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Espionage
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Until now it has been surprisingly difficult to protect a single folder on Mac OS X. In fact it hasn’t really been possible. Now, Espionage is here to solve that problem for good. Powerful and Intuitive
Espionage is much more than just a glorified interface for Disk Utility. It leverages a powerful event system called iSpy that enables it to integrate seamlessly with the system. Once a folder is under Espionage’s protection, double-clicking on it will bring up a password prompt:  Enter the correct password and your files appear. Right-click on the encrypted folder to re-lock. It’s that simple, the way we think it should have been in the first place. And because Espionage allows you to keep the notion of a folder, it can do something that so far only FileVault has been able to do: encrypt application data. With Espionage, you can encrypt your email, your chat histories for your favorite instant messaging client, your web browsing history and cookies, and more. Espionage now comes with 20 built-in application templates that make protecting yourself a piece of cake:  For a screencast demonstrating how to encrypt your email with Espionage, check out its homepage. Peace of Mind
With Espionage, you no longer have to worry about what happens if your computer is stolen, or about your friend reading your email while they borrow your computer. Nor do you have to worry about backing up your data, Espionage has you covered with its built-in backups:  Wicked Performance
Previously, if you wanted to encrypt your email or chat histories, you had to encrypt your entire home directory through FileVault, and this can cause a huge performance hit to the entire system. For laptop users, this also meant a shorter battery life as each time a program read and wrote to the hard drive it would have to perform expensive encryption and decryption operations. How slow? We performed some benchmarks on filesystems with and without encryption to find out, and the results are staggering:  By allowing you to choose what needs encryption and what doesn’t, Espionage can save you well over three times the performance for file access. This speeds up application launch times, and all disk-intensive operations. The result in a much more responsive system, and in most cases no performance hit at all. Laptop users can rejoice too, because now you can encrypt your files without having to worry about killing your battery life. During the benchmarks we sampled how idle the CPU was, and here are the results:  Reviews and User Comments
More Information + Video
More information, plus a video demonstrating how to use Espionage to encrypt application data can be found at its website: System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. |
April 18th, 2009 at 4:28 am
I need an application to encrypt files and document scans that I’ll be backing up to Jungle Disk or something similar. Would this be a good choice? Would something else be better or cheaper? It sounds easy to use, I like easy.
April 18th, 2009 at 6:48 am
Am I the only one that doesn’t understand the disk test results. From looking at them it would seem to me that in the disk test average results that the developer is claiming the exact opposite of what shows in the chart. Higher MB/sec means that there is more MB/sec which is faster.
In other words with the encryption there is a penalty in performance according to those benchmarks…not an increase.
At least that’s how I read it…judge for yourself.
April 18th, 2009 at 7:16 am
I’m interested in this because the on time I used one of these type things on a hard drive, I had a very difficult (and scary) time getting access to it again (plus it wouldn’t even show up as being there), so I said “no more”. However if this one doesn’t error and lock me out of my stuff, I’m in. I’ve been a little leary since that episode as I thought I was going to lose my stuff forever.
April 18th, 2009 at 8:55 am
@Techslacker, Sorry if we weren’t clear enough, the benchmarks demonstrate the savings in performance between using Espionage versus FileVault. Usually people only a tiny fraction of the data that’s in their home folder, thus Espionage allows them to encrypt only that portion without encrypting everything else. Perhaps “Wicked Performance Savings” would have been a better title for that section, but unfortunately macZOT! doesn’t allow us to change a ZOT once it’s live. For more detailed info on the benchmarks, see this link:
http://www.taoeffect.com/blog/2008/10/the-failure-of-vaults/
@macmac, You don’t have to worry about being unable to access your files with Espionage for even in the event there’s a problem with it, your files are always accessible in the hidden disk image that Espionage manipulates in the background. If you ever run into trouble we’re always quick to reply to urgent emails. You might also be interested to know that Espionage employs a “no-deletion” policy to keep it super-safe, in that it contains no code that would result in the deletion of any of your files. For example, after encrypting a folder, Espionage moves the original to the trash (and it lets you know that it does this) so that you can decide what to do with the original folder, whether it be to back it up to a CD or to securely delete it using the Finder.
@deb, We’ll test out JungleDisk with Espionage and let you know soon, but in the meantime you might want to read the help topic entitled “Backing up protected folders” in Espionage’s built-in help documentation, it may already answer your question. We put a lot of effort into that documentation so check it out! :-)
April 18th, 2009 at 10:28 am
This app is NOT as simple to set up as is claimed, at least in my experience. Maybe this is just my bad karma, but I report it as a warning to anyone trying it out. I’d be grateful for any explanation from the dev.
