What's new

All of OBSCURA Pro is now US$9 a month or US$79 a year, with 7 days free. Any one application on its own is US$4 a month or US$35 a year; two still cost a little less than everything, and at three everything is the better buy. Saving from one of the free tools for a day is US$2, paid once. A subscription started before today keeps the price it began at, for as long as it is paid. The Workspace stays free.

Converter takes pictures, documents, spreadsheets, audio, video, fonts, subtitles, maps and tracks, contacts, calendars, archives and 3D models, knows each by its contents, and makes it the format you need: HEIC to JPEG, Word to PDF, an iPhone’s MOV to MP4 without re-encoding it, Excel to CSV. A whole folder at once, saved as one zip or straight into a folder, with presets for the common jobs and a folder watched for new files. Part of Pro. Old .doc and .xls files and AVI are not read; its page says what else it does not do.

All of OBSCURA Pro is now US$5 a month or US$48 a year, with 7 days free. Any one of the fifteen applications can be had on its own for US$2 a month or US$19 a year; two cost a little less than everything, and at three everything is the better buy. Saving from one of the free tools for a day is US$1, paid once. The day, week and gift passes are no longer sold, and a pass already bought keeps the terms it was sold on. Team and Business are no longer offered: each person now needs a plan of their own, and a team or business that already has one keeps it and goes on adding people and taking them off at /seats. Each place you pay now offers two choices at most: an application on its own or everything, or a tool for the day or everything.

Responses from the site’s own functions now carry the same security headers as its pages, and the Pro lock adds HSTS. Signing out takes the copy of Pro code kept for working offline off the device as well as the key. Opening a Keep or Practice file has a ceiling on the work its key derivation can ask for, so a crafted file cannot hang the tab. PDF Studio’s signing moved to node-forge 1.3.2, which fixes three published faults in how 1.3.1 read the .p12 file a signer brings.

The front door says who the site is for and what Pro costs, with the way to every application; the Photo Editor and PDF Studio have full tiles beside the others. Each application’s page, without a key, carries the site’s bar, the price under its button, the one thing it does not do that most often decides it, and its comparison guides. The panel names the application it is on, and offers the month and the year as two equal choices, each saying what follows the free days. Every price says US$, the currency Stripe charges in. New comparison guides: Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer beside Vector, Audacity and Adobe Audition beside Sound.

Vector draws logos, icons, illustration and posters with the pen, shapes, type, gradients, layers and artboards, with unite, subtract, intersect and exclude worked out on the curves, and SVG, PDF and PNG out. Part of Pro. It has no brushes, symbols or effects yet, and opens SVG rather than Illustrator files; its page says what else it does not do.

Sound records, cuts, cleans up and mixes podcasts, voice-overs and music on a multitrack timeline, measures loudness to ITU-R BS.1770-4 and sets it for a podcast on export, with markers as chapters. Part of Pro. It exports WAV, and Opus or AAC where the browser can, but not MP3.

/os runs the site as a desktop: every application and tool in a window of its own that can be moved, resized, snapped and minimised to a taskbar, a launcher that searches every tool, and Files, which opens a document in the right application. On a phone it is a grid of applications, each full screen. It is the same pages, from this site, and nothing leaves the device.

Three applications, each part of Pro. Practice is practice management for a small firm: clients, the conflict check, matters, time, bills and client money, encrypted on the device. Write is for novels and screenplays: a binder, a corkboard, screenplay format and a compile to standard manuscript format. Authorship keeps a tamper-evident record of how a piece of writing was made, which anyone can check free at /verify-authorship.

Four applications, each part of Pro and kept on the device. Books keeps a small business’s books, from the bank statement to the VAT return and the year end; it works the return out, and you submit it with bridging software. Keep holds documents, passwords and two-step codes, encrypted before anything is stored. Roots is family history, with GEDCOM in and out, charts and a book. Research puts statistics and interview coding in one project. The bar now has four tabs, Workspace, Keep, Apps and Other, and every paid application is a tile on Apps.

Umbra edits a folder of code where it is, runs JavaScript, TypeScript and Python in a sandbox walled off from the site, previews a web page as you write it, and commits with git on the device. Part of Pro. It has no terminal and runs no servers.

Case is e-discovery on your own computer: a matter’s email and documents loaded, deduplicated, threaded, searched, coded, redacted and produced with Bates numbers and load files. PDF Studio changes the words already in a PDF, redacts them out of the file, signs with your certificate and makes scans searchable. Both are part of Pro; the free PDF editor in the Workspace is unchanged.

Every library is pinned by its hash, a spreadsheet exported from any tool is guarded against formulas that run when it is opened, the Pro lock answers every kind of request, the payment webhook refuses an oversized body before reading it, and the way back from checkout never leaves the site. The security page says how to report a fault.

