I’ve probably posted here before about the whistle forums
that I host as a favour to the guy who runs the Chiff and
Fipple tinwhistle website. These tiny little forums about
tinwhistles manage to generate about 40GB of traffic and two baseless
legal threats a month and have generally been a source of trouble and
poorly-timed emergency maintenance since they began, and doubly so since
I lost interest in running reading (woops!) them years ago. There’s a big community
there, though, so I feel a responsibility to do what I can to ensure
their availability.

Today someone noticed the forum emoticon called “admin”: and posted demanding
that the icons be removed, and kept at it even after a whole bunch of
people explained the tradition of calling administrators Nazis. Some people really need a hobby.

To not make this post entirely whining: right now I’m playing
with MyPasswordSafe, a
Linux port of Bruce Schneier‘s Windows PasswordSafe, and I’m liking it.

It’s a password safe, of course, but there are three features that make
it neato: first, the passwords are encrypted with Blowfish; second,
the program copies the password into the cutbuffer, so you can use it
even when someone is shoulder-surfing; and lastly, the file format is
identical to the Windows version, so you can use it on both platforms.

That said, there’s a warning at the end of the download page:

The safes should be secure unless the Blowfish algorithm gets cracked.
It’s when the program is running that I’m unsure of the security. I’m
sure some pesky program could find your passwords in memory.

which comes down to “you can only trust it if you can trust the machine
it’s running on”, but right now I type passwords into that same machine,
so that’s plenty good enough for me. Your mileage may vary there, though.