· 3 min read
Text recognition in Rutba Office that never leaves your computer
Since 1.47 Rutba Office reads the words in scans and pictures itself, with the network off, in English, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and Japanese. Scanned PDFs become searchable, a photo’s words can be copied, and a printed table lands in cells.
· 3 min read
Mail as an archive tool: old Outlook files searched where they lie, and exported for legal hold
Rutba Office Mail opens Outlook .pst, .ost and .olm files and mbox archives without importing them, searches them all at once with the syntax people already know, and exports what it finds with a SHA-256 manifest for legal hold.
· 4 min read
Calendar and Contacts now sync with your own server, and Mail has a junk filter that learns locally
Rutba Office 1.29.8 keeps Calendar and Contacts in step with a CalDAV or CardDAV server such as iCloud or your own. Mail files junk with a filter that learns from what you mark, without sending a message anywhere to decide.
· 4 min read
Worked out on your own computer: the Rutba Office 1.29 features that need no server
Design Ideas, the thesaurus, the junk filter, worksheet scripts and 3D models arrived in Rutba Office in October. Each one runs on the computer the file is on. Here is how, and what does still go over the network.
· 7 min read
A reset belongs where the sign-in is, even for somebody Rutba has never met
From 26 September, staff reset their password at Rutba’s sign-in and a shop’s customers reset at the shop, never across. Somebody only their company’s workspace knows can now reset at Rutba too, and every address still gets the same answer.
· 5 min read
One sign-in for the whole suite, and an organisation that stays chosen
Since 24 September, Rutba’s workspaces no longer ask for a password of their own. You sign in once, the organisation you chose stays chosen until you switch, nothing about it travels in a link, and signing out anywhere signs you out everywhere.
· 3 min read
A suffix is not an allow-list: the frames behind one sign-in
One sign-in works by small hidden pages that tell an app who is signed in. The first version trusted any address ending in our domains, which included shops running their merchants’ own code. Review caught it before it reached production.
· 3 min read
The sign-in service no longer has a database of its own
Rutba’s sign-in kept its own database: sessions, keys, second-factor challenges, an audit trail, and a second copy of everybody. Since 21 September it keeps nothing. Every record it needs lives in the one backend that already held people.
· 3 min read
The two-factor plugin guarding our admin panel is open source
The content backend Rutba runs on ships with no second factor for its admin panel, so an administrator’s password was the whole of the lock. We built one, put it in front of our own panel, and published it for anybody running the same backend.
· 3 min read
The lookup before your password, and why it cannot recognise you
Sign in at Rutba and the first thing that happens is a lookup on your address, not a password box. It reads only the domain, so it answers the same for an address that does not exist. And it was quietly doing nothing for weeks before we noticed.
· 4 min read
One place for your second factor, and a code you can scan
Turning on two-factor used to mean typing a thirty-two character secret by hand. It is a code you scan now, or a button on a phone, and the factor itself lives in one store rather than two, which is the part that keeps a settings page honest.
· 3 min read
The password was right. The browser refused the last hop
A sign-in that looked like a wrong password was a security header doing its job too well: it allowed the form but not the page the form lands on. The fix was to build that rule from the list of places a sign-in is already allowed to end.
· 3 min read
A common word with a year on the end is still a common password
Our sign-up refused a short list of common passwords, exactly as written. Nobody types them exactly: they add a year, a row of digits or a symbol. The check now finds the word underneath, and leaves passphrases alone.
· 6 min read
Rutba Assistant has no account of its own, and that is the design
Rutba Assistant answers questions about your business from inside whichever app you are in. It signs in as nobody: every call it makes carries your sign-in and meets the checks the screen would, so it never sees or does more than you.
· 3 min read
The view our operators get of your Relay workspace shows its shape, not your posts
Running a publishing service means staff sometimes need to look inside a customer’s workspace. What they see is who is in it, what is connected and how recent posts went. Never a credential, and never a word of a post.
· 3 min read
The merchant owns consent. We ship defaults that are careful about it
A Rutba storefront used to fire analytics and the Meta pixel on the first page view, in every country, with no notice. Now it asks first where the law expects it, and a shop that runs its own consent tool can take the whole decision over.
· 3 min read
One Rutba account opens the Relay, and the Relay no longer keeps passwords of its own
The Relay used to run its own sign-up, passwords, second factor and invitations. Now a person signs in once with their Rutba account, and their organisation gives them the Relay the way it gives them anything else.
· 3 min read
One sign-in for every Rutba site, and why it asks for your address first
Six Rutba sites used to disagree about whether you were signed in, and two of them collected passwords of their own. Now there is one front door, and since 24 September it is the one sign-in for the whole suite, the workspaces included.
· 4 min read
Unplug the machine. Everything still works.
The strongest privacy claim software can make is not a policy. It is that you can pull the cable and nothing breaks. Here is what that takes, and the one exception we will not pretend does not exist.
· 4 min read
HR and payroll fail in the same place every time
Not in the employee record and not in the pay calculation. In the gap between them, where somebody types hours from one system into another. We removed the gap, and left the biometrics out on purpose.
· 3 min read
Your cameras keep recording when the internet does not
Cloud camera services charge monthly to store your footage on someone else’s disk, and stop working the moment the line drops. Rutba Vision runs on a box in your building. The only thing that talks to us is a licence check.
· 3 min read
We built the whole meeting and you still cannot buy it
Rooms, lobby, breakouts, polls, whiteboard, attendance reports: built and tested. The media server all of it talks to is not deployed, so the product is listed as coming soon. Also: why we refuse end-to-end encryption.