Help is now thirty-three short answers under six topics: the jobs people come for, Pro and billing (passes, trials, cancelling, refunds, keys and seats), working offline and where work is kept, what to do when work has gone, Business, and the first steps in each suite. Each has an address of its own, such as /help#cancel. The box at the top searches them as you type, and lists the tools and guides the site search finds for the same words. The list of every other page is still underneath.

The first visit to the front door shows one line, how the site is used in three steps, which can be closed and is not shown again. The Sovereign Suite and the Engineering Suite now offer a short tour the first time they are opened, as the Photo Editor does: it is offered, never started by itself, and Help, Take the tour, runs the Engineering Suite's again.

Every entry on this page now carries tags (Workspace, Sovereign, Photo, Engineering, Billing, Site), which filter the list, and the feed carries them too. When something has been added here since you last read it, a dot appears beside the name in the bar.

In CLOAK, SEAL, SCRUB, DOCSCRUB, CLEANSHEET, DOTS, FLATTEN, TRAIL, STAPLE and AVSCRUB, the code that writes the saved file is now Pro code, which the server sends only to a paid key, as it does for the Pro applications. Checking a file is unchanged: free, on the page, and offline. With a key, the first save fetches the writer and every save after it works offline too. The Field Kit checks files with these tools and says plainly that saving needs the site.

The front door lists the last eight documents from Docs, Sheets, Slides, Notes, the PDF editor and the Photo Editor's autosave, each with a small preview, its application's mark and the time, and opens each where it was. The list is kept in this browser only; Clear forgets the list, not the documents.

Drive's Open with hands a file to the application for its kind, CLOAK hands a cleaned photo to VEIL or the Photo Editor, the PDF editor sends a page to the Photo Editor, and Sheets sends a block of cells to CHART. Settings, Available offline, shows what this browser holds and fetches the rest. The Install link uses the browser's own install prompt where it has one. Docs now writes ODT, Sheets writes ODS, and Slides writes a PDF of its notes pages.

An assembly brings parts together: from this device, from a project, from a STEP or STL file, or from the standard parts. Joints (rigid, revolute, slider, cylindrical, planar and ball) are picked in the view, and a component drags only as its joints allow. There are exploded views in steps, a bill of materials with part numbers, materials and masses, as a CSV and as a parts list on a drawing, and a check for interference between components. The standard parts are screws, nuts, washers and pins from the ISO tables, and the 6000 series of bearings.

A part can be in millimetres, centimetres, metres, inches or feet, and any field takes units typed into it (1/4 in + 3 mm). The History has a rollback marker, folders and renaming in place; the undo history is labelled; the keys can be changed, with a printable sheet of them. Part templates and examples (a bracket, an enclosure, an involute gear), ISO and ANSI drawing templates, and configurations from a design table. The hole tables were checked against published tables, the few values that were wrong were corrected, and what could not be checked is marked on the hole.

Each suite and application on the front door has a mark in a colour of its own, drawn as a line over a lightly filled shape, and the Continue list wears the same marks. The contrast check now measures every one of them, in light and dark.

Trust sets out what the server sees, route by route, who else handles any data (Cloudflare, and Stripe for payments), what the Pro lock answers, and how to check all of it yourself; the build stops if the page no longer covers the code. Status shows whether the site has been answering, from a check run every thirty minutes. Accessibility names the standard aimed at and the gaps still open. Support writes the email for you, with an optional description of this browser that you read before sending, and says what to do when work has disappeared.

Business is US$299 a month or US$2,990 a year for up to 100 people, with 14 days free. On /seats, whoever holds the subscription's key adds people by name and email address, one at a time or from a CSV file, and each gets a one-time link to a key of their own. Removing somebody stops their key within about two minutes wherever they are online. Every change is kept in a record for auditors. A team already sharing one Team key can go on doing so. On Business, the Sovereign Suite's reports carry the organisation's name and logo, and the yearly plan can be bought through a purchase order; for teams says how, and has a security questionnaire to download.

The site carries no ads and loads no third-party trackers, and that is now a rule rather than the current state of things: revenue is Pro, and nothing else. An old ads.txt file, left from before, has been removed.

The one request the site sends about a visit now carries three things: the path with no query or fragment, one event from a fixed list, and the kind of place the visit came from. Nothing is sent where the browser asks for no tracking (Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track), and the server refuses anything else. Privacy lists every value it can carry.

