wth
My approach to this is as follows:
- the password manager is probably the most important and often used piece of software I own. We (wife and I share the vault) store everything important/private in there - bank details, hundreds of passwords, passport details, drivers licence etc. It is used many times a day by us both.
- Loss of control of this data would be catastrophic, so I took its security very seriously.
- No one company can be trusted with our data, because they all get hacked or make mistakes at some point.
I’m the security dude for a cloud service provider in my day job, so my goal was to use Separation of Concerns to manage my passwords. I therefore split the software from the storage, choosing software from one company, and storage from a second company. That way, it requires a failure on both parties at the same time for me to lose control of all the data.
I used to use OnePass for the software, storing the data in Dropbox. But then they removed that option, so I switched to Enpass. Data is stored in a vault on the local device and synced to a folder on Dropbox, which we both have access to from all our devices (Mac’s, iPads, iPhones). The vault is encrypted using our master password and Dropbox only sees an encrypted file. Enpass provides software that runs locally and doesn’t get a copy of my vault file.
If Dropbox has another failure and the vault gets out, then that is not a problem as long as Enpass have properly encrypted it. If Enpass has a bug making the vaults crackable - again it’s not a problem as long as Dropbox doesn’t lose control of my vault file. I update Enpass, the vault gets fixed and life goes on.
Enpass is very usable, but buggy. It crashes every night (requiring me to start it again and log in), and often loses connection to Safari and wont re-establish it. It got better with a previous update, but has got unreliable again. I’m about to look for another.
Cheers.
What I hate about this story (other than the obvious inhumanity) is that it has a feeling of “these were bad apples”. No, these were normal apples. Maybe a little more brutal than some other apples, but under the full protection of the apple union and their department.
Until the story came out and the apple department had to expose them. But then it took months.
I’m usually a little suspicious of a new fancy language - because the language is only a part of the equation. Does it have good tooling and does it have awesome libraries?
I had a preconception that Rust is strong as a language (formally well structured, low shoot-yourself-in-the-foot potential, consistent, predictable) and that the tooling seemed strong (debuggers, editors, code completion, help, test frameworks), but I’ve always thought that it would lag with libraries. I mean compared to something like Python (« Batteries included ») or java, surely it is not yet compatible, right?.
So I chose a few of the less main-stream libraries that I use regularly… and Lo and behold! They exist for Rust, including Couchbase, SQLite, ECDH, DiffMatch. I can’t vouch for the completeness of those libs, but the fact that everything I looked for existed… that’s impressive.
Keep in mind that this is for « typical IEEE members », which I am pretty sure is not a great representative sample of programmers in general.
How many of you programmers out there are IEEE members?
If you did get a seriously large lump of cash… after a settling in period a lot of changes will happen, and you will be happy they did (IMHO).
The reason is that one of the biggest gifts that wealth gives you is TIME. A lot of the day to day crap that the rest of us need to deal with just evaporates. No need to shop (there are people for that). Want to travel… people will organise everything. There will be no waiting in lines at airports, at restaurants, at government offices… there are people for that. Someone to clean, someone to pick up the kids (unless you want to of course), someone to cook, holidays on a fuck-off huge yacht with crew to manage everything, or just to zip to Paris for the weekend.
You will probably really appreciate not having to deal with most of that crap. Also, while you probably don’t want a stupid large house, you do want privacy and so will want to get a house on 1000 acres in a gorgeous landscape (plus perhaps apartments in various cities that you like).
Imagine moving from a food insecure lifestyle to a secure lifestyle where food, safety, housing is always there. Would you want to keep your old food-insecure lifestyle? No. Same with going from a food secure lifestyle to a time-and-resource abundant lifestyle.
Well… this is pretty crappy.
I built a Xamarin app (mac/iOS) because I wanted portability to windows. Then I was forced to upgrade to .net 6/7 because of a library I needed, and that meant upgrading to .Net for Mac/.Net for iOS (which is part of MAUI, but not using MAUI UI controls). MAUI is definitely undercooked at the moment.
What an awful and painful process, but I’m finally there… and they drop the main IDE for development. Damn.
VSCode doesn’t have a visual UI designer (well… neither does VSMac, but it does prepare a copy of your project and opens XCode for editing the storyboard/images, and copies changes back). So does this mean they will add that to VSCode? Or will we all have to switch to raw edits of XML to create UIs like you have to do with MAUI? Ick.
Developing GUIs for windows using MS tools is a lesson in frustration, especially when you want to have cross platform capabilities… WPF -> WinForms -> Xamarin -> Xamarin.Forms -> MAUI/.Net for {Mac,iOS}… Not to mention UWP… Each transition is a rewrite. Damn.
Yeah. I didn’t realise initially, and wrote a response to a post on there, with multiple links to research (real research, by real scientists). Response was banning for misinformation. Kinda proud to be banned from that cesspool.
I have a lot of apple kit - I appreciate their over-engineered approach to a lot of hardware, and I like their approach to privacy.
But they do make mistakes in design - the puck, the aerials, butterfly keyboards, unrepairability of design…
And one thing I really hate is their response to those errors. Its almost always to blame the user. I just wish they would be honest.