Thanks for your interest in my ongoing work, presumably as evidenced by your being here. Or, phrased another way, you might be here because you are wondering WTF is going on with me, GRC, SpinRite, SQRL and anything else. I will attempt to satisfy those questions.
I’m posting this today (April 18th, 2019) because I have moved this blog to my own server. The two blogs I had at “steve.grc.com” & “blog.grc.com” have always been hosted at wordpress.org. But I needed to bring up a PHP-enabled server to host our first ever public web forums, in support of SQRL (see the link in the header above). We will also eventually have public web forms for SpinRite and other future projects, so SQRL is only the first. Since WordPress is written in PHP, and my annual contract with wordpress.org will be ending in a month, I decided that this would also be a good time to consolidate those two blogs and bring up my own WordPress blog on my own server.
This first post serves as a placeholder so that those who were subscribed to my original “steve.grc.com” blog can subscribe to this one before that blog disappears from the world. But while I’m here, as promised above, I’ll take a few minutes to explain where things stand:
Long time SpinRite fans are pretty much furious with me for allowing SpinRite to remain untouched and un-updated for 15 years. I get that. Believe me… I really really really do get that. And I truly cannot wait to be able to return to work on SpinRite. But as you will see once you become familiar with SQRL, it really does solve the problem of using secrets (passwords) and usernames or email, to sign-in to websites. A few people who were furious with me for spending so much time (about 5+ years) to perfect SQRL started to understand once they used it. So, once I had the idea for SQRL I had to make it happen. And it didn’t seem as though it was something I could propose and then delegate without making sure that my original vision was at least given a chance to succeed. SQRL is just about to have that chance.
Once SQRL has been officially released I will immediately be returning to work on v6.1 of SpinRite. The best true apology I can offer is not to call the next version v7.0 an ask for an upgrade fee, but to instead call it v6.1 and make it a free upgrade for all v6.0 owners… even for those who purchased v6.0 15 years ago in 2004 when it was finished and released.
So, that’s where things stand. SQRL is working. You can use it right now to log into the SQRL forums and several other test sites. There are working clients for Windows, iOS and Android, as well as a web extension that runs on Firefox and Chrome (and the Chromium version of Edge). I’m within a few days of taking my own SQRL client for Windows (which is WINE compatible so that it can be used on macOS and Linux) to v1.0.
I plan to post updates here on my status and on what’s going on, not only about SQRL but also about SpinRite v6.1… and anything else that I think needs saying.
Thanks for your interest and for your participation! Onward!
/Steve.