Steven Levy = Awesome Writer

Hackers

Many years ago I read Hackers for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed it. Levy takes exhaustive research and interviews and weaves them in to a great tale. I like reading about the people behind technology and how they came to do what they do (or did what they did), and this book [...]

Me and You and a GPG Key Named Boo

"Travellin' and livin' off the web..."
I have a GPG key, freshly created a couple of days ago. GPG is the GNU Privacy Guard, also known as GnuPG, used for encryption and digital signatures.
Many people include helpful comments about GPG encryption on a page with their public key and fingerprint. Instead of making similar remarks (which [...]

Password Safe / Password Gorilla

Updated 20 April 2007: Password Gorilla's author, Frank Pilhofer, contacted me to clarify how permissions work and to investigate the problem I was seeing. Talk about great customer service! See update notes below...

I've been using Password Safe in Windows for many years to manage my passwords. It seemed credible to me because [...]

HOWTO: EncFS Encrypted Filesystem in Ubuntu and Fedora GNU/Linux

(Go straight to the HOWTOs. Do not pass GO.)
2 June 2007: Updated with comments for 7.04 / Feisty Fawn.

I mentioned recently that I planned to keep using TrueCrypt in GNU/Linux since I had used it profitably in Windows, and that I also intended to keep using the container approach where you create a single file [...]

HOWTO: TrueCrypt in Ubuntu and Fedora GNU/Linux

Update, 1 June 2007: Version 4.3a, released May 2007, removes support for SUID.
I've been using TrueCrypt to encrypt financial and personal documents in Windows for a while now and it has worked just fine for the way I want to use it. I'm doing file-based encryption where you mount a single file as a [...]