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By Jon L. Jacobi

Freelance contributor, PCWorld | Jul 17, 2017 11:30 PM PT

Macrium was one of the first to release a free version of its backup software. Ten years later, to the benefit of users everywhere, Reflect Free 6 remains a stable, reliable way to quickly image and restore your system. It doesn't offer as much functionality as Aomei's Backupper, but there's something to be said for a backup program that hasn't failed its fans in over a decade.

Though Reflect is a bit old-school in appearance, the look somehow works better with the free version. Fewer options, less clutter, cleaner lines. Reflect Free is limited to imaging disks or individual partitions (no cloning, file backup, or other choices), but there's an option to select only those partitions required to restore the Windows operating system.

If you want file and folder backup, you'll need one of the pay ($70 or more) versions. Same deal with incremental backup, though the free version does support differential (all changes since the initial backup). Note that even the pay versions back up only folders, not individual files. You can always drag files to a folder, but it's still a slightly puzzling omission.

Reflect Free offers extensive schedule options and differential backup.

You may not be able to back up specific files or folders with Reflect Free, but there are extensive scheduling options and retention rules (how long to keep and what to delete when space is low), and jobs are saved as standard XML files. Password protection and email notifications are availableonly in the pay versions.

Several flavors of the Windows PE boot environment are supported by Reflect Free 6

Reflect Free supports both MBR and GPT disks (it was late to the GPT game), and it has a great boot media creator, which lets you change flavors of Windows PE to best suit the operating system being backed up. It also lets you choose the drivers you want to install. PE allows driver injection (adding them at restore time), so you're likely okay there anyway.

Macrium claims increased performance for the latest version 7, of which a free version is promised soon. That might be nice, as Reflect Free 6 took just over nine minutes to perform our 115GB system backup. That's about two minutes slower than any of the competition, though CPU usage was minimal. Backup generally takes place during off hours or in the background, so we don't lend performance a lot of weight in our evaluations.

On the bright side, the free version of Reflect spawns only a single background process, down from the three that the pay versions create. And much better than the six invoked by Acronis True Image.

If all you want to do is image your system or data, then Macrium Reflect Free 6 is a great way to do it. We've been using it for seemingly forever, and it's never let us down yet. That counts.

If you want sync or plain file copying, then look at the equally free Aomei Backupper Standard or Paragon Backup & Recovery. There's no rule against having more than one backup program installed.

on https://www.macrium.com/

This venerable freebie offers more than enough power for the average user. If all you want to do is create backup images of your system and disks, Macrium Reflect Free is a very reliable way to do it. Read the full review

Jon is a Juilliard-trained musician, self-taught programmer, and long-time (late 70s) computer enthusiast living the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Macrium Reflect Free review - PCWorld - PCWorld

Bitcoin reversed steep losses as miners began using new software which aims to bridge an ideological gap that has threatened to divide the cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins community has been at bitter odds for more than two years about how to solve its scaling problem, which has hampered the cryptocurrencys growth and allowed rivals like ethereum to steal some of the spotlight.

The new software, known as SegWit2x, is seen as a compromise for the two sides of the debate: miners who deploy costly computers to verify transactions and act as the backbone of the blockchain, and developers known as Core who uphold bitcoins bug-free software. While both sides have incentives to reach a consensus, bitcoins lack of central authority has made reaching agreement difficult.

The price of bitcoin rose to as high as $2,356 before trading at $2,348 as of 2:22 p.m. in New York. The digital currency slumped to as low as $1,758 over the weekend on Coinbases exchange. Bitcoin, which has more then doubled this year, climbed to just shy of $3,000 on June 12.

SegWit2x was formally released over the weekend and has already gained adoption by large miners Antpool, BTCC and Bixin. About 55 percent of blocks mined in the last 24 hours were done with SegWit2x, according to coin.dance, which monitors blockchain activity.

If support reaches 80 percent and maintains that threshold from more than two days, it will move bitcoin closer to avoiding a split.

Traders are excited by the prospect of a resolution to the scaling debate, which is why the price has rallied, said Thomas Glucksmann, head of marketing at Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange Gatecoin.

Read more about bitcoins civil war.

