We’ve long had a product called STRIP for Palm OS. This Secure Tool for Recalling Important Passwords encrypted account records in its database using a password supplied by the user. It’s been very popular on the Palm platform, in particular with IT folks, for quite some time (here’s an article on ZDNet from back when the Internet’s crust was cooling, and here’s a write-up on CNN.com).

Given the almost universal abandonment of the Palm platform and OS over the past few years, we’ve ceased to officially support Palm Strip. Many of our users have gotten in touch to inquire if we might take the program to another platform going forward, and to date our response has been to decline.

However, Stephen recently completed assembling a version of SQLite that provides high-grade OpenSSL encryption for embedded databases, sqlite-cipher. With this proven, secure technology as our foundation, we’ve decided to build a new version of STRIP on the iPhone platform.

It’s currently in development and we hope to have it ready to rumble by December.

These were being passed out today in NYC and LA (I’m told 1.2 million copies), a fake NY Times. Whatever your feelings on the war, it’s brilliantly done:

You’d never know looking at it right away that it wasn’t a real paper. It’s dated July 4th, 2009.

Update: looks like there’s a bit of video about the prank.

We’re turning into jQuery nerds.

Rocketboom came by the Williamsburg Coworking space last Friday during the code-jam to do some interviews of the various folks working on the "TwitterVoteReport"http://twittervotereport.com project (from designers to press folks to coders), and ended up including Yours Truly among the interviewed. The resultant episode on their site provides a great introduction to what’s going on with TwitterVoteReport and how it works, so check it out:

Worth pointing out again and again, since the name might be a bit misleading, that it’s not just for Twitter. You’ll be able to send in SMS reportsn, report by telephone call, use an iPhone app (if Apple deigns to allow it in the app store on time), and a Google Android app is up in the Android Market.

We’ve been really busy lately here at Zetetic, which is why you haven’t heard from us in a bit. We’ve got a new design for our website on the way, we’re running a beta program of the next version of Tempo while developing another major release in the background, we’re working on an iPhone app (actually two), we’ve donated some time to helping out the folks over at the Twitter Vote Report project, and we’ll be doing yet more work with them as the crunch to the election day gets closer, and we’re still hiring.

And we’re still working hard for our clients. So, not so much time for blogging this last month.

Just to expand on a couple of these things:

Tempo Beta

If you’d like to participate, send an e-mail to support@zetetic.net and we’ll give you the details. We’re particularly interested in feedback our users have during the end-of-month billing period, as this next version should make reporting a lot faster and easier.

Twitter Vote Report

Twitter Vote Report is a project we became aware of through the folks at the Williamsburg Coworking space where I work in Brooklyn, NY. Basically, it’s a project that will allow users to text or call-in reports from polling places to build a database of activity and problem reports. Hopefully this will help to monitor the election, problems at voting places, and identify any hotspots early on the 4th of November. So far we’ve done a bit of coding and contributed a bit to the architecture and security discussion, and we’ll be contributing more work to help them get over the finish line as we get closer to the election.

The basic gist of it is that a user can tweet a problem or send an SMS message to short-code 66937 to report a problem, along with their location, like so:

#votereport long lines here l:11211
#votereport #wait:20 they won't let grandma vote l:courthouse, va

More information will be available on the TVR site soon. Lots of smart folks are putting a lot of time into making this happen and it’s been awesome to watch it come together. If you think you could help out in some way, even if it’s just spreading the word, do get in touch with them. In particular we’ll need folks who can volunteer to be “sweepers”, folks who help comb through the incoming data looking for mistakes.