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Password Protection for the Portable Apps Launcher

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bdc1513
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Password Protection for the Portable Apps Launcher

Is there any possibility of Portable apps Development team adding a password protection to the launcher? Back when I used U3, I Favorited the U3 launch pad
(until they dropped support and software for it) mainly because it had a password protection feature that when you start up the launch pad, it asked for a password. You could not access the drive until you unlock it. This would be a great feature\addon to add to the Portable apps platform. I would really appreciate getting some reply's from people about this topic. If any Portable apps developers are reading, do you think to could go through with my idea and add password protection built in to the platform just like the U3 Platform?

John T. Haller
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Hardware Based

If you want actual password protection, you need to purchase a drive that supports it in hardware. That is the *ONLY* way to get true password protection that will work on every PC without admin rights. Period.

U3 was a combination of hardware and software. The hardware emulated a USB hub with a CDROM drive and a USB flash drive attached. The CDROM drive contained the U3 platform and, when run, allowed you to enter a password so it could send a specific signal to the hardware to simulate the USB flash drive being inserted into the hub. Some U3 drives had actual encryption. Most did not and could be easily tricked into gaining access to the underlying files.

Software-only implementations like TrueCrypt will *REQUIRE* admin rights as Windows will not allow the mounting of a drive letter to a virtual drive without admin rights. There is no way around this.

We will at some point in the future be implementing a security by obscurity password protection mechanism in the future. It will be a little less secure than the old U3 implementation but will fool maybe 95% of people.

If you want a password that can't be easily bypassed, you have to buy a new drive that supports it. This fact will likely never change no matter how many times people ask this question after reading the past explanations.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

depp.jones
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Nice explanation!

You should keep that as template to answer upcoming requests (or just bookmark this one to link to it quickly). Wink

bdc1513
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Thanks

Thanks for letting me know. I hope to see that security implementation soon! Right now I have both the u3 launch pad and the portable apps launchpad installed. U3 for the password protection, but thats the only thing i use the u3 launchpad for. Everything else I use portable apps for.

On the side of u3, do you or anyone else know why sandisk dropped support for the u3 launch pad for programs? It was a great launchpad, had everything, and there was tons of programs, but just out of the blue they dropped it. Any ideas as to why?

John T. Haller
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Problems

U3 had problems from the very beginning. It was launched later than expected and it was far buggier than it should be. Most publishers weren't interested since it would artificially tie their software to proprietary hardware that most people didn't own. Quite simply, a *real* portable app made way more sense. Even with millions spent on advertising and tens of millions of drives shipping with it, they never even came close to our userbase numbers. In an average month, their top app (Firefox, which I built for them) would only have a small fraction of the downloads of our top app (also Firefox). As it became clear that the platform would not improve and stay as a closed source platform artificially tied to hardware, I dumped it and kept improving PortableApps.com instead. Lots of publishers never bothered to even update their U3 versions as they had so few downloads. And then Sandisk pulled the plug on the staff maybe 3 years ago. So it operated dead for a couple years before it was finally publicly killed. It didn't even get an announcement when they killed it.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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