Despite the progress with SegWit2x, some warned that bitcoin isnt out of the woods yet. Many Core members still vehemently oppose the software, which they say hasnt been properly vetted for bugs. Also, not all miners support SegWit2x, which they say is a flawed compromise that doesnt solve the root scaling problem.

This price rally is a bounce, we are very bearish in the near term for a number of reasons, said Harry Yeh, managing partner at digital currency dealer Binary Financial, who cites the lack of support from Core developers as one of his biggest worries. Anytime the price rockets up quickly, it will be followed by a strong correction which we are starting to see. We are definitely headed for some turbulent and volatile times in the short term.

See the rest here:
Bitcoin Jumps After First Solution to Major Ideological Divide - Bloomberg

PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Free & Fair, a startup developing transparent, cyber secure and verifiable elections systems, today announced it has been selected by the State of Colorado to develop a high-assurance, open source software system to help state and local officials implement risk-limiting post-election audits.

A risk-limiting audit (RLA) is an evidence-based method that checks the integrity of election outcomes by comparing a random sampling of paper ballots to their corresponding digital versions. Colorado is the first U.S. state to require RLAs on a regular basis, starting with the November 2017 off-year election.

RLAs are better and more efficient than the random post-election audits they will replace in Colorado, because they generally require a smaller number of ballots to be audited but still provide a much higher statistical probability that the outcome is correct. At the same time, election experts also consider RLAs an essential component of a secure election process that can protect against both inadvertent tabulation errors and malicious cyberattacks.

Supporting Quotes: Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams Over the past decade, in academic journals and elsewhere, a large number of accomplished political scientists, statisticians and election integrity activists have advocated the theory and benefits of risk-limiting tabulation audits. In simple terms, and with a high level of statistical probability that has never existed before, RLAs will limit the risk that Colorado or any of its counties will certify official election results if the outcome is not correct.

Neal McBurnett, nationally recognized expert on implementation of election audits and a member of the Free & Fair implementation team Colorado has been a pioneer in moving election audits forward since 2004, and risk-limiting audits represent the most innovative work on the planet on efficient tabulation audits.

Dr. Joseph Kiniry, Free & Fair CEO and internationally recognized security expert Colorados leadership in elections auditing should be a beacon for the rest of America, and we look forward to seeing risk-limiting audits deployed in the other 49 states. And because the new RLA software system will be open source, other jurisdictions around the country will be able to use it at low cost to audit their own election results.

Ron Rivest, world-renowned cryptographer and Turing Prize winner "Using paper ballots, ensuring effective chain of custody of those paper ballots, and confirming the correctness of election outcomes with statistical post-election audits are among the very best tools we have for securing our elections."

About Free & Fair

Free & Fairs mission is to bring open source, high-assurance elections to the world. Based in Portland, Oregon, Free & Fair provides elections services and systems meeting higher reliability and security standards than the US federal government demands for national security.

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Colorado Selects Free & Fair to Develop Software Tools for First ... - Business Wire (press release)

GnuPGP still has many important uses today.

Most people have never heard of the software that makes up the machinery of the internet. Outside developer circles, its authors receive little reward for their efforts, in terms of either money or public recognition.

One example is the encryption software GNU Privacy Guard (also known as GnuPG and GPG), and its authors are regularly forced to fundraise to continue the project.

GnuPG is part of the GNU collection of free and open source software, but its story is an interesting one, and it begins with software engineer Phil Zimmermann.

We do not know exactly what Zimmermann felt on January 11, 1996, but relief is probably a good guess. The United States government had just ended its investigation into him and his encryption software, PGP or Pretty Good Privacy.

In the 1990s, the US restricted the export of strong cryptography, viewing it as sensitive technology that had once been the exclusive purview of the intelligence and military establishment. Zimmermann had been facing serious punishment for posting PGP on the internet in 1991, which could have been seen as a violation of the Arms Export Control Act.

To circumvent US export regulations and ship the software legally to other countries, hackers even printed the source code as a book, which would allow anyone to scan it at its destination and rebuild the software from scratch.

Zimmermann later worked with the PGP Corporation, which helped define PGP as an open internet standard, OpenPGP. A number of software packages implement this standard, of which GnuPG is perhaps the best-known.

PGP implements a form of cryptography that is known as asymmetric cryptography or public-key cryptography.