I downloaded Espionage to test and created a simple test folder on the desktop with a single RTF file inside created with TextEdit. I dragged this folder into the main window as instructed and gave it a password. I did nothing else and closed Espionage. When I double-clicked on the folder icon on the desktop, there was no window asking for the password. Instead the folder opened as normal but the text file inside had disappeared and instead there were three folders whose names told me in a sentence split between them that I had created an Espionage folder and should not try to alter it! There was no Lock item in the contextual menu and none appeared there even after I manually relaunched the finder and logged out and back in again.
I then restarted my Mac, only to find that all but three of my my Log-in items had disappeared! Espionage now works as promised, and the Lock item has appeared in the contextual menu but the only Log-in items in my account prefs left from what was a rather long list are Espionage Helper, History Hound and Dropbox. Everything else has gone and I will now have to manually replace them all.
I liked the idea of Espionage very much, but if it wreaks this havoc I’m uninstalling right away. I now have a lot of work ahead of me laboriously redoing all my Log-in items. Thanks a million guys! I’d like to love the app, but…
My machine is a G5 PPC, btw, running the latest OSX. Is this the problem, no Intel? There’s nothing on your site to indicate this.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:49 am
@Greg, until you define HD as something other than raw, normal hard drive performance, it appears the aes-128 and -256 are espionage’s work. After all, it uses the same encryption as filevault. Maybe state one is e’s sparse image 500MB folder using aes-128, or whatever it really is and the others are apple’s vilefault (ha!) mounted disk images.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:53 am
@mcoad, Sorry to hear about the trouble! This is certainly not normal behavior. We’ve tested Espionage on a variety of system configurations and in all cases it works without a problem, but there’s always the possibility that a user has a piece of software installed that can conflict with Espionage, almost always this is software that injects code into Espionage, breaking it. Currently the number one offender is Logitech’s Control Center, which is infamous for its ability to break third-party software (more about that here: http://blog.macromates.com/2007/logitech-control-center/).
If you run into any more trouble with your login items, send us an email and we’ll be more than happy to work with you to quickly find and fix the problem.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:59 am
@jon, I’m not sure I follow you completely, the AES-128 benchmarks would be the same whether it is Espionage or FileVault that is being discussed, as they use the exact same thing as you point out. The benchmarks simply show the cost of encrypting data.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Greg, thanks for the reply – and, btw, your rapid responses on the forum are much appreciated. I saw on your site that the Logitech CC is a problem, but I don’t have it. I’ve restored a few Log-in items and will try reinstalling and see what happens. Will report back then…
April 18th, 2009 at 11:34 am
I can vouch for this app. Great features, and the Greg, part of the Tao Effect team is very helpful. He will go out of his way to get your issues sorted out. Great app, even better price!
April 18th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Something on my system is definitely conflicting with Espionage. I reinstalled, tried another test folder and the same thing happened. After I restarted, with a few log-in items put back, everything worked fine. But when I reinstalled all my log-in items from Time Machine and restarted, the problems came back. The log-in items haven’t been wiped again, but Espionage doesn’t work – I just get the mysterious three files whose names read “This folder contains encrypted data“, “It is controlled by Espionage†and “Do not modify it in this state.â€
I’ll email Greg with the details and some screenshots so as not to abuse the forum any longer. But if anyone else is having the same trouble, do let the forum and Greg know to help get to the bottom of it.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
When creating sparsebundle disk images, they start off small and grow in size. What happens when you delete files from these “folders”. I could not find any information on the website that the application will shrink these images to save on disk space.
After installing the app, the help file does not mention if these images will be shrinked to save on disk space. If I expose the disk image it does not appear I can alter it in a safe way.
The default size is 2GB but what happens if you exceed the limit or choose a smaller size originally. Does the disk image get increased automatically or do you have to create a new folder. It certainly would be a pain to create a new folder because it would have to be encrypted all over again and on a large folder that would take some time.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Ah, i see. The charts do make sense. Your solution is a regaining of performance loss caused by filevault’s wide reach.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
@ray, The MIC can be adjusted to your liking, and if a folder is larger than it then the folder’s capacity is set to 10 times the size of the folder. You can actually set the MIC to a really large value and it won’t significantly add to the size of the encrypted folder. The folder will then grow up to it. It’s very rare when you actually fill up a folder to its capacity, but we are preparing an update that will perform re-compaction on the disk image and will allow you to adjust its capacity as well. This feature will appear in a free update. If in the unlikely event you do actually need to perform these operations before Espionage fully supports them, you can always do so via the ‘hdiutil’ command. Of course, we understand that some users hate using the Terminal, which is why we’re working to add this feature soon.
