SafeSign and Apple OSX Snow Leopard

Last week I got an e-mail from one of the product managers @ AET Europe regarding the availability of SafeSign / Tokenlounge for OSX Snow Leopard.

The content of the e-mail wasn't very encouraging.... It seems that the Snow Leopard of SafeSign / Tokenlounge release is delayed by a bug in the Apple Keychain;

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We use systemkeychain -T to create a login keychain (for a new FV user) associated with our token. When trying to unlock this newly created keychain during login with the smartcard, we get prompted with the "unable to unlock login keychain" panel - as you have observed -.
This is basically our main concern, as this was perfectly running under 10.5. Any idea why the system wants to update the login keychain password, prompting the user with that panel???

What we have discovered beside, is that when you click Create New Keychain on that panel, the keychain gets encrypted with the PIN of the smartcard instead of the RSA key, which is a major security issue (Same behavior if you click Update Keychain Password)...
You can easily verify this last issue by removing your smartcard, launching Keychain Access and entering your PIN code to unlock the keychain...

Once again, we didn't have this kind of problems with Leopard.

As long as this issue isn't resolved, there will be no version for Snow Leopard. The (security) risk is just too big.
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So, we need to be patient, and wait till Apple solves this. In the mean time, when you need the SafeSign software for your every day work, you shouldn't upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Check the follow-up on the original SafeSign post for the availability on the Leopard version of SafeSign / Tokenlounge.

DIY Porn on the iPhone

Updated on Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 23:25 by Willem

Most of the regular iPhone / iPod Touch users already know that there's no sign of porn or erotica to be found in the Apple App Store. Reason for this is (according to Steve Jobs);

You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.

So no porn for the iPhone (at least not the jailbraked versions), or is it? It seems that Apple facilitates the biggest 'app' for getting your porn 'fix'. The app is called 'Safari'. The good old browser. The application that made the Internet for what it is today. As an alternative you can use iTunes to provide you your 'fix'.

Note that eventhough I'm talking porn/erotica here, you can project this to any piece of content.

Before continuing, I must warn you. The complete article might have some explicit pictures, so continue at your own risk. I can't and won't be held responsible for the consequences.

Click to read more ...

Free Lonely Planet City Guides for iPhone

Not being able to fly has its advantages. In response to the widespread chaos caused by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano (pronounced as 'whatever'), Lonely Planet is offering 13 of its European iPhone guides for free (as in 'free beer').

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Creating Panoramas for the Web

I intend to create several panoramas during my next holiday, so I'm investigating the possibilities for presenting them on my website. Several pieces of software are under investigation, and so far Zoomify is the only one which is relatively simple to operate.

AutopanoGiga is probably the buggiest software I've used (it crashed almost every other panorama), but creates the best panoramas in my opinion. Better than PTGui, but that one is 100% stable. Somehow you can't have everything :-)

The other pieces of software for creating interactive flash/QuickTime movies from panoramas are:

• AutoPanoPro / Giga with the AutopanoTour as the flash export module
• Pano2VR

Results (read: experiments) can be found on my Panoramas page in the Photography section of this website.

Note that the Zoomify versions are stored on a sub-domain outside of the SquareSpace domain. Since the sub-domain hasn't the best of up-time, you might be looking at a relatively blank page. The reason for this is a silly limit on uploading ZIP files to the SquareSpace backend. These ZIP files may contain up to 100 files. The entire Zoomify environment contains over 6500 files, and I don't feel like uploading these by hand....

If all goes well, the Pano2VR panoramas will be stored on the SquareSpace backend, and therefore be better accessible.

Installing & Configuring CentOS 5.4 (Day 2)

Oké. Day 2. After the successful installation and configuration of CentOS with Adobe Coldfusion, I needed to install MySQL as a database. So, I started the virtual machine, and found out why Linux will (probably) never cut it as a common desktop environment.

X11 - No DesktopYesterday I (properly) shutdown the system (which had the GNOME Desktop), and today it started with some back to the 60's desktop. Every icon gone. All that I'm left with was a terminal window, clock, and a FireFox window. This environment is the basic X11 desktop.

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Adobe Coldfusion 9 on CentOS 5.4 (x64)

Updated on Monday, April 5, 2010 at 18:53 by Willem

A while back I figured out how to install Adobe (could have been Macromedia back then) Coldfusion MX on an Ubuntu linux server. This config still runs as it should, but in the mean time several things have changed in the world of software. I've been leaning towards Centos 5.4, and Adobe released Coldfusion 9 somewhere in 2009. These two 'events' made me decide to combine the two.

Before I continue, I must warn you that the Coldfusion installer is still broken..... So there's some manipulation of code involved.

Since the new 'server' is going to run in a virtual environment I started in a VMWare Workstation. This way I could make snapshots of my progress. This made it easier to start from scratch. The problem with Linux and me is that I tend to reinstall the OS when things go haywire. So VMWare is a safe way out in this case.

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