Settings and activity
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Damian
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An error occurred while saving the comment Damian
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Agree - please see my arguments for this as mailed to support, below:
I've dabbled with The Brain for a few years, on and off - I've never really fully committed, because there have always been shortcomings here or there which prevent a >$200 investment for the desktop platform. Occasionally I see developments like iOS and Android clients, or I have a new requirement that makes me think about looking at it again.
Every trial I've taken has expired without my having had enough time to learn it thoroughly and take the leap of faith required to see if committing to it will deliver the results worth investing for.
Can I suggest a term licence, such as a monthly recurring fee for all platforms and services? It seems most software has moved to this model, including most I use - Microsoft O365, my AvPlan flight planner, Lastpass, Evernote, Tom's Planner, etc. In some cases it's lamentable, where a customer really uses a product fully and ends up paying more long term under the new pricing, but for new customers, it makes adoption much easier.
The other issue is that platforms are changing so much, I don't know what my TCO will be - if a new mobile OS comes out, and I buy that, will I have to buy a licence again? That's why I use Lastpass (very cheap at $1/month for every OS, platform and browser), rather than 1Password ($30 for Windows, $30 for MacOS, $10 for iPhone, $15 for iPad - and the same again for my wife. I liked 1Password, but when I changed phone again, looked at another $20 decided enough was enough, and migrated wholesale to Lastpass.
For me, as well, this is the biggest reason why I won't put confidential data in TheBrain. What if someone finds a software vuln and manages to dump data from a bunch of accounts, including mine? Sony Pictures was a good example of what can happen.
OneNote does this quite well - AES-256 password encryption of specific notes - but it does impact searching and accessibility. I proposed a solution there of caching passwords, so that no matter how many thoughts you have, if most are encrypted with the same password that's been entered and stored in-cache, it will decrypt. I'm a newbie to TheBrain so I'm not aware on how it indexes, but i imagine the solution is to encrypt the indexes the same way.
The tricky thing is "Zero Knowledge" - encryption takes place in the client or mobile device, and TheBrain/WebBrain does not store the password or keys. If it's desktop only with local indexing, that's fine. For Web/Mobile brain, it might be necessary for the client to send a key to the server to cache in memory so that it can access the indexes/search on the client's behalf, with the user accepting that small risk.
This is similar to how Spideroak/Lastpass do this, by the way. Making data utterly inaccessible to anyone except the original user might be the only way to do this, these days - with the recent case regarding "Safe Harbour" meaning that it's now illegal for any companies using TheBrain to store brains that contain personal data on European individuals in WebBrain the US now (slight oversimplification).