Home › Forums › SharewareOnSale Deals Discussion › Confidential / Nov 11 2018
- This topic has 13 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 6 years ago by Peter Blaise.
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AshrafKeymaster
Have something to say about Confidential? Say it here!
Have suggestions, comments, or need help? Post it here! If you know of better software than Confidential, post it here! If you know of issues with Confidential, post it here! Share your knowledge with all of us. :-)
AssiePeteGuestI think someone should write a better promo for them because I’m not even sure what it does, never mind deciding if I need it or not. I think I may wait to read some comments and reviews before deciding. Thank you for the offer regardless.
Peter BlaiseGuest1 – BAD NAME: “Confidential” is a horrible name because the word already has a plethora of meanings, and do I really want a subdirectory on my computer named “Confidential” if I do not have one already — hello, any hacker / cracker will be drawn to that like flies to honey. I suggest “Commander Tagger” ( inside joke referring to the movie Galaxy Quest ), or “Gate Keeper” or “AtoZ Sorter” or something arbitrary like GIDNORK ( really, I just randomly typed that ).
2 – NOT ENOUGH PRE-INFO TO INSTALL: This is a raw programming tool for full-time-paid administrators who have way too much time on their hands, and involves making decisions on installation that only someone with vast experience with this software can make, they should simplify and automate, rather than expect me to know why I want to name a database without characters that I always use when naming other files ( no hyphens permitted ! ), or put the database in a location that … should I want this portable on a USB thumb drive or in a location outside my filing system, such as the root, or in the cloud, or where? I don’t know. How will I use the database, how will I back it up, how will I use it after crash recovery, how will I use it when I migrate to my next generation computers and also migrate my data, how will I inspect drives about to leave my property before they go to insure they are “clean”, how will I catalog my offline backup disks and discs and thumbdrives? Will it understand the contents of zip and 7z ( required so Windows 10 does not deny access to collected and compressed zipped data ) file storage … and so on?
3 – TOO COMPLICATED AND ARCANE: This is a raw programming tool for full-time-paid administrators who have way too much time on their hands, and involves making decisions on installation that only someone with vast experience with this software can make, ( didn’t I write that already ? ), and it’s third complaint about my attempted installation is a cryptic and unresolvable message:
“… Error … A network related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. ( provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 – Error Locating Server / Instance Specified ) … Sql Exception Number = -1 …”
That’s a show stopper right there.
4 – INSECURE ! : Their installation file has no file date in the security certificate, let’s get dangerous, risky, and unauthored, able to be scammed!
5 – WRONG HELP: See their web pages and help for more, but get ready to stop all other human activities ( eating, sleeping ) until you figure this out and master it, and prepare to uninstall and reinstall it at least 3 times over 3 months as you realize only after each installation attempt that there is way more to each installation decision than they were able to pre-warn you about, and you have to start over from scratch to reconfigure everything using your newly acquired experience.
They direct you to
[ https ://tabbles. net/wiki/index.php?title=Tabbles_Manual_(EN)#Setting_up_Tabbles ]
yes “Tabbles” in order to figure out their “Confidential” program … good luck imagining your own version of “Tabbles” instructions and applying them to their “Confidential” program.Show stopper right there.
6 – WHY ? : And for what .. for GDPR General Data Protection Regulations compliance? Uh huh. Meaning … ?
Thanks for sharing, I hope someone dives in and tells us how to implement it, and why.
.Mr.DaveGuestIt looks like they are using the Tabbles program as the underlying engine for this Confidential program. Very nice to see a giveaway licensed for commercial use. After reading the (as usual) excellent comments from Peter Blaise, it looks like they need to do a better job of describing what this does, why you need it and what other software it requires. In my experience something like this would normally be sold by some consulting company, with 2 or 3 sales meetings up front to see if it’s a good fit and whether they can convince the client that they have a problem requiring a solution costing a large amount, then a team to help install & train followed by a very high annual maintenance fee. If you need this you probably already know all about GDPR (I don’t!). From my understanding of Tabbles, it would be a very useful tool for tracking and managing confidential data, especially in a corporate environment. It looks like they added something to scan files for specific data formats so people won’t have to search through every single file — a very big improvement if it works well.
alirezaGuesthow can disable intro tutorial panel for every click on system tray icon?
