How can one be sure it's safe?

[redbeard]

Howdy all.

I just installed PasswordMaker the other night and love it! However, when I was raving about the whole concept and features to a friend last night a question came up that I really never [but should have] considered.

What if the programer is an 'evil genius'? You know what I mean. That somehow or another all my stuff is somehow available or can be made to be available to some russian crime sydicate.

I run antivirus, seveal layers of firewall, a router, and I'm mostly careful regarding my online prctices and computer management. An 'evil genius', however, could run circles around me if I somehow let him.

How can one be sure that PaswordMaker is safe from either malicious programing or whatever?

Please understand I'm not accusing anyone of anything. It's just that putting all one's passwords in one basket is a risk, as is writing them down on a post-it note, or using 'password' as a password is.

Is it possible that PasswordMaker is, in fact, the safest and easiest method of computing verfication?

[Miquel 'Fire' Burns]

Unless someone hijacks this site, PasswordMaker is very safe. Actually, I'm working on the C++ version for the commandline version, so I know the code very well, and I started as a normal user like you.

Open source is great like that.

[tanstaafl]

The bottom line is, unless you are a programmer capable of reading and understanding the underlying code of the programs you use, *and* the actual source code for those programs is freely available, there is an element of trust that you must engage in.

Thankfully, Passwordmaker is available under the LGPL license, which means it is open source, and so you or anyone else that wants to is free to examine the code for yourself (I wish I could, but a programmer I am not).

That said, I just looked, and can't find the source-code anywhere...

Eric? Shouldn't this be a link in the downloads section?

[Miquel 'Fire' Burns]

For the Firefox version, you need to open the jar file that is put into your extension directory. A jar file is actually a zip file though, and most decompressors will support jars anyway.