Protect Your Data (Encrypt Your Files)
Encrypt-Stick is the most advanced portable security application available on the market today. Encrypt-Stick software converts your USB flash drive into a personal vault and the key to access and secure your private files. Encrypt-Stick requires a serial numbered USB flash drive to run. It gives you the ability to create unlimited invisible encrypted vaults on an unlimited number of computers, removable hard drives or networked drives. If a vault is burned to a DVD/CD you can securely access it using the original USB used to create the vault. Encrypt-Stick provides you with the highest level of protection from identity theft, hackers, phishers and will never leave a footprint on the host computer.
With a USB drive in your pocket you can carry around personal notes, in-process documents from work, or even top secret military communications. But a hole in that pocket could quickly become a major security leak. Encrypt Stick 5.0 ($39.99 direct) equips any USB drive with a secure encrypted vault for safe data transport. It can also serve as the key for any number of local vaults on home or work PCs, and it has a secure browser and password manager built in.
Note - Once you’ve activated your software on a particular USB drive you can’t move it to another drive. Before you install Encrypt Stick, you’ll want to select a high- quality USB drive with as much storage capacity as you anticipate you’ll ever need. Conveniently, you can install the Mac and Windows versions of the software on the same USB drive and access your protected files from either platform. Once you’ve downloaded Encrpt Stick (or using an installation CD/DVD) your ready to create an encrypted vault.
Creating An Encrypted Vault
The setup wizard walks you through the steps necessary to install and activate Encrypt Stick on your USB drive. During this process you’ll create a strong master password, something that you’ll remember but that nobody would guess. The password-entry box has a built-in password strength meter to help you make a good choice.
Your home system probably doesn’t have a malicious keylogger running, but if you’re worried you can enter that strong password using Encrypt Stick’s virtual keyboard. For added security against monitoring software the virtual keyboard scrambles the location of the characters.
Encrypt Stick uses your password, along with device-specific information, to generate a unique 512-bit (polymorphic) encryption key. That means your files are protected by two-factor authentication: something you have (the USB key), and something you know (the password). Gaining access to protected data requires both.
The wizard includes a recommended optional step that makes a local backup of the decryption key. That way if you lose the USB drive containing Encrypt Stick, you can still recover encrypted files stored on your computer. Files on the lost drive itself are gone, of course, but at least nobody else will be able to read them.
Vaults for File Protection
On initialization, Encrypt Stick creates an encrypted folder right on the USB drive. When you’ve entered the master password, you can freely move files into and out of this folder or launch and edit the files. Outside of the Encrypt Stick interface nothing is visible except encrypted filenames and encrypted data.
You can also create any number of vaults on any PC or Mac to protect local files on that system. Encrypt Stick acts as a key to open these locked vaults. The product’s main window displays available vaults in its upper portion and offers a view of the unencrypted main file system in its lower portion.
To encrypt one or more files you simply drag them onto a vault. When you copy files into a vault, Encrypt Stick offers to securely erase the originals. The help videos call this “military wipe,” implying a connection with the DoD standard for overwriting files before deletion. Basically, it erases the data and writes over it 7 times for the minimum DoD standard.I It also definitely bypass’ the Recycle Bin, which is sufficient to foil casual recovery of secure files.
For additional security you can set Encrypt Stick to automatically lock after a period of inactivity (10 minutes by default) and require a periodic change of the main password (every 30 days by default). This is near military grade encryption (in a commercial usb casing).
Private Browser
Encrypt Stick includes a built-in private browser. When you’re browsing from a “foreign” computer your favorites, history, cached files, and all other browsing traces remain on the device. Once you unplug the device nothing remains on the host computer.
The private browser doesn’t have every possible feature, but it does support tabbed browsing, and it can handle Flash and other popular content types. I was mildly annoyed to find that Ctrl+Enter in the address bar doesn’t complete an address by adding “www.” and “.com”, but I didn’t find any page that it couldn’t display. I verified that no trace of surfing with the private browser remains behind on a host system.
Encrypt Stick lacks the ability to take private browsing to another level with the option to browse using a fully encrypted secure session. This is what Intel Operators use when they are connected through a compromised network in a shady Internet café (the bad guys won’t be able to sniff out private data from your network packets).
Limited Password Management
Encrypt Stick also includes a password management system linked to its private browser. You can store any number of passwords and group them in a hierarchy of categories, but you’ll do all the work yourself’copying and pasting URLs from your browser and manually entering username and password data (with an option to use the virtual keyboard for passwords).