Andrea D’IntinoGuestHi Peter,
note from the developers:
1 – BAD NAME: “Confidential” is a horrible name because the word already has a plethora of meanings, and do I really want a subdirectory on my computer named “Confidential” if I do not have one already — hello, any hacker / cracker will be drawn to that like flies to honey. I suggest “Commander Tagger” ( inside joke referring to the movie Galaxy Quest ), or “Gate Keeper” or “AtoZ Sorter” or something arbitrary like GIDNORK ( really, I just randomly typed that ).
Ok :)
Any hacker that access that subdirectory won’t find anything interesting as the config files and the database files are in %appdata%\Confidential2 – NOT ENOUGH PRE-INFO TO INSTALL: This is a raw programming tool for full-time-paid administrators who have way too much time on their hands, and involves making decisions on installation that only someone with vast experience with this software can make, they should simplify and automate, rather than expect me to know why I want to name a database without characters that I always use when naming other files ( no hyphens permitted ! ), or put the database in a location that … should I want this portable on a USB thumb drive or in a location outside my filing system, such as the root, or in the cloud, or where? I don’t know. How will I use the database, how will I back it up, how will I use it after crash recovery, how will I use it when I migrate to my next generation computers and also migrate my data, how will I inspect drives about to leave my property before they go to insure they are “clean”, how will I catalog my offline backup disks and discs and thumbdrives? Will it understand the contents of zip and 7z ( required so Windows 10 does not deny access to collected and compressed zipped data ) file storage … and so on?
Well yes, we could have done a better job in the copywriting of the promo…
But about the database part, the software is designed so that users just click the big blue GO button at first launch (which is what 99% of them do)… I recommend everyone to stick to pressing the GO button (hopefully after having read the text around it), try the “Local” mode and follow the tutorials.3 – TOO COMPLICATED AND ARCANE: This is a raw programming tool for full-time-paid administrators who have way too much time on their hands, and involves making decisions on installation that only someone with vast experience with this software can make, ( didn’t I write that already ? ), and it’s third complaint about my attempted installation is a cryptic and unresolvable message:
See above.
“… Error … A network related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. ( provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 – Error Locating Server / Instance Specified ) … Sql Exception Number = -1 …”
I guess this is connected with my answer from above: if you try the local option the software will run using Microsoft SQL LocalDb in a transparent way, and you shouldn’t get any connection error.
4 – INSECURE ! : Their installation file has no file date in the security certificate, let’s get dangerous, risky, and unauthored, able to be scammed!
This is what puzzled me the most, as we’ve never heard about this complain before :-)
Indeed I found an article about this, we’ll try to get this sorted in the next builds. In the meanwhile, while there is no timestamp, the installer is digitally signed (with a Comodo signature that is valid for the next year or so) and as long you got the installer from Confidential.tech it should be ours :-)5 – WRONG HELP: See their web pages and help for more, but get ready to stop all other human activities ( eating, sleeping ) until you figure this out and master it, and prepare to uninstall and reinstall it at least 3 times over 3 months as you realize only after each installation attempt that there is way more to each installation decision than they were able to pre-warn you about, and you have to start over from scratch to reconfigure everything using your newly acquired experience.
As above, I recommend you press the GO button at first launch.
They direct you to
[ https ://tabbles. net/wiki/index.php?title=Tabbles_Manual_(EN)#Setting_up_Tabbles ]
yes “Tabbles” in order to figure out their “Confidential” program … good luck imagining your own version of “Tabbles” instructions and applying them to their “Confidential” program.That’s correct: as someone else pointed out, Confidential is indeed a “fork” of Tabbles, done by the same people as re-branding activity. This was based on GE use case of Tabbles and Confidential is in fact a super-set of features of Tabbles (it includes the explorer-tags, so you have 4 tags that you can assign from Windows Explorer’s Context menu and see in Windows Explorer when browsing). Since the software is the same (and the company behind it is the same) we figure we could stick to a single user manual.