The story of its discovery is itself worth telling. It was invented in the 1970s by researchers at the British intelligence service GCHQ and then again by Stanford University academics in the US, although GCHQs results were only declassified in 1997.

Asymmetric cryptography gives users two keys. The so-called public key is meant to be distributed to everyone and is used to encrypt messages or verify a signature. The private or secret key must be known only to the user. It helps decrypt messages or sign them - the digital equivalent of a seal to prove origin and authenticity.

Zimmermann published PGP because he believed that everybody has a right to private communication. PGP was meant to be used for email, but could be used for any kind of electronic communication.

Despite Zimmermanns work, the dream of free encryption for everyone never quite came to full bloom.

Neither Zimmermanns original PGP nor the later GnuPG managed to become entirely user-friendly. Both use highly technical language, and the latter is still known for being accessible only by typing out commands - an anachronism even in the late 1990s, when most operating systems already used the mouse.

Many users did not understand why they should encrypt their email at all, and attempts to integrate the tools with email clients were not particularly intuitive.

Big corporations such as Microsoft, Google and Apple shunned it to this day, they do not ship PGP with their products, although some are now implementing forms of end-to-end encryption.

Finally, there was the issue of distributing public keys - they had to be made available to other people to be useful. Private initiatives never gathered much attention. In fact, a number of academic studies in the early and late 2000s showed that these attempts never managed to attract widespread public usage.

The release of the Edward Snowden documents in 2013 spurred renewed interest in PGP. Crypto parties became a global phenomenon when people met in person to exchange their public keys, but this was ultimately short-lived.

When I met Zimmermann in Silicon Valley in 2015, he admitted that he did not currently use PGP. In a more recent email, he said this is because it does not run on current versions of macOS or iOS. I may soon run GnuPG, he wrote.

By todays standards, GnuPG like all implementations of OpenPGP lacks additional security features that are provided by chat apps such as WhatsApp or Signal. Both are spiritual descendants of PGP and unthinkable without Zimmermanns invention, but they go beyond what OpenPGP can do by protecting messages even in the case of a private key being lost.

Whats more, email reveals the sender and receiver names anyway. In the age of data mining, this is often enough to infer the contents of encrypted communication.

Nevertheless, GnuPG (and hence OpenPGP) are alive and well. Relative to the increased computational power available today, their cryptography is as strong today as it was in 1991. GnuPG just found new use cases - very important ones.

Journalists use it to allow their sources to deposit confidential data and leaks. This is a vital and indispensable method of self-protection for the leaker and the journalist.

But even more importantly, digital signatures are where GnuPG excels today.

Linux is one of the worlds most common operating system (it even forms the basis of Android). On internet servers that run Linux, software is downloaded and updated from software repositories - and most of them sign their software with GnuPG to confirm its authenticity and origin.

GnuPG works its magic behind closed curtains, once again.

Read the rest here:
A brief history of GnuPG: vital to online security but free and underfunded - The Conversation AU

Seattle, Washington-based BloomAPI has raised $2.4 million for its medical records processing software. Y Combinator, Slow Ventures, Founders Co-Op, Section 32, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Parker Conrad all contributed to the round.

HIPAA allows anyone to ask for and receive their medical records. But EHR systems arent always designed with an elegant way to get records out of the system, leading to a status quo where records are often printed out and then faxed, mailed, or hand-delivered to patients, as well as to insurance companies that might need them.

BloomAPI is aiming to tackle that problem by installing a free software at practices that allows them to release records securely, easily, and electronically. The company has 300 doctors in its network currently and helps transmit records for more than a million patients.

While the software is free to providers and sits on their existing systems, BloomAPI makes money by selling access to its API to insurers and other vendors. That product is called ChartPull.

Interoperability between health records has long been a goal in healthcare, one that still seems a long way off. Whats interesting about the BloomAPI approach is that, rather than tackling the huge problem of enabling seamless data sharing between EHRs, the company is just trying to make the current status quo record requests a little more high-tech. While electronically requesting and transmitting records might not be as good as real data exchange, its still quite a bit better than printing and faxing.

This is the first round of funding for the company, and it will go toward hiring engineering, operations, and sales staff in the Seattle area.

Read more:
BloomAPI gets $2.4M to digitize records requests - MobiHealthNews