If you’re setting up a new online account, you can use Encrypt Stick to generate a strong password. However, there’s no provision to adjust the password generator to match a site’s password policies. Key Safe’s password generator lets you set the length and choose which character types to use. It even includes an option to create passwords like “purrPler0ks” that are easy to remember because you can pronounce them.
Full-powered password managers automatically capture login data as you log in to a site manually using a supported browser. I was surprised to find that Encrypt Stick doesn’t offer this level of automation, given that it has total control over the browser.
Key Safe also lacks most features of full-featured password managers, but it does at least have the ability to automatically launch IE, navigate to a saved page, and fill in the login credentials. With Encrypt Stick you must click a link to open the URL in the private browser, then right-click the username and password fields individually to paste in the saved credentials. For some sites this right-click process didn’t work; for others the “fill in” menu choices didn’t appear.
You can import existing passwords from a .CSV file, but it’s not easy. To make use of a similar feature in Key Safe I simply took a file exported from LastPass and rearranged the data columns to the order expected by the import facility. Key Safe can also import directly from several other data types.
Getting my LastPass data into a form that Encrypt Stick would accept took half an hour of manual editing. I did succeed in the end, but only after requesting a sample of the correct format from ENC Security Systems’ tech support.
Why didn’t I just export a sample and study that to learn the format? The export to .CSV feature doesn’t work. It produces a file, but the file is filled with gibberish. After some experimentation I determined that the “gibberish” is actually an encrypted copy of the password data, not the promised .CSV file. The password management feature could definitely use some work.
I also checked the help system to see if it would explain the import process. Or rather, I tried. There is in fact no help system, just a link to the product’s online FAQ. To get help for anything that is not covered in the FAQ you have to e-mail tech support.
Eradicating The Kinks
Encrypt Stick offers a good implementation of file protection by encryption. It uses two-factor authentication, and it can protect portable files on the device itself as well as local files on any number of other computers. The onboard private browser lets you surf the Web on a foreign PC without any risk of leaving private data behind.
The password management doesn’t seem as polished as the rest of the product. It looks good, but it lacks the automation that would make it actually useful. And its import/export system doesn’t work quite right. If you’re looking for a portable password manager, look elsewhere. Still, if you need encryption-based protection for local files and portable files, with private browsing as a bonus, Encrypt Stick can be quite useful.
Pros
Turns any USB drive into secure portable storage. Can create local encrypted folders with two -factor authentication. Private browser allows surfing on foreign PCs leaving no traces behind. Includes password management. Virtual keyboard for safe password entry. Generates strong passwords. Version 4.2 is freeware.
Cons
Password manager requires manual entry of all data. Limited ability to automatically open Web sites using saved credentials. Password import/export facility not working correctly. Can’t configure password generator to match specific password policies.
In Conclusion
Encrypt Stick 5.0 turns any USB drive into secure portable storage for your important files. It also serves as the key to unlock local encrypted folders. An onboard private browser lets you surf without leaving traces. Its weak point is the password manager, which doesn’t seem quite finished. It’s all good though… I have it on my USB stick
Cee Simpson is a Security Systems Analyst with EZMobilePC.com
Games on iPhone
I declared quite publically around a year ago that I was refusing to select an iPhone as my next contract phone, not due to the fact that I consider it a poor piece of technology but rather that it would have immediately made me ‘one of those’ people.
You know the type; you’re busy minding your own business but they’ll sit next to you and force you to endure a daily demonstration of the latest app that they’ve downloaded. They do this with such a self assured smugness that you’d swear that they’d invented the iPhone, not had it handed to them by their mobile phone provider.
I am starting to get a little envious however…..
It seems there are more to these apps than initially meet the eye; after years of dominance, both the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS portable games consoles are starting to lose ground to, bizarrely enough, a phone.
After just a few years in the industry, the Apple iPhone boasts over 21,000 game apps compared to the Nintendo DS which has over 3,500 titles or the Sony PSP which has just over 600. In defense of the Sony PSP, the majority of those 600 titles are large games created by recognized software houses whereas the majority of the 21,000 iPhone games are ‘bite-sized’ two quid offerings.
Personally I have always been of the disposition that if you are going to play a game on a mobile device then you probably want it bite sized anyway as you’re unlikely to get enough uninterrupted time to get immersed in a monster sized game. That having been said, with the latest iPhone boasting a faster processor and third generation Operating System there are already some fairly staggering games coming to market and some serious money is being pumped in to future game development.
The method of game distribution is also one of the primary advantages the iPhone has over the competition. The Sony PSP for example uses mini optical discs that not only do users have to carry around with them but additionally distributors have to worry about the costs involved in producing and distributing the software to the gamer. The iPhone by comparison stores games in the internal memory of the phone and users simply download games directly from the Apple website rather than buying them in a more cumbersome physical format.
