ten quid moleskine, with my thoughts. A £1200 leather bound journal would remain pristine.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Picked up a Nokia N95 from Vodafone. Supposedly Vodafone have killed VoIP on this phone - so it is time to flash the firmware on this puppy and get some functionality back.
We used the Tomtom One a great deal while holidaying down in South Ayrshire. It worked very well and guided us to a number of places, including the remote cottage that we stayed in.

We put the postcode supplied to us by the owner of the cottage into the Tomtom and it took us within a 100 yards of the place. I think the postcode designated the area rather than the individual buildings. Without it, I doubt we would have been there as quickly.

Another situation was when I tried to find the Sulwath Brewery in Castle Douglas. We found ourselves on King Street and as Liz pulled over to park, we were right beside the brewery. It would not have been easy to find since the brewery is actually not on the street.