Frameworks, controls and policies; an evidence locker, audit packs, questionnaires, a trust page, a board report and a compliance calendar; building and shipping safely; people, access reviews and training; vendors, risks, assets and privacy; incidents, monitoring and secrets. Set up asks a few questions and switches on what fits, with a first-90-days plan, or opens a demonstration company to look around. What is due gathers every date from every register. The registers can be sealed with a passphrase, backed up in one file, and kept in several workspaces. The Sovereign Console is a full-window workbench for looking hard at a file.

With no picture open, the editor shows a start screen: open, new, paste or the sample, recent pictures, common sizes and templates. Export As shows a before and after at the chosen quality and an accurate size, and has a switch, on each time, that keeps the place and the camera out of the file; every file is read back before it is saved, and one that still says where it was taken, against the switch, is not saved. Quick Export repeats the last one.

Also: Select Subject, Remove Background and the Object Selection Tool, all worked out on the device; Develop's colour mixer, colour grading and tone curve; smart guides; Export Layers and Artboards; fingers and a pen, as on an iPad; symmetry painting; shortcuts and workspaces of your own; noise reduction in the background; and a tour of four stops, the first time, if asked for.

Sketches held by constraints and dimensioned in the part's variables, with the degrees of freedom left counted. Faces, edges and corners picked in the view and measured. Shell, loft, sweep and springs. An exact kernel, OpenCascade in a worker, for fillets and chamfers on the edges you pick and exact STEP. A part's views put on a Foundry sheet with a title block, and kept up to date. Foundry itself gained sheets, plot styles, DXF 2000, underlays and constraints.

New reference pages: every function in Sheets, keyboard shortcuts, file formats, a glossary and templates. The guides are filed in clusters, linked to one another, and found from the search and from Where to start. Every Workspace application, and the Photo Editor's autosave, now asks the browser to keep the site's storage, and where it says no, says once what keeps the work safe: installing the site, or choosing a folder.

The Sovereign Suite now has twenty-four services. Three are in a new section, Build and ship safely, next to signing a release. Check cloud and container config reads Terraform, Kubernetes manifests, Dockerfiles, Compose files, GitHub Actions workflows and IAM policies, and flags sixty kinds of setting that expose data or hand out too much access, each with the line it is on and the fix; the results save as SARIF for GitHub code scanning. Dependencies and SBOM reads lockfiles from npm, Yarn, pnpm, Python, Go, Rust, PHP and Ruby into a software bill of materials in CycloneDX or SPDX, sorts every licence against a policy you set, and, only when you press the button, checks the versions against the public OSV.dev vulnerability database. That check sends each package's name, version and ecosystem and nothing else, and it goes through this site, so OSV never sees your address. Track vulnerabilities takes findings from scanners and penetration tests, scores them with CVSS 3.1 and 4.0, gives each an owner and a date to fix by from its severity, and reports on what is open and what was fixed on time.

The other three sit with SOC 2 readiness. Review who has access compares the user lists exported from your systems, including the AWS credential report and Microsoft Entra ID, with your staff list, flags leavers still enabled, admins without two-step sign-in and accounts nobody recognises, and records each decision and the sign-off. Vendor register keeps each supplier's data, assurance reports, agreements and review dates, and says which need attention. Staff security records keeps policy acknowledgements by version, training due dates, and joiner and leaver checklists. Each saves its evidence as a report an auditor can read, and none of them makes anybody compliant; they keep the records a review needs.

Like the rest of the Suite, they are part of OBSCURA Pro and run on your own machine: the files you give them are read in the browser window and never uploaded.

The Engineering Suite is a CAD program in the tab. A part is a list of features, each editable after the fact: boxes, cylinders, cones and spheres; sketches extruded or revolved; holes with counterbores along any axis; joins, cuts and intersections; moves, mirrors and patterns. Every dimension takes arithmetic and named variables, so a plate drawn with w = 90 becomes a longer plate when w changes, with its holes where they belong. It measures as you go: size, volume, surface area, through-holes and mass in ten materials, and the distance between two points. Parts leave as STL and 3MF for a slicer or a machine shop and OBJ for a renderer, and an STL comes back in as a solid. The geometry is computed on your machine by manifold-3d, drawn by three.js, and never uploaded. Like the Sovereign Suite and the Photo Editor, the whole of it is part of OBSCURA Pro.

Yesterday's entry below drew the line in one place, and today it moves. The whole Sovereign Suite application is now part of OBSCURA Pro: all eighteen of its services, from SOC 2 readiness and finding sensitive data to cleaning files before sharing, sending a file securely, unlocking a shared file, backing up passwords and codes, and your data. Without Pro the page shows a lock screen. So is the whole Photo Editor, not only camera raw and saving as PSD: editing, layers, export, all of it. Without Pro the page shows what the editor looks like and asks for a plan.

What that replaces. Yesterday this page said the Photo Editor was free to edit in and to export JPEG and PNG from, that five services in Sovereign were Pro, and that opening a file somebody locked for you and backing up your own data in Sovereign would never be charged for. None of that holds for the application any more.

