Clipperz announces it’s first fundraising campaign to support the development of its free, multilingual, open source online password manager.

We are sending out emails to the thousands of users that made contact with us during the last 5 years (see below). It’s actually a major new start for the project. If successful, Giulio and I could eventually devote more time and energy to Clipperz.

The first target is to complete the hosted “gamma” version and port it to the downloadable Community Edition. And, if we raise enough money, we could add sharing and tagging, move forward the “workgroup edition”, design a robust mobile version, improve the website and our communication plan.

We would also love to set up tools and provide tutoring for the small community of developers that gathered around the idea of a web application that knows nothing about its users and their data.

Thanks in advance for your generous support!
Marco Barulli and Giulio Cesare Solaroli`

Dear Clipperz user,

there’s nothing more satisfying than creating something that people care about and use. I know this because, along with Giulio Cesare Solaroli, I’m the co-founder of Clipperz, the online password manager that knows nothing about you!

We got a lot of funny looks 5 years ago when we started talking to people about Clipperz. Let’s just say some people were skeptical of the notion of storing passwords and other sensitive information on the web. But we kept evangelizing the benefits of browser cryptography and the more general paradigm of zero-knowledge web apps, i.e. fully functional web apps that have no access to users’ data.

Five years later, nearly 50 thousand people created an account on Clipperz and about 5 thousand use it every single day! I thank every one of you who donated to keep Clipperz alive and well since 2006.

It was a tremendous help, and extremely generous, and I can’t thank you enough. However, the current flow of donations makes it difficult for us to further invest resources in the development of new features. Clipperz needs your help!

In the past we’ve relied entirely on the in-app donation reminder. Today we’re trying something new: we’re turning to those who have already donated or have made contact with us (directly or through to the Clipperz forum). For the first time ever, I’m writing to ask if you can help get our efforts off to a strong start.

Can you make a donation of $50 or more to fund the work of Giulio and myself? Or a monthly recurring donation of 5$ or more?

Together, we can keep Clipperz free of charge for everyone.
And together we can also keep it open.

As someone who’s using Clipperz, you know that the source code of Clipperz has been made available since its first day and you can even run a private instance of Clipperz on your own server by downloading our Community Edition. We adopted AGPL as our preferred open source license because we firmly believe that the world needs more “zero-knowledge web apps”.

If you value Clipperz as a useful and convenient tool to enhance your security, I hope you’ll choose to act right now. Make your donation today!

Sincerely,

Marco Barulli
Clipperz co-founder

PS
If you are in contact with other Clipperz users, please spread the word and forward this message to them, thanks!
In keeping with the open spirit of Clipperz, we’re publishing a summary of all donations received.

Bruce Schneier says that privacy is controlling your data. How true. I would just add that control is not enough, I want exclusive control and ownership of my data. And if you are using Clipperz password manager it’s probably because you share a similar vision …

To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it’s no longer private. But that’s not how privacy works, and it’s not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social-networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone’s e-mail conversations — your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.

Companies are in the midst of a privacy frenzy. They keep changing their terms to reflect social and cultural changes, at least this is what they say. So are Google and Facebook just evil? Not at all, they are just working to “maximize their profits, which has the side effect of killing privacy”. And we should not be fooled by their public declarations in defense of privacy.

The very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users’ information. Whether through targeted advertising, cross-selling or simply convincing their users to spend more time on their site and sign up their friends, more information shared in more ways, more publicly means more profits. This means these companies are motivated to continually ratchet down the privacy of their services, while at the same time pronouncing privacy erosions as inevitable and giving users the illusion of control.

Schneier asks for a stronger privacy legislation and he’s probably right. As a commenter wrote: “the idea that the market will sort things like this out is laughable. Consumer protection laws are needed precisely because the market fails at this sort of thing.” However, the EU has a remarkable privacy legislation, but I can’t say that, as a citizen, I feel more protected.

While government and companies find their ways out of the privacy maze, smart users could use zero-knowledge web applications like Clipperz!

toothpastefordinner.com

We have just released a new version of Clipperz password manager that fixes a bug related to native JSON support. The bug was affecting only those using Firefox 3.1. Beta 1 or Beta 2.

Firefox 3.1 includes TraceMonkey, the new Javascript engine. It’s an evolution of SpiderMonkey that uses a new kind of Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to boost Javascript performance by an order of magnitude or more.

Unfortunately Firefox 3.1 also introduced a DOM binding (the global object JSON) for the native JSON parser; the DOM binding “shadows” the JSON object from the json2.js library currently used by Clipperz for JSON de/serialization. The native parser doesn’t yet support de/serialization of primitive (string, number, boolean) objects (only object literals and arrays) hence the card creation process results in being broken in Firefox 3.1 Beta.

As soon as Firefox 3.1 will provide full support for JSON de/serialiazation (planned for Beta 3) we will switch to the native JSON parser, taking full advantage of speed improvements.

The first thing most of you do every morning is to open the Clipperz password manager and start your daily routine by quickly accessing your online services. Just one click on a “direct login” link and you are logged in and, depending on your browser settings, each click will open a new window or a new tab. Unless you are using Safari …

In that case there is no way to tell Safari to open a “direct login” in a new tab, it will always open a new browser window. I find it quite annoying, I personally can’t stand having too many browser windows open.

Direct login links have a target = "_blank" attribute and Safari has no (evident) option to decide if the new page should be opened in a new window or a new tab (like Firefox has). But luckily Apple has added a hidden preference, since Safari 3.1, that allows you to tell Safari to stick to one window. Just paste into Terminal the following command and and you’re sorted!

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

This works great, unless you are like me: I usually launch tens of “direct logins” and I end up scrolling tabs back and forth within a single Safari window. Not very convenient. But with Safari I can solve this problem by easily detaching and grouping together tabs (all email accounts in one window, all bank accounts in another, …).

Unfortunately Firefox does not allow me to detach tabs the way Safari can, but I’ve found a very good solution: Duplicate Tab 1.0.2. A nifty Firefox add-on that allows you to detach tabs and merge windows.

So if you use Safari, I would suggest to set the above hidden preference, while if you prefer Firefox, choose the option to open new pages in a new tab and install the Duplicate Tab add-on. In any case, don’t let your browser degrade your Clipperz experience!

Thanks to Dennis and John for the tips!

picture from inju Flickr photostream