The Pebble and the Avalanche

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Current Revolutions in Business and Technology

by Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky,

author of The Pebble and The Avalanche: How Taking Things Apart Creates Revolutions

 

Mon, 2009-Feb-09, 09:29

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Smaller Files Mean Easier Security

One of the fun parts of writing a book is when someone "gets it" and learns to apply the ideas.

I've just received an interesting missive from Tracy Snell, who has just left his post as CTO of Interactions:

I've used MobileMe for years and one thing I loved was the OSX keychain syncing. It's worked pretty well, but to have my keychains synced across all the Macs I use I was welded to MobileMe.  Kept hearing good things about 1passwd. So I installed it recently and it is nice.
Former versions were just a nice front end on the OSX keychain, but now it uses its own keychain format. Suddenly I lost sync across machines! So I go digging and find out that their new format is not one monolithic file storing all the keys but instead each key gets its own file. [This] makes syncing and merging a trivial issue. Just store your 1passwd keychain on DropBox or iDisk and you're done. You don't risk a corrupted keychain if you have a failure in the middle of a sync. Dawned on my last night it was a great example of disaggregation.
In other words, the location of the password keychain is no longer tied to the Mac, and the keychain entries are more robust and easier to synchronize.

And I guess I congratulate the makers of 1passwd as well, at least in theory, but don't forget to read some reviews before you try this product.

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