6 – WHY ? : And for what .. for GDPR General Data Protection Regulations compliance? Uh huh. Meaning … ?
On confidential.tech you read “GDPR solution for unstructured data”. I guess you have heard about GDPR… again we could have done a better job with the copyright here, but I recommend you have a look at our website too.
Regards,
AndreaAndrea D’IntinoGuest[@alireza]
That will go away as you shut down and launch Confidential again.
Peter BlaiseGuest.
Thanks, [ Andrea D’Intino ], for your reply, but …… I looked at the YouTube video ( that pops up locally but won’t play locally ? ), and it appears that your program has absolutely no intelligence about GDPR, or anything that we users consider at risk, data contents wise.
That is, it has no idea how to search file contents and AUTOMATICALLY identify information that would be of a concern to GDPR or to ourselves, or to anyone, personally, professionally, security wise, risk wise, liability wise.
That is, we, the end user, apparently have to tell this program everything that we think we know about GDPR-sensitive information ( … but there is no GDPR reference in the program to teach us what GDPR means to us ), we apparently have to tell this program our own specific character-by-character proper spelling concerns, we apparently tell this program everything that we think we have already told our computer before, and then we apparently have to tell this program to hunt for it, and hope that something good and useful will happen.
That is, if we have ANY file with risky content that we don’t know about, this program will not find it.
That is, this program is stupid ( ignorance is when you don’t know any better, stupid is when you do and you go ahead anyway ).
Sorry, but true.
For example, I have a teenageer who borrowed my computer for homework, and while doing so, created files containing GDPR-sensitive and personally-risky data BUT DID NOT TELL ME ABOUT IT — so how do I tell this program to find it?
For example, I download an email attachment from a friend that has a zipped photo file, and I don’t notice that it also has a data file in the zip file — so how do I tell this program to find it, especially the metadata that the camera created that neither my friend nor I know about?
I now load this program and … this program cannot seek and find that data or the metadata in the photo file that has my friend’s personal private information of when and where they took the photo, let alone the human-readable content of the photo, say, it’s a photo of a check they wrote to me, with bank account numbers and signature in plain sight.
And what about my cloud data on Facebook, public posts on Disqus, Quora, and so on, files I have uploaded anywhere, such as to TinyPic for sharing, Google Photos, MyShoeBox, such as photo files that contain medatada that tell folks when and where I go on vacation, where my home address is, and since I post my exciting vacation photos live as they happen, everyone can now know that I am not at home at the moment, so, burglars, have at it, my house is all yours for the taking!
This program has absolutely no ability on it’s own to find and identify any data, let alone any GDPR-sensitive data, or security risk, or privacy risk, or financial risk, or embarrassment risk, or any risk at all.
Dumb, dumber, dumbest.
— This program is dumb,
— data entry people like me are dumber ( I did not know my camera reveals my location, and the data and time when I was there, especially that I am there now, and not at home ),
— and I would be the dumbest to think that this program will find stuff I don’t know about because I have been lead to believe that this program is smarter then I am — it is not.Thanks anyway, but your program is inappropriate for it’s intended task.
It’s NRFPTY — Nerf Putty — Not Ready For Prime Time Yet.
Next.
__________Hey, kudos to you, [ Andrea D’Intino ], for designing an incredible resource with such powerful capabilities but … now get started on the really hard part.
