New API client library: Perl

We now have a perl client library for our API thanks to Kyle Dawkins. The code is available on Github and CPAN. Here's an example:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use Net::OneTimeSecret;

# Note: replace these with yours in order for this to work!
my $customerId  = '[email protected]';
my $testApiKey  = '4dc74a03fwr9aya5qur5wa8vavo4gih1hasj6181';

my $api = Net::OneTimeSecret->new( $customerId, $testApiKey );
my $result = $api->shareSecret( 'Jazz, jazz and more jazz.',
                   passphrase => 'thepassword',
                   recipient => '[email protected]',
                   ttl => 7200,
                 );
printf( "%s\n", $result->{secret_key} );

my $secret = $api->retrieveSecret( $result->{secret_key}, passphrase => "thepassword" );
printf( "%s\n", $secret->{value} );

If you implement a client library in another language, let us know and we'll post about it here.

'Good' vs 'Strong' passwords

One of my pet peeves about security is people who advocate for 'strong' passwords. Everyone knows these people; they're the tech support person who tells you your password must have a minimum number of characters that you only use when censoring expletives. Even worse, some of them use a random password generator to assign a password to you that you're unable to change. The argument for this is that if you have a wider range of characters in your password, you have greater entropy and therefore it is harder for your password to be hacked. While there is some truth to that, there are numerous flaws in the logic when using it to determine a good security policy: