Announcing the first public release of Underscore Backup

The first Underscore Backup pre-release is available for immediate download from Github.

• Public key based encryption allows continuously running backups that can only be read with a key not available on the server running the backup.
• Pre-egress encryption means no proprietary data leaves your system in a format where it can be compromised as long as your private key is not compromised.
• Runs entirely without a service component.
• Designed from the ground up to manage very large backup sets with multiple TB of data and millions of file in a single repository.
• Multi-platform support based on Java 8.
• Low resource requirements, runs efficiently with only 128MB of heap memory.
• Efficient storage of both large and small file with built in de-duplication of data.
• Handles backing up large files with small changes in them efficiently.
• Optional error correction to support unreliable storage destinations.
• Encryption, error correction and destination IO are plugin based and easily extendable.
• Currently supports local file and S3 for backup destinations.

Best of all it is available as open source for free under a GPLv3 license.

For now this software is still under heavy development and should not be relied upon to protect production data.

Released Your Shared Secret Service

I recently published Your Shared Secret service which allows you to safely and securely ensure that private information that you have is not lost if you are in any way incapacitated.

The basic premise is that information is submitted through your browser where it is encrypted before it is ever sent to the service. The key to decrypt the information never leaves your browser. The key is then then chopped up into multiple pieces which are securely handed out to a number of people that you chose to act on your behalf and only by a group of them collaborating (You chose how many) can they together assemble the key required to access your information. For a quick introduction you can check out this video.

I really went all out on the privacy aspect of this website and service and have gone out of my way to not collect any information not needed for the operation of the service. The site have no third party links except for when collecting payments and it does not collect any visitor analytics such as for instance Google Analytics.

You have complete control over who of your caretakers is able to initiate accessing the information and also how many of the total group of caretakers need to participate to access the information. Even better the service does not even need know how to contact the caretakers. This information is only known by the unlocking caretaker and the owner of the information.

Furthermore the act of one of your caretakers trying to assemble the key will give you as the creator a notification that allows you to cancel the unlocking information or delete the information all together within a 7 days quarantine period. For more information on how the service works see the Usage section on the website.

The entire service operates on a zero trust model where all the functionality is ensured with cryptographically strong primitives with the single exception being the 7 day quarantine period. There is plenty of detailed information on how the encryption works in detail and how the service has been built. To ensure what is claimed on the site is actually what is happening the source code to the entire service is published on GitHub and you can even run the entire website locally by just cloning the website repository and just run.

npm start

The service is available for an introductory price of $1 or if you want to have completely anonymity you can also pay with either Etherium or Bitcoin although that is slightly more costly because of the value fluctuations of these currencies.

The service is available now so feel free to get started now keeping your information safe without you.

Dealing with credit report errors

I just realized that my credit report has several errors on it. None of them should reflect my credit, but I just thought I would take some time to fix it. The problems I have is that for some reason there is an extra address that they all think that I live on and also I am apparently according to some of them owning a US company (That also doesn't exist), which is problematic since I am not allowed to operate a company in the US based on my visa.

Trying to deal with this is kafkaesque. First of all Experian just flat out refuse to give me my free annual credit report so there is nothing I can do there for now. They give me a weird error message that refers me to a phone number that when called refers me back to the web page. There is also no place on their web page to either call or email someone about issues. I wish I cared enough to sue, because I am pretty sure what they are doing is illegal... But who has the time.

The other ones actually does work and I have successfully at least lodged a request to remove the address I've never lived at. However the company that they think that I own is nowhere on my credit report for me to even dispute and I have no idea how to get that off there so I guess I am screwed there too.

Will be interesting to see if they will actually modify my report... So far I am not super optimistic.

Perhaps it is time to look over what you "Like" on Facebook

Time to go through all your "Likes" on Facebook and and unlike the things you are no longer comfortable with. Seems that Facebook has made a change to how it is using your "Likes". With this change Facebook will not only place posts from sources that you "like" in your own news feed, but it will now also add these posts in your friends news feed as well. And it is indicated that they are coming from you.

Are you OK with the posts from the right or left wing nut case you liked a few years ago show up in your boss or coworkers feeds? There is unfortunately currently nothing you can do about this feature except to go through all your likes and remove the ones you are not comfortable with.

For more information please see this post on Gizmodo.

California bans employer from prying into your Facebook

Even though the federal bill is still a long way off from becoming law if you are lucky enough to be living in California you are already set to keep your Facebook account private as the California State Assembly just passed a bill to ban employers from mandating that employees hand over their passwords to their favorite social network.

Source The Verve

How much are you worth to Facebook?

This is a really cool site where you answer a couple of questions and they will estimate roughly how much you are worth to Facebook in their upcoming IPO at the end of this week.

I'm apparently worth roughly $67 dollars to them.

Awesome Chrome plugin to visualize who is snooping on you

Collusion is a really cool plugin available for Chrome that visualizes all the sites that are linked in when you access a site so that you can easily see who is tracking as you wander around the internet. In the latest update it also gives you the option to block known tracking sites.

You can get it in the Chrome Web Store or if you want to read more about it you can also read about it on Gizmodo.