AI artificial intelligence, ready to scan and pass / fail any computer, and possibly offer to clean it, at least to identify specifically what’s at risk, so that a human can take your program’s report and take action manually, manually review your program’s interactive report on screen with toggle on / off selections and a “go” button to clean, and or to move to another location, and or to zip / encrypt, and to scrub over the removed data areas with zeros, and to re-check … where your program:
[ 1 ] – works anonymously from a thumb drive, wiping it’s insertion history from the registry upon removal
[ 2 ] – scans every sector / cluster for contents, not just files, but slack and free “erased” areas that still contain passwords, banking numbers, parts of images, image metadata, fragments of personal documents, and so on — and check memory through a reboot cycle to ensure nothing remains in memory.
[ 3 ] – builds a database of computers scanned, where and when, all contents and actions taken and confirmed effective — data moved to where, data erased and confirmed zeroed, and so on — all on a local thumbdrive child-database that is mergeable with a central parent-database of all USB tools periodically, a parent database that has it’s own auditable and actionable reports.
Easy as 1, 2, 3, no?
;-)
Thanks for getting started.
.Andrea D’IntinoGuestHi Peter,
I don’t like your tone and I won’t cry about the fact that you don’t like our tool.
The only thing I agree with you is the fact that the target for Confidential is typically corporate, so unsurprisingly someone is confused about seeing it here.
Said that, not only you clearly don’t know what GDPR is, nor what data loss protection means (which is in fact ok!), but you didn’t even look at the 3 pages of the confidential.tech website, cause if you did you would have seen that we have build several “queries” (auto-tagging rules) that you can import (to scrape your hard drives for example for email addresses, credit card numbers or social security numbers). Neither you picked up the ball and went to check the Tabbles website, whose website explains the features of the software much better.
On top of this, your recommendations are totally off-target as Confidential is a tool to work with FILES, on shared drives, or Dropbox like solutions and has nothing to do with web-located data like facebook.
Peter BlaiseGuest.
Got it, [ Andrea D’Intino ],For you, “automated” means “you can [ manually externally hunt for, and manually ] import” … because the program doesn’t know how to do GDPR-related tasks OOB out of the box, so to speak.
And for you, “has nothing to do with web-located data” means, well, means nothing, since you yourself claim it has to do with “Dropbox”, as you wrote, and Dropbox is web-located data … and except for “Tag files on local drives, shared folders and in the Cloud ( Dropbox, OneDrive, Box.com, Amazon Cloud Drive etc. )” as in your product description here on Shareware On Sale’s opening page for your software, and, if anyone wanders to your product web page, they are promised that your software “Works on local drives, shared-drives and Cloud folders” ( well, good start on being aware of users being responsible for some web data at Dropbox at least, nonetheless ).
I was going to review the “Confidential” instruction reference manual for “GDPR solution for unstructured data” as your promotion promised “Confidential” is purposely built for … but there’s no instruction reference manual — apparently “Confidential” is not immediately ready to support anyone’s desires to audit and control GDPR compliance … hence my “Not Ready For Prime Time Yet” observation about your software.
FYI for your information, here at Software On sale is where you offer a full version of your program in the hopes of getting valuable insight from those of us willing to give your software a try and give you feedback, your chance to see how a new and random audience experiences your software, a chance for you to build up some goodwill in an expanding worldwide arena, where you listen, help fix anything that malfunctions if you can, and, to those of us who spend our time and energy turning our computers over to testing your offering, and giving you feedback in this thread, you always, always say “thank you”.
You’re welcome
( PS — Web dialogs are text, not tone. )
.Peter BlaiseGuest.
GDPR wise and “data scraping” wise, Tag-Forge ( the parent company of “Tabbles” and it’s off-shoot here of “Confidential” ) has collected a few scripts that we can manually find and manually download and manually import and manually modify to our local or other personal preferences and then manually implement, read on, read on, the answer’s at the end.IF these GDPR scripts were included in today’s SOS download, or IF these GDPR scripts were even at least linked to in today’s SOS download or IF these GDPR scripts were linked to in the subsequent post from the programmer, THEN a significant portion of negative feedback — that the program was empty of GDPR-awareness and sensitive-data-awareness — might have been avoided ( see what I did there, an IF / THEN programming statement ! ).
