One Shot Design

One of the facts that made me decide to get an android phone was the availability of KeePass, an open-source encrypted database software that allows to securely keep all critical password and numbers at hand.

Brian Pellin  is the volunteer software developer who singlehandedly compiled and maintains KeePassDroid, the android version of KeePass. Being an industrial designer, and having a long experience in graphic design, I contacted Brian on July 12^th 2009 to offer some assistance. He replied within 24 hours and I got back to him with an android-specific launcher icon for KeePassDroid, and a few suggestions for fine-tuning the user interface.

What do you know? Three days later Brian was already publishing an upgrade to the software, featuring the GLP’ed launcher icon and the interface tweaks. Now where else do you find software that implements user feedback so fast? Two thumbs up for Brian Pellin and Open Source!

Kenneth Van Wyk wrote an article for itmanagement.earthweb.com in which he tried to assess the level of vulnerability of Google android and Apple Inc. iPhone OS.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict Google’s Android mobile phone platform is going to prove itself to be more secure than Apple’s iPhone in the long run.

Go to the article.

PC World posted a very useful article about tips on protecting your privacy on Facebook.

Avoid Facebook Disasters
Ignoring Facebook’s privacy options–some of them fairly new and not well known–can trip up the social-networking site’s users in a number of ways. Here are some that everyone who has a Facebook account should be aware of.

Read the full article here.

Ubuntu already featured by default security enhancements developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, but version 9.04 of the Linux distribution now brings seamless file encryption for added protection of critical data. When activated, the option automatically mounts the encrypted home folder without asking for a password, and the user can browse and work with files at normal speed. Should the encrypted folder need to be recovered, there is a hash passphrase.

This new feature could prove useful should the computer gets stolen: in case critical data was not already encrypted through Keepass or Truecrypt, the thief won’t be able to read anything from the home folder. File encryption is not virtually unbreakable, so for added security one should combine all those different layers of security.

This should be something mandatory for all government laptops, which are particularly at risk.

It is highly arguable that at the time of this famous statement, Andy Warhol could have foreseen that a US government agency created in 1958 to secure technological edge over the Soviets would combine with post-1975 personal computers after to enable common mortals to experience fame from the anonymity of their basement.

Since 1989, the World Wide Web has enabled skilled users to publish content on the Internet, and the ever-decreasing technicality of the process now allows laymen to publish 140 characters-long messages. The Web 1.0 era was characterized at best by free static web hosting, while the Web 2.0 saw the successive rise of free content management software, free blogging, MySpace, Facebook and eventually Twitter. On april 16^th 2009, actor Ashton Kutcher won his bet against CNN, reaching 1,000,000 followers on his Twitter account before the news channel.

Twitter is based on proprietary software, just like the social networking portal Facebook. Both networks boast a multi-million broad user base, but have yet failed ^{1 2} to capitalize on their popularity. Apple’s iconic iPhone received dedicated Facebook and Twitter applications and Facebook features a micro-blogging feature that can be synced with Twitter.

Users somehow consider the free service they get as something democratic, but truth be told, both networks are funded by capital venture; so at some point the investors will want to get their money’s worth.

On several occasions, Facebook did stir strong protest from regarding policy. The network is prone to phishing and is criticised namely for holding onto information even after an account has been closed and for reselling data to third parties. Similar concerns about Twitter brought some developers to create Identi.ca, an open-source Twitter clone that handles all the user information according to the Creative Commons license.