Normally, I’d have been personally on twitter, the blog and in the help center letting folks know what’s going on. Alas, tonight was my night off (which in itself is rare). By the time they got a hold of me, the problem was fixed and everything was up and running again.

For all of you who don’t have a copy of Passpack Desktop yet, please download it here and sync it to your online account. You can use Desktop to access your passwords in the case of an outage, or simply when you don’t have access to the web.

Again folks – sincerely apologize for the troubles this may have caused you.

We apologize for the problem and hope that you are using the Desktop (backup) version.

With Passwords, Simplicity Can Equal Strength
We all know that ‘remembering’ complex passwords can be a bit troublesome, which is why we use password managers, but if you insist on keeping a few passwords to memory you may want to hear these tips.

Cleveland.com

Tips For Fighting Identity Theft
With all the info out there on how to protect your identity online, there’s no reason to keep your sensitive info unsafe anymore.

To activate bulk editing, go to your Passwords tab and scroll down to the link under your Tag cloud. Make your selection then use the Apply an action menu and away you go!

Don’t forget you can also bulk delete your passwords and send encrypted passwords to emails.

More to come! More to come my pretties.

Michael Jackson X-file Scam Steals Passwords
It’s no surprise that the death of the King of Pop has brought about a lot of media, but be careful while clicking on the latest links of Michael Jackson stories. Some of them may be password scams.

Mail Online

So why is the U.S. so eager to lock up the Asperger’s Syndrome hacker?
Here’s a look at the “biggest military computer hack of all time” and the man who has caught the eye of President Obama’s new security tsar.

Examiner.com

Online Scams and Fraud Warning
When economic times are tough, new scams arise which is just what the FTC is warning Internet users about in a newly released video about web safety.

It’s a proud moment. Passpack has been nominated to the TechCrunch Europe award. So show your favorite password manager a little love.

The Europas: Best Web Application Or Service       

Vote for Passpack

Wondering why we didn’t mention this last week? Well, maybe… we… um, didn’t notice right away that we’d been nominated [yikes!]. Apparently we’ve been working too hard on the upcoming autologin improvements. Ok, so you go vote and we’ll keep coding.

Who Should Reimburse ID Theft Victims?
One in five victims of identity theft are not reimbursed for their losses but who really pays the price of getting your personal information compromised.

delaware online

To Curb Identity Theft, 10 Tons of Documents Shredded
There are many ways to protect yourself against identity theft but here is an example of the tried and true method. Result: the shredding of 10 tons of documents!

Star-Telegram.com

Tips to Help You Spot Phishing Scams
Hopefully you are the one out of ten Americans who can spot a fake website or phishing scam and if you are not, here are a few tips to help get you there.

Chrome Back Button Alert

As you may know, you should not use your browser’s back button with Passpack, because at best you’ll get logged out and have to log back in. At worst, you may loose any unsaved data. To avoid this, we use a Javascript library which simulates a disabled browser back button. When you click it, nothing seems to happen. If you click it a lot (like 7 times) then you get this warning:

The problem Tim ran into was that Google Chrome was giving him that error even though he’d not clicked the back button. Then it would repeat every 3 minutes or so. This was an odd bug as both Francesco and I use Chrome, and neither one of us has ever run into this issue.

By changing a single call, Francesco was able to fix the problem. If you’re interested in the technical details, here’s what he said was happening.

IE6 Non Secure Items Alert

This is one of those bugs that has been driving us crazy for some time now.  All of Passpack’s images, Javascript, CSS and data travel over a secure https connection. Nonetheless, Explorer 6 was throwing up an alert that there were non-secure items on the page. We searched far and wide, but until now were not able to find the mysterious non-secure item.

While debugging the Chrome issue, Francesco discovered that the iframe the jQuery history plugin was attaching to the page body didn’t have a src attribute. That’s normal, but IE6 produces an error in these cases. So we added a src by modifying the plugin… and all is now fine and well.

The login and training failure rate when we first began was very low. Alas, it’s been growing, and now we can’t keep up with the requests coming through the help center for broken links. [oh boy that's trouble!]

So we’re upgrading the button. While we’re at it, here are some features that we’re building into the new version:

1. Overhauling the Javascript which powers the button.
2. Quick copy/paste options when a login fails
3. Automatic reporting of broken auto-login URLs
4. Double-click to add a Passpack entry directly from a registration page.

Will it Still Be Host-Proof Hosting?

Yes, yes, yes! The architecture remains the some same, we’re just rewriting the bricks.

What About a Plugin?

Following these improvements to the Auto-login, we’ll be working on a solution that’ll allow auto-login without having to open to the Passpack website everyday. That may or may not take the form of a browser plugin or toolbar. So stay tuned.