Tao Effect

A bit more than a maintenance release:

• NEW: “Public mountpoint” option allows other users to access unlocked folders (nice for multi-user systems)
• NEW: Added application templates for Thunderbird and Postbox email clients
• NEW: Auto-enables folders on external drives when they are mounted in
• FIXED: Situation that could cause Mail to claim it didn’t have permission to access its folder
• FIXED: Items added to the ignore list from the prompt wouldn’t appear in “real-time” the UI list
• FIXED: UI glitch associated with the Minimum Image Capacity text field
• FIXED: Bug where launch-at-login checkbox could be checked when it wasn’t supposed to
• FIXED: Very rare launch-at-login bug
• IMPROVED: Checks to make sure Espionage has write permission to parent directory
• IMPROVED: Added check to discourage encrypting application bundles
• IMPROVED: Checks to prevent users from running Espionage from its disk image
• IMPROVED: This version listens to a different sparkle feed (so that users don’t see the warning for 1.x)
• IMPROVED: Mountpoints are predictable and stay the same, they no longer use incrementing numbers
• IMPROVED: Open panels now point to whatever they last pointed to instead of the home folder always

Overview of Significant Changes

Predictable mountpoints

Mountpoints now have an intelligent structure to them, instead of using an incrementing number, they’re now done like this:

/Volumes/EspionageMounts/<username>/<number>/<foldername>

This solves problems that can arise if you’re using an application like Coda that relies on knowing the absolute path to your encrypted project folder. Now you don’t have to worry about updating the path each time the folder is unlocked.

“Public mountpoint” option

If you have a mac that’s shared by several users, it might be convenient to allow another user account to access one of your unlocked folders so that you can share an encrypted folder while using Fast-User switching. Normally you’d want to leave this option disabled.

Auto-enabling folders on mount

This new feature is aimed at users who use Espionage to encrypt folders on external drives. Now if you plug in a drive that has an Espionage’d folder in it, it will automatically be enabled so that you can immediately begin using it without having to re-enable it from the application.

Enjoy!

Yesterday the President made the extraordinary step of asking citizens to submit questions to him. He promised to answer the most popular ones, and he did.

This isn’t the first time this administration has invited questions. They’ve done this before, and each time one of the most pressing questions has been the issue of legalization.

About the only respectable thing I can say today about this man is that he finally gave the public a direct answer:

I have to say that there was one question that ranked fairly high, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy [pause], and uh… [laughs], ah.. I don’t know what this says about the online audience [crowd laughs], but.. haha… but I just want uh.. I don’t want people to think uh.. this was a fairly popular question we wanted to make sure that it was answered, the answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy. [crowd claps]

Perhaps I’m naive, but I was shocked when I saw this.

Whether or not you agree with it, how can you laugh at an issue like that?

You were not put there by the people to laugh at their serious concerns. This particular issue has been the source of decades of fighting, murders, imprisonments, and millions of lives ruined. And this… politician, behaves exactly as so many cynics have said he would. This is not the change that we were told about, this is idiocy-as-usual.

I thought hard about posting this, as this post has nothing to do with Tao Effect or Espionage, or anything tech-related. But then I realized that in my position this is the most I could do, that this is what “being patriotic” is about, and on an issue like this I would be embarrassed and ashamed of myself if I didn’t speak out.

You’re laughing at peoples lives and their freedom Mister President. Wipe that smirk off your face.

Further Reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Criticism
The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States
Bullshit: The War on Drugs part 1 of 3