I’m trying out Pastor, an OS X application for keeping track of passwords (and other things, but I’m not, yet) for various accounts I have online. So far, so good.
Yesterday I ran into a bug(let) and was pleasantly surprised by the turn-around time of my emailed bug-report. Here’s the time-line:
| 8:58 AM | My email sent. |
| 9:04 AM | Initial reply from programmer. |
| 9:06 AM | Confirmation of bug behaviour. |
| 11:39 AM | New version available for testing. |
Keeping in mind that the programmer of this piece of software is located in Germany, making it 7 hour later where he lives, that was very nice response time. Thumbs up!
Man. I wish those things were cross-compatible. I luckily wrote a stupid CLI app that creates a loop device at 1 meg in which I put in plaintext my sensitive stuff (serpent-encrypted). If I hadn’t, I’d be sorta screwed at this point since GPass, which is where I store my passes usually, doesn’t exactly fly in Mac OS X, or Win32. I wish they’d make an OpenPasswordWalletFormat over at Oasis.
And how cross-compatible is that? The closest thing I can think of is Password Safe which was originally created by Bruce Schneier (or rather Counterpane, his company, I don’t know how much difference there was in practice). There is an OS X program that uses the same format called Password Gorilla but I was not impressed with the Tcl/tk interface it uses.
How cross-compatible is my CLI hack? Well, anything with an SSH client can access it, which is rather cross-compatible I’d say. But not very user friendly. I suppose I could work on it some more though. Perhaps people’d love a CLI server-side way of storing passes (on their own servers that is), though not all people have servers, exactly. I think I’ll stick with my current CLI solution though for now. But a standardized format for pass wallets would be great, I think. Since it’d naturally be intensely encrypted I could literally store my wallet online or email it to myself wherever I was and simply use it no matter which OS I was in. The concept of online password managers is retarded, though I hear there are such out there. Nothing I will ever use, I think, but you never know.
Btw, funny that your thing claims CLI is “Common Language Interpreter”. It’s also Command Line Interface, and that’s an official acronym IIRC.