The GDPR scripts:
[ Sensitive Info #1 ]
(Updated 16.05.18) This is a first attempt to put together a list of auto-tagging rules to scrape and auto-tag. Most of the regex where found on RegExLib. This list contains rules to match:
— Name of all the danish cities with more than 2500 inhabitants (around 1000 cities) [FIXED, this caused to trigger any character]
— Credit card numbers from the major credit card companies (Visa, Mastercard, Amex…)
— Danish CPR number (check on wikipedia)
— Email addresses (RFC 5322 Official Standard)
— Italian Codice Fiscale (check on wikipedia)
— USA Social security codes (this regex gives a lot of false positives, but since the pattern is so simple, it’s to be expected)[ UK Passport, National Insurance Number and Postcodes ( promised, but NOT available ) ]
(Updated 20.06.18) Upon a user request we put together a database of UK Documents :
— UK Passport based on this regex
— UK National Insurance number based on this regex [Updated: less permissive regex, less false positives]
— UK Postcodes
… but not really available, as they duplicate the link to the German download here, so the UK scripts are not really available yet.[ German Zip Code, tax code and more ]
Various German codes, including:
— German Zip Code (Postleitzahl – PLZ), matches the numeric part
— German personal tax number (Steuernummer)
— German health insurance number (Versicherungsnummer)
— German army ID number (Personenkennziffer)
— German VAT Number[ JMBG (former Jugoslavia) and OIB (Croatian) ]
Various personal identification codes, including:
— Former Yugoslavia Unique Master Citizen Number (JMBG)
— Croatian Personal Identification Number (OIB)
[Note: currently it checks for 11 digits strings, so it will give false positives]How to find them:
Download the above mentioned zipped xml scripts at various places from Tag-Forge, such as:
[ https ://www.confidential . tech/gdpr-compliance-for-unstructured-data/ ]
[ https ://tabbles . net/data-mining-file-tagging/ ]Look for:
— db_Sensitive_Information_1.zip — creation_date=”04/12/2018 14:52:47″
— German_Sensitive_rules_db_.zip — creation_date=”04/23/2018 12:51:15″
— JMBG-OIB-Croatian_Confidential_db_xml.zip — creation_date=”04/12/2018 14:52:47″Missing is
— UK Passport, National Insurance Number, and Postcodes( Note the date and time formats are using ambiguous-European-bassakwards date, and are using slashes and colons, not using computer-readable and sortable computer date and time, which would be, for example, in the format of 2018-04-12 or 2018-12-04 for date — the original could be April or December, it could be either, I do not know … and 14-52-47 for time … sorry, but slashes and colons already have meanings in the file system and cannot be used for other purposes such as naming files. )
Import them via the following “Confidential” program File Menu sequence:
— File
—- Confidential database
—— Import data from XML zipped
——– browse to your downloaded file, one at a time, multiple files cannot be selected and imported, and it does not remember the previous browse location, so renavigate each time
———- Open
———— wait for import to complete, OK
repeat for each fileThere is no test data file in any format to download that contains dummy data that would be should be could be found by any of those scripts, so there is no “master calibration” way to “inspect what we expect” from this software … just trust it, I suppose.
These GDPR scripts are not available in today’s SOS download, these GDPR scripts are not mentioned nor linked to at the main website [ https ://www.confidential . tech/ ] where the headline promises that this is “The GDPR solution for unstructured data” … well, maybe … if you can only find these GDPR scripts on your own …
“Tag-Forge” / “Tabbles” / “Confidential” promise the following:
— Data-mining: auto-tag files based on their content, name and location – get all your sensitive documents on a whole drive automatically tagged within minutes!
— Create auto-tagging rules for folders: Confidential will “listen” and tag each new file you put there.
