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Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

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Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#231

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

thecodrr wrote: post #224
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is obvious that you misunderstand something. Please respond with how exactly they achieve this.

It's very simple. Since the encryption key is basically derived from your password, Notesnook allows you to backup the encryption key. This encryption key + a random salt is used to encrypt all the data client-side. In case you forget your password but have the encryption key somewhere safe, you can easily use the encryption key to have your data decrypted. Notesnook does the above by sending a recovery link to your…

If you have the encrypted key 'somewhere safe', it is not account recovery because your key was never lost. It is just a more elaborate password change.

As I've said, you can't have both meaningful encryption (as in service operators can't decrypt data by themselves) and account recovery (as in you've lost credentials necessary to access account).

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#232

Post by thecodrr »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #231
thecodrr wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very simple. Since the encryption key is basically derived from your password, Notesnook allows you to backup the encryption key. This encryption key + a random salt is used to encrypt all the data client-side. In case you forget your password but have the encryption key somewhere safe, you can easily use the encryption key to have your data decrypted. Notesnook does the above by sending a recovery link to your…

If you have the encrypted key 'somewhere safe', it is not account recovery because your key was never lost. It is just a more elaborate password change. As I've said, you can't have both meaningful encryption (as in service operators can't decrypt data by themselves) and account recovery (as in you've lost credentials necessary to access account).

> If you have the encrypted key 'somewhere safe', it is not account recovery because your key was never lost. It is just a more elaborate password change.

Uh...what? I think you misunderstood. You use the "password" to access your account, encryption key to decrypt the data. You lose the password, you lose access to your account and your data. However, server has the ability to grant you access to your account without the password. BUT Access is not equal to decryption of data.

The key that you have is used to decrypt your data on your device. The "service operator" is never involved in the decryption step; only the access step.

This is the only way to recover account access + data for zero knowledge apps. It is similar to the [backup data -> delete account -> create new account -> restore backup] process but it's automated and much more secure.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#233

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

thecodrr wrote: post #232
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the encrypted key 'somewhere safe', it is not account recovery because your key was never lost. It is just a more elaborate password change. As I've said, you can't have both meaningful encryption (as in service operators can't decrypt data by themselves) and account recovery (as in you've lost credentials necessary to access account).

> If you have the encrypted key 'somewhere safe', it is not account recovery because your key was never lost. It is just a more elaborate password change. Uh...what? I think you misunderstood. You use the "password" to access your account, encryption key to decrypt the data. You lose the password, you lose access to your account and your data. However, server has the ability to grant you access to your account withou…

> The key that you have is used to decrypt your data on your device.

Oh so you need a safely stored key and your own device to decrypt data. Lol. Why do you say we need to use that service, if all is done on user's device?

but being serious, everything you say just proves my point, yet, somehow, you refuse to see it.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#234

Post by mickeyd290 »

kushan2020 wrote: post #101

Me including lot of people hate the following about todays note apps which have one or more of the following: - Forces you to split screen of writing markdown on one side and rendered version on another. - Is a bloated electron app. - Data is not portable i.e. there is proprietary format or saved in the servers. It is a shameless pug but I am working on creating a WYSIWYG note taking app [1] that is web based, portab…

Bangle.io looks interesting, thanks. I can edit my local Markdown files in a web browser. How does it connect to GitHub? I tried the "Workspace: Import workspace from a Github URL" but it didn't appear to do anything. It would be great if Bangle.io could use GitHub as a backend store as an alternative to local hard drive storage.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#235

Post by animesh »

brnt wrote: post #156
bmarquez wrote: post #58

I have a love/hate relationship with Standard Notes (and with most encrypted editors in general). Standard Notes is one of the few apps that has end-to-end encrytion AND password protection on the desktop (or Face ID on mobile devices). Joplin is E2E but refuses to encrypt locally, meaning someone who browses your computer can view your notes unless you use Joplin Portable in an encrypted container (with the added pe…

Ive changed from Joplin to QOwnNotes. I dont think it does encryption, but it is just a folder of markdown files so is flexible to use.

It does encryption. Some detail here: https://www.qownnotes.org/blog/2016-10-02-Note-encryption-wi...

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#236

Post by ay »

thecodrr wrote: post #176
ay wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used the app quite actively for a couple of years and maybe had one conflict at most. Maybe I don’t do edits as intensely as you do. The free plan was perfectly adequate for the first year, then I explored the editors in the paid plan but found I got used to plain text much more so switched off all the add-ons. Was happy to compensate developers for a great app. Forgotten password recovery is very simple: Export an…

It's great that SN works well for you but reading about your workarounds/compromises do not make SN better but you as a user better. For example, as you detailed, there is a way to recover your password but you have to do all the steps manually (although I still don't know how you are going to delete your account without your password...). > Same about the UI - it’s perfect. I am curious as to how no context menu for…

All I care is a distributed text replication to all of the available platforms, with no lock-in and decent search. Standard notes does it perfectly.