It will be interesting to see how the turning fortunes of Sony and Nintendo will affect any planned successors to the DS or PSP and it is becoming apparent that dedicated portable gaming systems may have their days numbered. Unfortunately for Nintendo this is a market that they have relied on heavily since they released the GameBoy back in 1989 and they are ill positioned to launch a competing product to the iPhone. Sony Ericsson however remains a formidable force in the mobile phone market it can surely only be a matter of time before they retaliate with their own hybrid device.
Ten Ways to Kill Good Design
It’s a given that we at Cooper—and most of you reading this article—believe design is the right tool for translating market needs into tangible product specifications. The people who hire us to design their products or who attend our Cooper U courses think the same thing. Unfortunately, the best designs and the best intentions won’t always lead you to success, because the problem goes beyond your product and beyond your design or development process. Building better, more innovative, and more profitable products requires organizational change on a deep and difficult level.
When design pilot projects fail, it endangers everyone’s willingness to adopt design methods. Over the course of doing hundreds of design projects and teaching our methods to more than a thousand people, we’ve seen that several reasons for failure keep showing up. A discussion of these reasons follows, along with some solutions to consider. Let’s start with the easiest ones and work our way up.
1. Poor choice of pilot project
When you first bring design into an organization, you generally have to convince others of its efficacy. The best way to do this is usually to pick a pilot project and demonstrate how design helped it succeed. However, if you pick the wrong project and can’t demonstrate success, you will certainly lose credibility and may also lose any further chance of persuading people.
Choose a relatively small project with a clearly measurable outcome. For example, if a particular part of your application causes 30% of your tech support calls, fix that part and track the decrease in calls. It’s also a good idea to choose a type and size of project your company has done several times before, so you can show the savings in development time and cost. Also, avoid ill-conceived projects—if it’s a product or function no one will ever use, there’s only so much design can do to help.
2. Not having one consistent project owner
Every design project needs a business decision-maker associated with it—someone who can make trade-off choices between desirable design directions and difficult implementation issues, and will shepherd the product from concept to completion. In many cases, this is a product manager. Companies that try to do this by committee, with no single person responsible for the project’s outcome, seldom succeed. Everyone thinks everyone else is responsible, so the process proceeds very slowly, if at all. Changing project ownership partway through the process is also an enormous risk, particularly if the new project owner has not been involved until now; you will need to revisit every project decision, and may end up throwing out quite a few and starting over. This will lead to a perceived project failure, and will devalue the design process in everyone’s eyes.
So, senior managers, choose a single project owner and be sure that person is someone you’re not planning to reassign in a couple of months.
3. Incomplete design or insufficient design communication
The best design in the world won’t get built if it’s incomplete or undocumented. When clients ask us to design to the framework level (major navigation and interactions) but not provide the detail, they are much less likely to succeed than our clients who ask for bitmaps and widgets. This is generally because the people who have to fill in the rest are not interaction designers, and don’t have the appropriate skills and context to fill things in. Likewise, your documentation must be very complete, because if anything is open to interpretation, trust me, it will be interpreted. It might seem obvious to a designer that my bank’s ATM shouldn’t offer me the ability to withdraw from a money market account if I don’t have one, but it apparently wasn’t obvious to the people who built the ATM software.
This kind of problem is relatively easy to fix; be sure to assign designers for the duration of the project, and make sure there’s someone on the team responsible for providing detailed documentation.
4. Not getting buy-in from top executives
Every time we interview stakeholders on a project, we ask whether there are any executives higher up the chain of command who need to approve the project’s direction. One of our worst nightmares is being told that no one else will influence the project, then having an executive we’ve never met suddenly object to our direction. On one of our projects a few years ago, we were told that a senior executive didn’t need to be part of the process. Sure enough, two days before the end of a multi-month project, he didn’t like the design because he hadn’t gone down the path with us. Several months of formal usability testing finally convinced him, but the opportunity cost to our client was tremendous.
Interviewing top executives at the start and involving them at each decision point will help you avoid this.
5. The wrong people doing design
If you wanted to persuade people that martial arts were an effective means of self-defense, would you hire me, or Jackie Chan? (Believe me, you’d want Jackie Chan.) Design won’t take root in your company unless people see it done by experts. The vast majority of companies I’ve seen try to bring design in-house by telling some programmers that they’re now designers, or by having the product manager do some design in his spare time.