What does not change. The single tools under the Sovereign tab, such as CLOAK, X-RAY and LOCKBOX, are still free to open and to check a file with, and saving the result is Pro, as it is for every other tool outside the Workspace. The Workspace stays free for everyone, with no account: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Notes, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Plan, Drive and the PDF editor. The prices are the same: Pro is US$15 a month or US$144 a year with 7 days free, Team is US$69 a month or US$690 a year for up to 25 people with 14 days free, and a pass is US$5 for a day or US$9 for a week. And Pro runs on your device like everything else here: nothing is uploaded.

Ten days ago this page said there was nothing to buy. That was a bet that a free site could be paid for by people chipping in, and the numbers since have settled it: it cannot, and a site that cannot pay for itself does not stay up. So the chip in page is gone, and there is one thing to buy instead, OBSCURA Pro.

What is free. The Workspace, all of it: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Notes, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Plan, Drive and the PDF editor. And every other tool is free to open and to check a file with. It still shows you the location in the photograph, the author in the document, the text under the redaction that did not take; you see your own problem before anything is asked of you. The Photo Editor is free to edit in and to export JPEG and PNG from.

What is Pro. Saving or exporting the result in the tools outside the Workspace: the cleaned photo, the redacted PDF, the report. The five services in Sovereign that security teams otherwise buy a platform for (SOC 2 readiness, finding sensitive data, a certificate inventory, release signing and folder watch). And camera raw and saving as PSD in the Photo Editor. Pro is US$15 a month or US$144 a year; Team is US$69 a month for up to 25 people; and for somebody with one job to do, a pass is US$5 for a day or US$9 for a week, paid once.

What is never charged for. Opening a file somebody locked for you, and backing up your own data. Holding either back would be holding people hostage.

How it keeps the rest of the site’s word. Pro is a key, not an account. Stripe sells it; the key is a signed statement of the plan and its end date, checked on your own device, so the tools work offline. On another device you sign in with the email you paid with, and there is no password. The one thing that ever leaves your machine is the key, when Pro code is fetched, so the server can see it is paid for. Your files never do, on Pro or off it.

AVSCRUB reported a video's location removed while the whole route was still in the file. A phone does not write location once. iOS also records it into a timed metadata track: a whole track beside the picture, a reading every second or so for the length of the clip. Stripping removed the single fix, struck “Location” through in the list, said the entries were gone, and left every coordinate in place. Measured, not guessed: a test clip with three fixes in such a track came back with all three intact. AVSCRUB now finds the track and says plainly that it does not remove it, in the list and again in the line you read after stripping, because that is the moment somebody decides the file is safe to send.

STEGOSCAN was blind to the case its own test was written for. It ran the pairs-of-values test on the whole picture, and sequential embedding fills the beginning and stops, so a picture carrying twelve per cent of its capacity came out described in the same words as a clean one. It now scans a growing prefix, finds it, and brackets how long the message is.

Slides and Calendar said the opposite of what had happened. Both swallowed a failure and then let the save bar say “Opened notes.txt” over the top of it. And all twelve apps sharing that bar answered a refused file with “Could not open that file” while the app that refused it was holding the actual reason, which it did show you if you dragged the file in instead. They say why now.

WIRE's all-clear claimed more than it had checked, saying “no flow on a regular timer” when the check only ever counts TCP connections. It says TCP now, and names what it did not look at.

Three tools that had no test at all (AVSCRUB, PACK and STEGOSCAN), and the save bar those twelve apps share now have 78 checks between them, on files built byte by byte so each one exercises the case it is about.

PLUGGED reads a Windows setupapi.dev.log and lists the USB drives that were attached to that machine, decoding each into vendor, product, revision and serial. It is careful about the two things that make this easy to get wrong: Windows writes a line when it installs a device and nothing when an installed one is plugged in again, so it answers when a drive was first attached and never implies a count; and a drive that reports no serial gets an identifier Windows made up, which means nothing on any other computer, so every row says which kind it is.

The question had been checked and rejected that morning, because the site had nothing that answered it. So the tool was built, and then the page written: that order, not the other one. It ships with 29 checks of its own, against a log carrying one of each case that changes the answer.

Ten guides alongside it, each checked against what is already on the first page of results before a word was written: why a zip says the path is too long, checking a PDF for malware without uploading it, what a video file gives away about you, telling whether a USB drive was plugged in, spotting malware beaconing in a connection log, seeing what a device on your network connects to, Bates numbering a bundle, whether a message is hidden in an image, and what is actually in a Google Takeout export. Nine more queries were checked and rejected, which is the other half of the work.