— Explorer integration: Confidential “listens” when you move files between folders: the tagging is preserved_________________________________
Critique:
Their in-program “Tag browser” does not behave like the external Windows File Explorer in that the left window does not expand to show subdirectories for us to select or as we browse, and we cannot directly type or paste directory location into the top address field … but at least tapping the [ Backspace ] key does return the display up to the previous displayed directory level to allow us to drill down and back up, but we cannot see any comparative drill-depth location as we would see in Windows File Explorer, that is, “Confidential”‘s own tax explorer does n0t indicate if a directory we are looking at has any sibling directories under the parent directory.
Network drives in this Corporate Edition are not available, so much for a central database and central audit capability … I guess we have to duplicate the installation and customization on each computer in our network — even though Confidential tagging options appear in the context menus when using Windows File Explorer and looking at network directories on other network-attached computers, because trying to tag them only results in a pop-up window from Confidential indicating that an improper thingy was doneish to that them thar whats-ya-ma-call-it because Confidential has no networking awareness.
The Tag browser viewing options are self-named averse to Windows File Browser pre-existing descriptions:
— “Normal” = Microsoft’s “Content”
— “Compact” = Microsoft’s “Tiles”
— “Very compact” = Microsoft’s “List”
— “Gallery” = Microsoft’s “Extra large icons”I wonder if the programmers call underwear as outerwear?
… I am trying to get prepared to have to translate everything from familiar meanings to their own idiosyncratic iconoclastic personal inventions, as if they are new to the computer industry and don’t know, or resist, or want to better rename everything, so be prepared for a steep learning curve, not just to learn the program, but also and interruptively to relearn what they think are better names for already familiar things.
Misbehavior: If I double-click on the address bar to try to walk back through a directory tree, it apparently thinks I am trying to select and cut-and-paste the parent directory name I am clicking on, and it duplicates it in the mini-strip-window, thereby giving me a false directory structure, for example, I browsed to:
C:\Documents\A\Addresses
… then wanted to walk back to C:\Documents\A\, because I was planning to go down to other C:\Documents\A\… directories, but double clicking on “A” caused the Confidential to display:
C:\Documents\A\A\
… which does not exist, and, luckily, when checking in Windows File Explorer, was not accidentally created.
Misbehavior: it failed to show the file contents of a directory, showing it empty.
Luckily I could not reproduce these errors, as of yet, and they went away after exiting and restarting the program.
I checked Windows File Explorer to see if there was any effect of “Confidential” running live, and nothing looked different.
I right-clicked on a directory and — woah — there were new context menu options salted throughout the already pre-existing list of context menu items, none of them identified or grouped as “Confidential” options, so now I must scrutinize each item in my context menu to see if maybe they relate to “Confidential” or maybe they came from some other program, perhaps CCleaner, Glary Utilities, and so on.
Nope, they are not “Confidential”, but they are:
— HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\TabblesContextMenu
— HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\TabblesContextMenuThey are “Tabbles”, not even “Confidential”, it’s a good thing I am researching all of this to see that “Tabbles” is the base program underneath the “Confidential” program … and now my self-assignment is to compensate for such programming myopia and try to reorganize the “Confidential” context-menu entries to be under a “Confidential” sub-tab ( using some other context-menu editing program ).
… also, is “Confidential” a noun or a verb? If I click “Confidential” will it mark the directory with a “Confidential” tag, or will it open a sub-menu for the “Confidential” program options of what other types of tags are available for this directory or file?
Does anyone else see the problem with making the program name — “Confidential” — ambiguous and co-opting of words that already have meaning?
In the context menu for a directory, selecting “Locate in Confidential” opens a new instance of Confidential … surprise ! … so, how many Confidential program instances can I get to run at the same time, and do they cross-coordinate changes made in one “Confidential” window to the other “Confidential” windows, and do any of them immediately send any information to any number of open Microsoft Windows File Explorer windows, instantly, in real time, or can I be looking at the wrong one and see inaccurate data that has already been changed elsewhere?
Hey, let me check on that, because that’s my job as an end user … not!
