A shameless plug

I recently released my second iPhone/iPad app. It has absolutely nothing in common with Monal.  The program is called MyNepali and uses sounds and images to teach  young children some basic animal names in the Nepali language.  It is 99 cents. If you are interested, you can find MyNepali here
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mynepali/id406911355?mt=8

And we're back

I have no idea what happened.  The email account that was used to create this blog was listed among the 1.3 million accounts taken from Gawker hack on Sunday.  While my account password was not there, I did get  locked out of Gmail because of suspicious activity, likely thousands of failed login attempts from all over the world.  I assume this blog was taken down for the same reason. This  was annoying but could have been much worse, I could have been stupid and used the same password for my Gawker account and my email account.

The Gawker hack is one more reminder of  why trusting some third party with your Gmail, Facebook  or corporate login is a bad idea. While push messages are really nice, are you sure that the database that has your username and password is secure?  Do you trust the company making your IM client with all of that info?

A note on privacy and tracking software

How many people use Monal? A lot. Thousands and thousands of people all over the world in all sorts of random places (Hello, Antarctica!). However, all I know is what the Apple download/upload  counter shows and what people tell me in emails.  Much the same way I have objections to ads in my software, I do not like the "metrics" software and libraries that are out there. Unlike many other iOS apps, Monal does not contain and will never contain user tracking software. Consider this app your refuge from ads, trackers and middle man servers.