So I’ve been playing with OSXCrypt and TrueCrypt for a few days now, and found out some things that aren’t so obvious from the websites.

• Both can only format in the FAT filesystem. Since their primary virtue over encrypted DMGs is cross-platform portability, this probably isn’t too big of a deal.
• You can use the disk utility to reformat a mounted encrypted volume if you want another filesystem.
• With TrueCrypt volumes, you can’t eject from finder, with OSXCrypt you can eject from finder but need to complete from command-line anyway.
• OSXCrypt is MUCH faster than the official TrueCrypt release. I didn’t do benchmarking, but the difference is easily noticeable.
• You can’t copy large files into a TrueCrypt volume unless you use Disk Utility to reformat to another filesystem.
• OSXCrypt doesn’t yet do full-disk encryption, and seems to be unable to create an encrypted disk larger than 1GB.
• TrueCrypt has a GUI, but it doesn’t really feel like it was designed for mac. OSXCrypt has no GUI, but it’s pretty self-explanitory usage (I had an easier time figuring out OSXCrypt than TrueCrypt).
• It seems that OSXCrypt won’t mount images that don’t have a .img suffix (due to their usage of hdiutil).
• From what I’ve seen around the internet, OSXCrypt is currently more reliable than TrueCrypt.

While it seems neither is quite ready for day-to-day use, I’ll be sticking with OSXCrypt and/or sparseimage files for now. I’m certainly looking forward to support of full-disk encryption, however.

TrueCrypt 5.0 was released today, adding support for Mac OSX among other things. As a OSX user, I’ve been awaiting full-disk encryption for some time. However, as of January 27th, the OSXCrypt project has also been completed.

Now, to keep the record straight, TrueCrypt and OSXCrypt have different goals. TrueCrypt allows for steganography, encrypted disk images (something OSX has not been lacking), and full disk encryption. OSXCrypt, on the other hand, is not an encryption solution in and of itself. Instead, they provide a framework for various encryption solutions.

Personally, I don’t see anything lacking in TrueCrypt’s feature list, and a 5.0 tag is a little more reassuring to me than 6.2A. I’m going to be installing TrueCrypt shortly, but I’m wondering if anyone has had experience with OSXCrypt and recommend it.

Some quick updates that may be of interest to those considering installing one or the other:

• TrueCrypt’s OSX implementation is based on MacFUSE.
• MacFUSE comes bundled with other filesystems (NTFS, WebDav, ZFS, FTP, etc)
• OSXCrypt is probably a lighter-weight install.
• OSXCrypt has no GUI, whereas TrueCrypt does.

Due to low-rent DSL, I needed some way to confirm many parts of a file transfer. After a few google searches, I found a great app called MacSFV… which is practically impossible to find a working download for. So now that I’ve found a working download, I’m playing host to MacSFV_2.0.1.dmg. Enjoy!

The title pretty much says it all, after much procrastinating (read: schoolwork) on my part, I’ve gotten around to updating my guide for installing BackTrack in VMWare Fusion.

If you’ve been just WAITING to install BackTrack, but couldn’t find a guide that was correct for installing the latest VMWare tools, your time has come. Here’s the new, 100% updated guide. As a side note, in the process I’ve upgraded to the latest WordPress and NexGen Gallery plugin. Hooray :)

While the new spotlight in Leopard is much more powerful than it was in Tiger, there are still those of us that would rather not have our system eating up system resources. Unfortunately, adding “SPOTLIGHT=-NO-” to /etc/hostconfig no longer does anything.

To disable spotlight (non-destructively), open up Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app), and execute the following two commands:

sudo chmod 0000 /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Support/mdworker

(This will disable the spotlight indexing)

sudo chmod 0000 /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

(This will remove spotlight from your menu bar)

If at any time you want to re-enable spotlight, simply run disk utility, and have it fix permissions on your boot drive.

Disclaimers:
* You should probably reboot after running those two commands.
* Doing this will disable any features that explicitly depend on spotlight, such as searching mail content.
* I believe that disabling spotlight will break Time Machine. If this is wrong, or there’s a way around it, let me know!