@jon, That’s right. :-)
April 19th, 2009 at 12:06 am
I bought this right away after checking out the demo on their website during the Friday Zot preview. I haven’t had any problems (and thanks for sending the serial number right away rather than after the promotion) but I am sweating bullets that something might go wrong in the future because of the Logitech Control Center issue since I use LCC for my Revolution mouse. I have Steermouse and ControllerMate but the Logitech hyper scroll (or whatever it’s called) is only available using LCC so I’ve been putting up with the horrible LCC driver. I have to Force Quit and restart the driver every few hours!!! I haven’t restarted my computer since Friday so I hope there aren’t any problems…(Luckily I do a clone once a week and have TimeMachine active just in case…)
April 19th, 2009 at 1:59 am
Just wondering if anyone know where I can get a copy of the trial.
The website is down and the macupdate/iusethis/etc links all point to TaoEffect website – I can’t download it to try it?
If MacZot know how to contact TaoEffect – now’s the time :)
April 19th, 2009 at 3:12 am
All working now – thank you!
April 19th, 2009 at 4:52 am
how do I uninstall it?
April 19th, 2009 at 7:18 am
I had the same incidence today as “mcoad” above when I restarted my Mac. I am currently evaluating Espionage and encrypted one folder which on restart (at this time the Espionage main app wasn’t running) showed 3 apparently empty folders in it which were named “This folder contains encrypted data“, “It is controlled by Espionage†and “Do not modify it in this stateâ€.
I actually thought this to be normal behaviour and started Espionage and was able to normally click on the encrypted folder (at this time the three abovementioned empty folders within the encrypted folder disappeared) and was prompted for the password for the encrypted folder which after typing the password completely restored its contents without any problems whatsoever. And my log-in items seemed to not have been alteredor vanished (although it’s also a pretty long list of items so I can only guess they are all still in there).
Since the three folders seemed to being deliberately named in a way you can actually read the entire warning in Finders column view I reckon this has to be intentional behavoiur of Espionage.
Maybe Greg can give us a hint as to what the behaviour of Espionage with those three folders it seems to create is all about. It must be some sort of behaviour of the app that the devs have built in intentionally to my assumption.
I actually also have LCC installed on my MacBook Pro and came across posts in other forums in the past regarding its wicked behavoiur to other apps but never experienced any problems so far. I always wanted to get rid of LCC but have yet to find a keyboard/mouse combo that is as comfortable to use as the LT S530 Mac Edition.
April 19th, 2009 at 10:14 am
John, uninstalling is a doddle. Just go to the Espionage app menu in the menu bar. Uninstall is available there.
Interesting that Jo* had a similar problem as me. Did you send the system log to Greg? If you like, they can send you a small app that will gather all they need for a report for you to send it. What I’m finding now, like you, is that everything seems to work okay when I manually launch Espionage itself, but if not I get the three folders, presumably because the helper daemon isn’t working behind the scenes as it should be.
I have to add, though, that despite this hassle I’m really impressed with the devs. Their response is immediate and friendly, they are obviously very serious and dedicated people, and Espionage is a carefully thought-out app which does a tricky job very elegantly. What they’re doing is one of the trickiest to manage without unexpected app conflicts leaping out to bite you, it seems to my non-tech eyes. But in principle this is by far the smoothest implementation of routine encrypment out there. Greg has been very helpful and is currently working on what I’ve sent him, and if we can get it sorted I’m certainly in. Kudos to them.
April 19th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
DEVELOPER Questions: (?_?)
- How long is this license good for?
- Approximately when is the next major upgrade planned and when will “we” be paying for an upgrade?
Thanks for this discount offer.
(^_^)
April 19th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
@Enlightened411, There is no different between this license and the one that you would normally buy through us. We don’t know when the next major upgrade will be, but what we can say is that there won’t be a payed upgrade anytime soon (we just had one from 1.x -> 2.x). We plan on working on the 2.x series for a long time.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I am having the same problem as Mcoad.
I now cannot get my files back. Greg did send me some help, but, alas, all to no avail.
Anyone else got any ideas of how I can get my files back?