I’ve got 5 windows of “Confidential” running, but when I click the 6th icon in the notification area, which of the 5 existing “Confidential” windows will I get ( or is that information “Confidential” ! ).
Well, let me check the task manager to see a list of all five “Confidential” programs and their windows … no, wait a minute, there is no “Confidential” listed anywhere in Microsoft Windows Task Manager, only one “tagger.exe” program, and when I ask to open it’s window, I get a different window than the window opened by clicking on the “Confidential” icon in the system tray, go figure.
Cool, it’s like a “Where’s Waldo” video game, “… Guess where “Confidential” is hiding now ! …”
I found a “Confidential” program menu command to cache thumbnails ( ? ) from a network drive, but it does not offer to browse to find network drives … oh well.
It makes little pop-up messages appear in the lower right corner of the screen, but they go away before I can read them, and I cannot make then reappear … oh well.
I did get to read one message, the top one, of dozens of duplicate messages, saying the SQL server could not be found, all the messages filling the right of my screen, then they all went away, but at least I got to read one!
I accidentally successfully tagged something using the context menu in Windows file Explorer, yet I cannot accidentally successfully untag it … oh well.
In the Windows File Explorer context menu, I found a “delete tag” thingy under an “add tag” thingy which warned that I will lose all tag associations but not lose the files ( whew ! … but do I trust this program’s promises ? ), and so I accepted that, and yet another Confidential window opened and showed the tag still in place, and was not in fact deleted or unassociated or removed or extinguished or eliminated or eradicated or exterminated or whatever new name they think is better than all other names … oh well.
Are folks reading here beginning to understand why I assessed this software as
— NRFPTY
— Nerf Putty
— Not Ready For Primer Time Yet?
Well, there’s more ( or there’s less ):
After all of this, I can find absolutely nowhere in the program to actually search for and auto-tag or even manually-tag and or do anything with the GDPR scripts that I manually downloaded and manually installed … nothing, nada, zilch, zero, ain’t no, nyet, nein.
Repeat: no GDPR anywhere.
Ahh, the life of an Alpha tester, waiting patiently for the programmers to produce something worthy of Beta testing …
Sending out an SOS indeed.
.Peter BlaiseGuest.
The is no “Go” button or “Scan” button or “Begin” button, so how do you get this “Confidential” program to do anything?Okay, it’s NOT in the menus, but I finally found a way to get it to scan:
— right-click a drive in the left-window of the program
— — select Apply auto-tagging rules… and go away for a long -t-i-m-e- …
Of course you have to find and download and install auto-tagging rules first, the program came with none, absolutely no GDPR awareness.
After 8 hours, it was still slogging it’s way though one backup directory structure of mine containing 6,000+ files in 60 GB of data … before I killed it, rebooted, and reopened “Confidential” to see what it hath wrought.
It marked a bunch of files as having country address and the like, personal identification numbers and the like, and so on, which I expected ( I have many epubs and mp3s as well as typical self-created documents ).
But, there is no way to identify WHAT data was found, no “here’s a list of social security numbers found, and in which files” or “here’s a list of street addresses found, and in which files”.
There is also no way of asking “show me files with Tom Jones” or “show me all files with Social Security number 0123-456-7890”.
It just tagged files as meeting some general criteria, no specifics.
__________
My overall assessment in 2 days ot struggle with Tag-Forge “Confidential”:
It is not smart, not intelligent, not savvy, not aware, not user friendly, not purpose-built for any one task, and as such does nothing.
Other programs call home for daily database updates, not so here, the programmers are not acting as a clearing house for GDPR-compliance references kept contemporaneous and authoritative.
Other programs build a relational database of file contents, no so here, this just looks, tags, and does not keep a specific record of what it saw that made it apply any tag.
The only thing a user could reasonably do with a report from “Confidential” is decide to keep the drive in-house, off the web, a decision easier to make just by deciding to keep all drives with self-created data in-house and off the web, no “Confidential” program needed.
