With a little help from one of my current colleagues Sid I have altered Steve’s example by writing the temp file to a ramdisk, which is subsequently srm’d.

The fact that this implementation never writes the contents of the unencrypted file to disk, I recon I can go as far as saying that it was a little *more* secure than Steve’s original post


#Password config
USEFUL_FILE="$HOME/.passwords/passwords.txt.gpg"
USEFUL_KEYID="XXXXXXXX"
RDLABEL="ramdisk"
RAMDISK="/Volumes/$RDLABEL" # Please no spaces
FILE="passtmp" # Please no spaces

function viuseful {
  ramdisk 4096 # 4MB
  cp "$USEFUL_FILE" "$USEFUL_FILE~"
  vi '+set viminfo=' '+set noswapfile' '+r !gpg --trust-model always --quiet -d '"$USEFUL_FILE"' 2>/dev/null' '+1d' '+redraw!' "$RAMDISK/$FILE"
  if [ -s "$RAMDISK/$FILE" ]; then
    gpg --trust-model always --yes -r "$USEFUL_KEYID" -o "$USEFUL_FILE" -e "$RAMDISK/$FILE"
  else
   echo "File not changed"
  fi
  cleanup
}

So yeah, a big shout out to both Steve and Sid, for now I have a proprietary secure(-ish) way of storing all of various passwords.

If someone would like to tell me how to create the RAMDISK on a linux machine I would love to know

As a result, I thought I would describe the steps I have taken in securing my Firefox instance on my laptop. These are :

• Installing the HTTPS Everywhere plugin from the eff, which attempts to select https if available when accessing a site. I have tested it with Facebook, Google, Hotmail, LinkedIn and a few other sites
• I have set my homepage to be encrypted.google.com
• I have changed the search engine in top right hand of my Firefox instance to use the encrypted google service, by installing their plugin
• I have set a master password on my Firefox keychain, which gives my stored passwords some level of protection
• And I run Adblocking software, (with a custom Facebook Like Button blocking extension) as per an earlier blog post

Furthmore, I use Firefox as my main browser, I have chrome installed, but I hardly ever use it, and I have a locked down, stateless Safari instance which I wrote about earlier.

This is fanstatic news, as I can now digitally sign my emails, with my GPG identity, which can be found linked to from my FOAF file.

In order to have a zero cache safari instance on my laptop I have taken the following steps :

• 1: Removed spotlight’s prying eyes, by excluding the following directories :
  • /Users/<USERDIR>/Library/Caches
  • /Users/<USERDIR>/Library/Safari
  • /Library/Caches
• 2: Setup two cronjobs to constantly delete Safari cache-dir

*/10 * * * * find /Users/<USERDIR>/Library/Safari -type f -exec rm {} \; 2>&1 > /dev/null
*/10 * * * * find /Users/<USERDIR>/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/ -type f -exec rm {} \; 2>&1 > /dev/null

And finally, I have created a wrapper .app file which open’s Safari, and then enables “Private Browsing” mode, as I could not find a way to do this through editing the Safari.plist file. I followed the instructions posted on the MacWorld site, and they go a little something list so:

• 1. One needs to enable the Enable Access for Assistive Devices option, which can be found in the Universal Access system preference.
• 2. Open the AppleScript editor, and type in the following commands :

  
tell application "Safari"
   activate
end tell
tell application "System Events"
   tell process "Safari"
    tell menu bar 1
     tell menu bar item "Safari"
      tell menu "Safari"
       click menu item "Private Browsing"
      end tell
     end tell
    end tell
  end tell
end tell


• 3. Save this shiny new AppleScript as an application (.app file), and I called mine “PrivateSafari.app”.
• 4. I then grabbed the icon file from Safari, and added to the PrivateSafari, and then replace the old shortcut in my Dock, with one to “PrivateSafari.app”.

It should be noted that I am well aware that the private browsing features in most of the modern web browsers have come under a certain amount of scrutiny recently, below are some links to articles for the interested reader :

• Private browsing modes leak data – BBC News
• Private browsing: it’s not so private – Ars Technica
• Private browsing ‘not so private’ – IT Pro
• Private browsing modes in four biggest browsers often fail – The Reg

At home I run a backup server for Time Machine on one of my Linux boxes, I did this by enabling the following feature on the machine which I have configured to be backed up.

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This in turn allows for unsupported network volumes to be used as backup volumes.

Below are some other Apple related preferences I have configured on my macbook:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'

defaults write com.apple.terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles Yes (ALL FILES IN FINDER)

I found that I was having problems making software on Leopard, which I could build fine on my linux (fedora) machines. The error I was getting was:

ld: duplicate symbol _g_bit_nth_lsf in foo.o and bar.o

I am running Leopard 10.5.3. I was using glib2, installed via Fink, version number: 2.12.0-103. After spending lots of time googling I found the following article to be of the most use, “Wireshark with Macports”, where Anders Brownworth pointed out that the error was due to a “extern inline bug in glib/gutils.h which is easily fixed“.

So to fix this:

• I located gutils.h, which I found here:
  
  /sw/include/glib-2.0/glib/gutils.h
• I then replaced these lines:
  
  #ifdef G_IMPLEMENT_INLINES
  
  # define G_INLINE_FUNC
  
  # undef G_CAN_INLINE
  

  #elif defined (__GNUC__)

# define G_INLINE_FUNC extern inline

#elif defined (G_CAN_INLINE)

• With this:
  
  #ifdef G_IMPLEMENT_INLINES
  
  # define G_INLINE_FUNC
  
  # undef G_CAN_INLINE
  
  #elif defined (__APPLE__)

# define G_INLINE_FUNC static inline
  

  #elif defined (__GNUC__)

# define G_INLINE_FUNC extern inline

#elif defined (G_CAN_INLINE)

• By adding these two middle lines:
  
  #elif defined (__APPLE__)

# define G_INLINE_FUNC static inline
• The start of the fragment of code was at line number 96 in my gutils.h file

Here is a link to my edited and working gutils.h file.

Note 1: I would make sure I get a copy of my original gutils.h file, as this may come in handy

Note 2: There is a patch which one could apply to make the same changes which I have just described here. This patch follows this ticket. I didn’t know what to do with the patch file, so I ended up editing the file by hand:). I am guessing that is something todo with macports, mmm, nevermind, its working now.

duplicate dylib libiconv.2.dylib

This is due to my use of the Fink and Darwin packages to install various bits I need for OSX development.

I recently noticed that many configure scripts cater for the user to select which dylib they would like to include. So I figured that my problem of duplicate iconv’s can be overcome by looking for options like :

--with-iconv=

So look out for similar parameters in configure scripts

./configure --with-iconv=/opt/local/..

So, why do I not just remove all but one instance of iconv? Well, Leopard ships with an old version of iconv, and I require recent versions for my development work.