For XMPP, I recommend checking out Prosody (http://prosody.im). You can get a working system up with Off-the-record instant messaging and internal file transfers in an afternoon, if you're familiar with UNIX system administration.

If you use a client like Jitsi, you can do ZRTP encrypted calls through the server as well. Use your own SSL certificates for SSL.

Ejabberd is also good, however the debug information was pretty inadequate. Also helps to be familiar with erlang.

Have a look at BitTorrent Sync: http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html

One advantage is that there's no third-party storage of data involved.

Thank you, will have a look.

The leaking via gmail has an issue:

In many cases when creating a new gmail account, you have to provide a phone number for an automatic text verification code.

yeah, I was going to say this as well. sometimes they ask for a phone number, and sometimes they don't.

I wonder what triggers it, maybe if a lot of different Google Accounts log in from that single IP, it assumes it's some open coffeeshop wifi or similar?

True. The article has so many mistakes in it, it's almost as if it's written by the government !! We need a new article.

Love the minimalist interface. Perhaps a little more differentiation between comments (becomes a bit hard to read when the comments are nested). We'll definitely use this.

Amen to this. A skilled designer adds a lot of value by setting the type weight and kerning properly, choosing a decent color palette, giving you the right options for light / dark backgrounds and so on.

As important is a basic style guide/manual for the rest of your stuff (use these styles for h1, h2, h3, bullets like so etc).

As a formerly design-blind hacker, I've come to appreciate that consistency in visual design is significantly under-valued.

Yes, where I am it's often used to direct-to-bill services such as purchasing ringtones. The user clicks on 'purchase ringtone / song etc' and doesn't have to enter any payment information. The partner site has access to the number that they have to bill to. Since this is not controlled for or re-checked, there have been incidents of billing fraud (just set the header yourself with someone else's number).

Is it possible to use ipfw / pf to control outbound traffic based on the process that is initiating the connection? I skimmed the man pages but didn't see anything that looked promising.

I've had a decent experience so far with Crashplan (www.crashplan.com). They have good options for security (to ensure your data is encrypted prior to sending it off).

The client UI could use some work, but it gives you a lot of control about what, where, how and when stuff is being backed up.

I might have missed the option, but a way to import additional images / vectors would be nice. Either just an upload or a creative-commons image search. Also, real-time editing with other users would be superb.

Nice work!

Real-time editing with other users is in development, probably released in 5-6 weeks.

You can technically put your own images in nodes currently, but the UI isn't explicit about how to do it. If you right click on a node, select format->style, the style string of the shape comes up. So pasting in "shape=image;image=http://www.jgraph.com/images/plug-image.png (not the quotes) puts a pretty plug in there.

But yes, you're quite right, we need to expose an easy way to do this on the UI

Has anyone else had a problem where the menus have no text. As in, I can't see the menus at all. I figured it might be a font problem but couldn't work out what it could be.

I have same issue. Latest patched Steam, 10.6.3. on 1,1 Mac Pro. Tried -autoconfig on launch in case of video issues. Runs fine on same system under BC, Win7. Menus are there and can find them after clicking around, dialog boxes also text-less.