albinoloverats ~ Software Development

AMA Messaging Architecture

2026-02-05T14:37:10+00:00

This is the first usable release of our new messaging framework: AMA Messaging Architecture. It may not be big and professional like Kafka, but it sure is a hell of a lot easier to get up and running; certainly based on my own experience in my day job!

There is a server that can easily be pulled via Docker Compose; a single dependency for client services (and a sneaky second dependency for testing) that is available from the Maven Central Repository. There is also a demo project that showcases how to make use of it all.

More information can be found on the project page.

Java, love it or hate it, it pays the bills.

Peace

Move To Github Pages

2025-10-22T12:20:31+00:00

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally simplified our site and moved everything to Github. Student life with its ample free time is a distant memory these days and keeping up with the changes in PHP to ensure our site runs well is less of a priority. And using Jekyll on top of Github Pages is more than capable of hosting (mostly) static pages, as well as providing a bug tracker.

Although we have migrated all of the previous posts there is still some polishing of rough edges, particularly getting SSL to work as expected; we will also need to see what solutions exist for email (maybe we’ll move over to AWS?)…

Anyway, that’s all for now.

encrypt 2025.05

2025-05-23T17:17:57+00:00

It’s not been quite as long between updates this time around, but Google kind of forced our hand by threatening to close our developer account due to lack of use. So here we are with a few minor bug fixes and maybe a dependency update or two.

Hopefully people are still find it useful to have local file encryption applications that are cross-platform; we still find it useful if we need sensitive documents on difference devices and it needs to be secure when at rest, though for transferring SSH obviously helps a lot.

Anyway, until next time,

The encrypt Development Team

encrypt 2024.01

2023-12-30T09:57:49+00:00

Biennially seems to be how we release recently, if you can call the last 8 or 9 years recent! Again, there aren’t too many on the surface changes, but there are a handful of bug fixes and improvements in reliability—especially on Android.

Library dependencies have been updated, and this is especially relevant on OS X as there the dependency management was incomplete and dependant on Homebrew (building encrypt still is but at least is should now function properly without it).

Stay secure,

The encrypt Development Team

encrypt 2022.01

2022-01-25T16:14:54+00:00

Well, it’s been another 2 years but we’re back with another release of encrypt! On the face of it, it would appear that very little has changed but there has been significant changes under the covers, a lot of which should help with error reporting and debugging (if you’re unlucky enough to need it).

There is now a PKG installer for Apple OS X, although as encrypt is not yet signed (and distributed via the AppStore), it will generate a warning about being untrusted; this can be overridden in the security settings. There is also still not a complete Gentoo eBuild solution, but we’ll get there one day.

That’s all for now,

The encrypt Development Team

encrypt 2020.01

2019-12-31T18:05:29+00:00

It may be long overdue, but finally, after over two years (although a day early if you check the release notes), we are back with another release of our flagship product encrypt. The big ticket item this time around is configurable KDF iterations.

We have also put together a Solaris package and the start of a Gentoo eBuild file. One snag that we have discovered is that the OS X application—once copied from the disk image to Applications—the extended attribute gets set and this seems to break the applications checksum. As such, a warning message that says the application may be damaged is displayed. This can be worked-around by opening the terminal and executing the following: . This will recursively clear all extended attributes, and solves the problem. It’s not ideal, but it’ll have to do for now; we’re working on a more user-friendly solution (perhaps distributing via the App Store is the way to go).

That’s it for now, hopefully everything works smoothly and we haven’t missed any compatibility issues/major bugs. So all that’s left to say is Happy New Year and bring on 2020!

The encrypt Development Team

encrypt 2017.09

2017-09-15T17:36:58+00:00

It’s been nearly two years, but we have finally brought out a new release of our flagship encryption application.

There have been a host of changes and bug fixes, including improved key derivation and MAC authentication. There are two new binary packages available: FreeBSD and Windows (64 bit); Win32 has gone the way of the dodo and is no longer available. We have also fixed the Android version to work properly with its latest permission handling.

Downloads are available in all the usual places; so until next time, stay secure.

The encrypt Development Team

stegfs 2015.08.1 - a quick fix

2016-07-21T19:16:35+00:00

It’s been nearly a year, and during that time there has been numerous updates to the FUSE library, one of which started causing problems with stegfs. We’ve been able to quickly push out a fix, and hopefully this will give the motivation to resume working on stegfs instead of neglecting it. As there are no new features or changes to the file system layout there shouldn’t be any issues with compatibility with 2015.08 but if there are just let us know.

So here it is, the quick fix that is: stegfs 2015.08.1

Enjoy

encrypt 2015.10

2015-10-04T15:12:57+00:00

encrypt 2015.10 brings with it one significant new feature, as well as several bug fixes.

The major update is that encrypt can now correct read errors in the encrypted file (when decrypting). If several bytes are not what they should be, then encrypt will detect and fix these errors - however if there are too many then you really should find out why the bytes on disk are not what they should be! It won’t fix bad storage, but instead is to correct possible data transmission errors.

Bug fixes include fixing the infinite loop when attempting to decrypt a file that isn’t actually encrypted, fixing the compatibility menu on Android, and most significantly: allowing AES on Windows 8! This was achieved by using a different build of the GNU libgcrypt library.

The only other item of note is that there is now a free version available on Android (supported by ads).

That’s all now this October release, The encrypt Development Team

stegfs 2015.08

2015-08-13T18:37:39+00:00

Okay, so here we are, back again (finally) with a completely new stegfs! And when we say new, we mean totally rewritten! It’s much better at not overwriting your existing files (although it can and will still happen) and it’s a lot more customisable.

Warning! stegfs 2015.08 is not backwards compatible!

However, onto the good stuff:

More bytes for data, less for metadata
Choose your crypto at mkfs time (now using [libcrypt])
File systems are no longer architecture dependant (score one for network byte order!)
There’s no longer any need to prefix directories with +
And hopefully the code generally all round better than before (having been rewritten with a few more years experience, et cetera)

Lo, there too are a number of sad points:

stegfs is not (yet) multi-threaded—if you have a large read/write, it will block—this is something we’re looking at working on soon
As was mentioned above: it’s not backwards compatible, but hopefully it will be as we move forward

I think that’s pretty much everything for now; sorry it’s been so long, but (as far as file systems go I feel) too many releases are likely to negatively affect stability, hence the delay.

Stay safe, Ashley