According to the 80 / 20 rule, I imagine that whatever energies the programmers have put in so far is about 20% of what’s needed to make this do anything close to what it promises: GDPR-compliance assistance, they have 80% more to go, about 4 times more work than applied so far.
It claims to provide GDPR-savvy, but has none, even the programmer could only hint that scripts are available on the web, go find them yourselves, and figure out how to use them — that’s the level of support for their own claims and promises.
I … don’t think there is hope, considering how inappropriate “Tabbles” ( the underlying program ) is for a job that “Everything” and “Copernicus” and other file-contents-catalogers have a far better head start on.
This is not even useful as a “Tabbles” enhancement due to it’s lack of GDPR-savvy, such that even if people used this to discipline their use of a fresh, brand-new data drive, this program has no skill or capabilities to accurately and meaningfully audit a drive for compliance.
All I can recommend is that everyone just say “oops” and walk away, even the programmers.
.Peter BlaiseGuest.
… and another thing …When uninstalling, it does not remove it’s self-installed SQL server, which then hangs around running in the background, never to be called on to do anything, consuming the computer resources forever.
FOREVER.
-F-O-R-E-V-E-R-.
So, folks, there’s a lot of manual cleanup to do after kicking Tag-Forge / Tabbles / Confidential programming out of our computers.
Oy …
Nerf Putty … NRFPTY … Not Ready For Prime Time Yet.
.Peter BlaiseGuest1 – “Confidential” is a horrible name because the word already has a plethora of meanings, and do I really want a subdirectory on my computer named “Confidential” if I do not have one already — hello, any hacker / cracker will be drawn to that like flies to honey. I suggest “Commander Tagger” ( inside joke referring to the movie Galaxy Quest ), or “Gate Keeper” or “AtoZ Sorter” or something arbitrary like GIDNORK ( really, I just randomly typed that ).
2 – This is a raw programming tool for full-time-paid administrators who have way too much time on their hands, and involves making decisions on installation that only someone with vast experience with this software can make, they should simplify and automate, rather than expect me to know why I want to name a database without characters that I always use when naming other files ( no hyphens permitted ! ), or put the database in a location that … should I want this portable on a USB thumb drive or in a location outside my filing system, such as the root, or in the cloud, or where? I don’t know. How will I use the database, how will I back it up, how will I use it after crash recovery, how will I use it when I migrate to my next generation computers and also migrate my data, how will I inspect drives about to leave my property before they go to insure they are “clean”, how will I catalog my offline backup disks and discs and thumbdrives? Will it understand the contents of zip and 7z ( required so Windows 10 does not deny access to collected and compressed zipped data ) file storage … and so on?
3 – This is a raw programming tool for full-time-paid administrators who have way too much time on their hands, and involves making decisions on installation that only someone with vast experience with this software can make, ( didn’t I write that already ? ), and it’s third complaint about my attempted installation is a cryptic and unresolvable message:
“… Error … A network related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. ( provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 – Error Locating Server / Instance Specified ) … Sql Exception Number = -1 …”
That’s a show stopper right there.
4 – Their installation file has no file date in the security certificate, let’s get dangerous, risky, and unauthored, able to be scammed!
5 – See their web pages and help for more, but get ready to stop all other human activities ( eating, sleeping ) until you figure this out and master it, and prepare to uninstall and reinstall it at least 3 times over 3 months as you realize only after each installation attempt that there is way more to each installation decision than they were able to pre-warn you about, and you have to start over from scratch to reconfigure everything using your newly acquired experience.
They direct you to https://tabbles.net/wiki/index.php?title=Tabbles_Manual_(EN)#Setting_up_Tabbles yes “Tabbles” in order to figure out their “Confidential” program .. good luck imagining yoru own version of “Tabble” instructions and applying them to “Confidential”.
Show stopper right there.
6 – And for what .. for GDPR General Data Protection Regulations compliance? Uh huh. Meaning … ?
Thanks for sharing, I hope someone dives in and tells us how to implement it, and why.
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