Context menu? Not sure what would I be using it for. But then again it’s my mode of operation.

I also have Simplenote, which also works well, but the e2e encryption (and lack of account recovery!) is what attracts me to standard note.

About the plan. The point is: the free plan is absolutely perfect for me, and I choose to pay just to say thanks for a great product.

The only thing missing for me is ability to see multiple accounts merged in a single UI - that would allow very easy sharing of notes.

For that I use iCloud or simplenote.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#237

Post by qbasic_forever »

trinix912 wrote: post #188
qbasic_forever wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the web version and it's great, no install or anything (obviously need internet access).

> obviously need internet access Yea because no one ever needs to access their notes anywhere with bad/no connection.

Uhh, that's why I have the Android app too on my phone that's always in my pocket. It syncs everything offline.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#238

Post by scpedicini »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #53

I don't mean to be snarky, but what's the purpose of apps like this? Notepad.exe is 227 KB, runs instantly and flawlessly on even ancient environments, and gives all the basics. If you need something more "Power User," Notepad++ gives some language-sensitive formatting, tabs for easy switching between files, and plugins for custom use cases. If you need something more specific to a given language, that's an IDE, not…

This comment is absurd and contradictory, if the software is supposed to be the equivalent of "grabbing a scrap of paper and scratching something down" then at bare minimum it needs to support images since you can draw pictures on a piece of paper. Do notepad or notepad++ support images?

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#239

Post by xvector »

jerednel wrote: post #114

The comments here prove their marketing could use work. SN Extended is basically a completely different app than the free version. Nested folders, smart tags (i organized a workflow with untagged notes going to an inbox folder, notes with due:yyyy-mm-dd being pulled into a Next Items folder etc..) Also there is a markdown editor, an editor that encrypts and stores attachments in an S3/webdav/drive/dropbox folder. The…

The spreadsheet editor is really underrated. I haven't found a single other E2EE notes app that supports spreadsheets.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#240

Post by scpedicini »

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #158
scpedicini wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the Wikipedia entry for it but it didn't really shed a lot of light on these types of questions: 1. Can I embed images and more specifically can I embed animated GIF files? 2. Can I embed MP3s and play them within the note? 3. Does it support rich text editor functionality including the ability to insert tables easily from programs like Microsoft excel? 4. Can I use multiple fonts in the same individual note i…

1. Embedding of images is pretty much file linking. It can display and let you intract with images inline, but that may not be up to your requirement. 2. Same as above, except playback will require a plugin. 3. Absolutely! Tables are fully supported, with automatic formatting and formulae and lots more. This is one of the strong areas of org-mode. 4. You can get bold, italic, monospaced varieties inline, with minimal…

I understand what you're saying wrt to rtf versus text but I completely disagree and I say this as somebody who used to have all of my notes in thousands of plain text files.

I've never felt like rich text editor's have gotten in my way, I can start immediately typing into a note in Evernote without ever feeling like the rich text somehow hinders my ability to be able to quickly transfer my thoughts.

For you, as you've said, you don't see the utility of rich text outside of presentations. But when I'm drawing up and working on new projects I like to have embedded imagery for my flow charts, when I'm working on music I like to include snippets of melodies, and I like to be able to easily take screenshots of things I'm working on and transfer them and embed them easily.

I like the ability to be able to copy code blocks from programs like visual studio and web storm knowing that I can preserve the color scheme and monospaced font. It makes readability great.

When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note.

Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy.

I am not a casual user at this point as I have about 5000 notes with folders and tags associated with them. I've been building this note store for the last 10 years in Evernote after switching from One Note. And at least for me the search capabilities are for all intents and purposes instantaneous. Evernote in particular does have a few minor issues with the inability to be able to do regex searches or partial word versus whole word searches but they're minor and don't really impact my daily experience.

Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use, it took me less than five minutes to understand how Evernote worked and to have it syncing and searchable across my Macbook, my PC, my android and my iPad.

I do think you make strong points but fundamentally we have very different workflows and that's what makes our requirements so vastly different.

You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it. If it has limitations with regard to notetaking I certainly haven't encountered them - of course as a safety measure I also make weekly back ups of my Evernote store as a series of exported HTML files. To me this is the biggest shortcoming, ultimately I don't control the central repository, if I ever found an Evernote competitor with comparable features that could connect to an s3, FTP or even dropbox i would switch in a heartbeat.

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