VampiroZ

Given the recent popularity of Privnote as consequence of appearing in ReadWriteWeb and the front-page of Digg, a rather heated discussion has arisen about whether notes send through Privnote are really protected against someone with access to the Privnote database.
We believe it is, and I’ll explain the reasons here by detailing the exact process used […]

At first, Privnote looked like an ideal application for porting to Google App Engine because:

it’s already written in the “official” App Engine platform (Python+Django)
it’s entirely based on a request/response mechanism
we would forget about scalability problems forever

So we give it a try and implemented a prototype, just to see how it goes, but, in the […]

When I launched Insophia, about a year ago, I wanted it to have a blog, right from the beginning. So I chose Wordpress as the platform for the site. However, in many occasions, when going to write something, I faced the question of where to post it. Should I post it in the Insophia (corporate) […]

Have you ever wanted to send some highly confidential information (like credit card information or root passwords) over the Internet and were afraid others could be sniffing your traffic?. Well, I have, all the time. I’ve always being paranoid about this, so that’s why we, at Insophia, came up with Privnote, a tool for sending […]

I needed a virtual machine for debugging some Python memory leaking software without risking the health of my Ubuntu system. VirtualBox was my first choice because of its ease of install (just “apt-get install virtualbox”). Since I wanted to access the VM via ssh (instead of using the VirtualBox console) I found a bit annoying […]

Google has just launched AppEngine, a new hosting service with “all the Google infrastructure” available for you. For now, it only supports my favorite language, but they may add more languages in the future.
A couple of things that come to my mind now:

If you’re running a hosting company, you should re-consider your business, specially if […]

It took me some time to find out how to do this, so I’ll post it here hoping that someone will find it useful.
First of all, “fidsk -l” won’t show all your FreeBSD disklabels, you’ll have to do “cat /proc/partitions” to find the partition you wan’t to mount. If the Kernel has support for disklabels […]

When you have accounts in dozens and dozens of servers, it could be hard to replicate and keep track of all your configuration files (aka. rc files). To be honest, that’s the reason why I never used rc files in the past, and always tried to stick with the default behavior of programs. But, for […]

Have you ever ssh’ed into a remote server and wondered if you could run a program using the connection from that remote server in a transparent and easy way?
Well, you can and it’s quite simple. Here’s the recipe for Linux.
1. Install tsocks using your Linux distribution package manager (preferably) or compiling from source.
2. Add a […]

Beware of the whois service. There’s a lot of people in the world spying whois queries to steal domain names.
Back in August I was looking for a cool name for my company, and the domain name was the starting point. To tell you the truth, insophia.com was not the first one at all, although I’m […]