Espionage 2.0.5/2.0.6 Released + Dropbox note

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A maintenance release for 2.0.4:

  • FIXED: Bug in 2.0.4 that could prevent a volume with an espionage’d folder from unmounting (thanks Neil!)
  • FIXED: Bug in auto-backup where backup wouldn’t start if backup folder was in a subfolder of the drive
  • FIXED: Auto-enable-on-mount only enables folders if they are on the device that was mounted
  • IMPROVED: Warning for “can’t find folder” now disappears instead of sticking around waiting to be clicked on
  • IMPROVED: Minor change related to custom folder icons
  • IMPROVED: Updated BWToolkit to 1.1

2.0.6 was shortly released after 2.0.5 due to an oversight on our part related to PPC machines.

Note on Dropbox

While testing Espionage’s compatibility with Dropbox, we noticed that one of the recent updates to Dropbox causes the Finder to change its behavior a bit, causing the password prompt to come up when it shouldn’t. Therefore for now we’re recommending that our users do not use Dropbox as a method of syncing espionage’d folders, but you can still safely use it as a backup destination for Espionage’s built-in backups. Better Dropbox support is planned for the future.

Update (12/14/09): See here: Instructions on how to safely use Espionage with Dropbox.

Espionage 2.0.4 (aka FinderPwn) Released!

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This release brings fixes to some long-standing bugs in Espionage with its Finder integration, as well as two new features!

  • NEW: Full support for custom folder icons! To add a custom icon to an existing espionage’d folder, disable it, and use the Get Info panel
  • NEW: Automatically begins backing up folders if backup drive is mounted
  • FIXED: Bug where locking a folder with the ‘Lock’ CM could cause the Finder to claim it no longer had permission to access the folder
  • FIXED: Many situations where password prompt would appear randomly.
  • FIXED: Bug introduced in 2.0.3 that prevented moving an encrypted folder to a parent directory
  • IMPROVED: Prevents encryption of folders inside of an already encrypted folder (which can cause problems and is unnecessary)
  • IMPROVED: Reveal in Finder menu item now selects the folder even if it’s locked (because now the prompt won’t appear)
  • IMPROVED: Folders backup setting is turned on by default now
  • IMPROVED: Warns users to not use iDisk as a backup destination

Overview of Significant Changes

Finder ‘Pwnage’

This bug has been with Espionage since day one, and we’ve finally nailed the sucker. Now, when you re-lock a folder on some systems, the Finder will not claim it doesn’t have permissions to access it when you double-click on it again. This bug only appeared in certain specific situations, and was fairly easy to get around by doing something as crazy as “nudging” the folder a bit, but we’re glad to have finally fixed it nonetheless, and I’m sure our users are too. 🙂

Additionally, we were able to fix several scenarios where the password prompt could randomly appear. This turned out to be quite the challenge in pattern recognition actually, which is why we’re dubbing this release “FinderPwn” due to the rather hackish nature that this must be done in.

Custom Icon Support

Now you can give your folders pretty custom icons! When you encrypt a folder that has a custom icon, Espionage will automatically copy that icon to the newly encrypted folder. If you’d like to change the icon for a folder that you’ve already encrypted, first disable it, set its icon as you normally would via the Get Info panel, and then re-enable the folder.

Auto-backup 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! 🙂

Tao Effect Forums Open!

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To allow our users to share ideas and help each other out (read: send us less support email), we’ve created the Tao Effect Forums!

Come on in for all the exciting action! Sorry. Maybe it’s not all that exciting, BUT—to start things off there are three Espionage Tips that you might be interested in reading:

Enjoy!

Taking inqueries for iSpy

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EDIT June 12, 2014: We’re Giving away licenses to iSpy!

Espionage owes its existence and unique capabilities to a little known system that we’ve developed in-house called iSpy.

iSpy is a low-level, generic system for detecting and moderating events on the filesystem. It is comprised of three main components: a kernel extension, a system-wide daemon, and an application framework.

Brief History

I originally became interested in the problem of watching the filesystem when I had an idea for an application that would automatically clean your Desktop as files were added to it, moving downloaded files to their proper locations for you, thus resulting in an uncluttered Desktop. It would be possible to generalize such an application to perform various other tasks as well. It wasn’t until I discovered that such an application already existed that I turned my sights to another problem: password protected folders.

As I studied the available systems that I might be able to use to solve this problem (fs_usage, FSEvents, Spotlight, and others), I realized why this problem hadn’t been solved before: none of these systems allowed you to detect or intercept folder access. And “just like that”, iSpy was born.

Not only can iSpy detect when a folder or file is accessed, written to, read from, executed, or deleted, but it actually detects and reports these events before they happen. This gives iSpy the unique capability of allowing events on the filesystem to be moderated by a user-land application.

Using iSpy

Using it is actually very simple. The API consists primarily of only 3 significant functions that register, modify, and unregister events, respectively.

Licensing iSpy

Originally we were planning on keeping iSpy firmly in the hands of Tao Effect, but we’ve recently decided to head in a new direction. That is why we are considering licensing this system to trustworthy third-party developers, so that it may be used to create more unique software instead of being monopolized by Espionage.

This does not mean that we will be abandoning its development, to the contrary an update to it is scheduled for the near future, and it will continue to be supported and maintained by Tao Effect for quite some time. However, as we are working on software that will not make use of the system, it is unlikely for the time being that Tao Effect will create any significant new software using it (other than Espionage, which is in active development, and will continue to be for quite some time).

While we haven’t hammered out exactly how we plan to license it, we’re curious to see if there’s any interest out there. Whatever the final terms, we’ll do our best to make sure that they are fair to both parties, and that the cost of licensing would be less than developing it in-house. If you’re wondering whether iSpy is the right event system for your project, let us know by sending email and any questions to:

To:      contact (at) taoeffect (dot) com
Subject: Interested in iSpy

Espionage 2.0.3 Released!

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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! 🙂

Dark Day for Freedom

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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

Espionage 2.0.2 Released!

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Version 2.0.2 adds more bugfixes:

  • FIXED: situation where the helper could hang if an association went missing
  • FIXED: apps with names longer than 16 characters were not being watched for quit
  • FIXED: finder sometimes bringing up password prompt upon login
  • IMPROVED: will not stop or update helper while associated apps running (prevents their data from being locked)

Don’t worry, we don’t plan on doing an update every other day, but if we catch any critical bugs (like the first one in the list above) we’ll put one out.

Espionage 2.0.1 Released!

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Version 2.0.1 adds a bugfix for one annoying bug related to backups not working immediately, and whitelists fseventsd:

  • FIXED: Backups not backing up recently added folder
  • IMPROVED: fseventsd added to default whitelist

Now when you enable backups for a folder, it will also begin backing up immediately if the destination is present.

It also includes the silent fix mention in the previous blog post, so you can just ignore that one and do a “Check for Updates…” to get the latest fixes.

Notice: Silent Fix for 2.0

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If you downloaded Espionage 2.0 before midnight on the 24th of February, then you may run into a bug if you attempt to encrypt a folder on an external drive. I’m not sure how this one slipped past us, but the bug was silently fixed as soon as it was discovered, and immediately uploaded to the site.

You can check to see if your copy is one of those affected by dragging a folder from an external drive onto Espionage (while Espionage is unlocked). If the sheet doesn’t appear then you’ve got it! Getting the fix is easy though:

  1. Download Espionage.
  2. Move your current copy of Espionage to the trash (you can’t overwrite it because the helper which is inside of it is running).
  3. Copy Espionage out of the downloaded disk image to wherever you wish.

For good measure you might want to restart the helper, you can do that from the preferences.