Although the need for designers varies during the project life cycle, design is a full-time job as well as a profession that requires many years of practice. Good interaction designers are hard to find, but they do exist—hire them!
6. Not committing resources to design
Even with the right pilot project and the right people doing the design work, if the management team doesn’t provide support in other ways, it’s much harder to succeed. We often see companies that won’t give designers access to users, or that won’t allow enough time to understand the problem, solve it to the level of detail required, and document it in a reasonable way. Unfortunately, until they’ve seen its value demonstrated, many people view design as a cost, rather than a savings (and more importantly, a strategic advantage).
Think about mini-projects you can use to demonstrate value, even with little or no budget. Use those small successes to ask for resources on a modest pilot project with an obvious opportunity for gain.
7. Failure to separate innovation from renovation
If you have one product manager and one development team, it makes sense for them to be responsible for the visionary new release 3.0 as well as the 2.x maintenance releases, right? Wrong. When that version 2.x deadline looms, no one has time or attention to spare for what the next major release should be, so the future product always gets shortchanged.
Instead, carve off a small team to focus solely on designing 3.0 in parallel with the implementation of maintenance releases. This might mean you throw away a little more of that 2.x code when you build 3.0, but it will save calendar time and increase what you can accomplish for the big upgrade.
8. The inmates are running the asylum
You knew this had to be in the list somewhere, right? It’s here toward the end of the list because it’s a big problem that takes a long time to solve. When we say the inmates are running the asylum, it means the programmers are making business decisions that should be made by executives. In most cases it’s not intentional, and the majority of people are unaware of the extent to which it happens. However, every time a programmer says “That’s not technically feasible,” he’s just made a business decision that’s invisible to most people, since “not technically feasible” really means “not in the tiny amount of time or with the constraints I know you’re going to give me.”
It’s a designer’s job to mediate this conversation. Changing the process on paper is relatively easy, but changing the attitudes and behaviors behind the process takes more time and effort. One way to help things along is to make sure that design doesn’t report in to engineering, but instead reports to a cross-silo manager who can balance marketing and engineering perspectives. Ultimately, responsibility for fixing this problem lies with senior managers, who have to ask, “What would it take to make it technically feasible?”
9. Unrealistic expectations
I can’t even count how many times someone has called me up to say “We need to design or drastically redesign the product that generates 100% of our revenue, and we want to ship it in two months.” For some reason, Fast Company or some other part of the Web boom hype created this perception that you can design, build, and launch a successful product faster than you can get a new driver’s license. While this may have been true for a couple of people who got lucky, it’s simply not true in most cases.
We seldom encounter this myth in companies that build physical products, because they’re much better acquainted with the reality that spending up-front time ultimately results in more efficient manufacturing and more profitable products.
Unfortunately, many companies assume their problems come with the territory, just like traffic noise comes with living in a big city. Have you ever noticed, though, how much more annoying the traffic noise is when someone points out that it’s there? You can do the same thing: bring the points of pain to the attention of the management team, identify the cause, and propose design as your solution. It may take a while to have an impact, but be persistent, tie the problems to dollars, and you’ll eventually get through.
10. Unhealthy corporate culture
For design to work in an organization, that organization has to be basically functional. By this, I mean there needs to be open communication at all levels of the organization, clear delineation of responsibility and authority, competent staff, and trust between managers and their teams. Some degree of risk-taking must be acceptable; otherwise, no one will be willing to stand up and say, “I believe we need to do this.” In healthy companies, certain kinds of mistakes are OK, as long as people learn from them. Senior managers challenge their teams to do better, but never ask the impossible, and they give their teams clearly stated problems to solve, instead of specifying solutions.
If your company lacks these qualities, work on fixing these major issues first before you try to implement design. Again, you’ll succeed in getting management’s attention if you tie these problems to dollars: talk in terms of lost productivity, employee turnover, and project delays. A good human resources manager will be your ally in this.
One step at a time
When you’re trying to bring design into an organization, it’s important to realize that you’re not just changing a process—you’re attempting to change the company’s culture and dearly held beliefs. It’s entirely possible to change any company, but it will take a clear goal for where you want to be, a plan for getting there, executive sponsorship, and excellent communication about the benefits of change. Change on this scale isn’t easy, but isn’t that true of just about everything that’s worth doing? Find allies within your organization, look to designers outside your organization for moral support, and don’t forget to celebrate your successes, because you will have some. Every time I get discouraged about the state of the industry, I remind myself that five years ago, no one know what interaction design was except those of us who did it. Today, marketers, developers, and executives call me up asking for interaction design. We must be doing something right, after all.
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