Relaunched TrueCrypt site with original content and documentation

Why can't the original devs just leak the reason behind all this? I don't expect it on their official website but honestly, how difficult is it to just let people know?

If I was concerned about my data, I wouldn't touch TrueCrypt with a 10 foot pole. More specifically I wouldn't touch Windows.

Developers don't abruptly shut down projects. If there are problems with the code, they release statements and patches. If they lose interest in the project, they call it orphaned and ask for maintainers. If it's a mix of the two, they at least say so.

But what happened with TrueCrypt was truly bizarre. No warning. No phase-out. Telling people to move to BitLocker?

I think there's only one way to interpret that. They did something bizarre because it was all the noise they could make without telling us what really happened. AKA some of their developers got served gag orders.

But what on earth could a TrueCrypt dev be gagged for? A gag order implies that some three-letter-agency had enough foresight to know they were planning to disclose something. If it was that there was a government backdoor in TrueCrypt itself, how would NSA/FBI know that they discovered it? How would they know that it could be tied back to them? Why didn't the audit [1] catch it? Gag orders are pretty loose in terms of legality in the first place, but even still, would a gag order prevent them from releasing a statement about a security hole (without mentioning its origin) and releasing patches?

It's a total guess, but my theory is that TrueCrypt discovered something outside their codebase (EG: Windows itself) that was undermining encryption. They reached out to Microsoft, who contacted FBI/NSA, and they were served their gag orders. This is the only theory I can think of that makes a gag order possible, in other situations the FBI/NSA wouldn't have been able to know about a disclosure before it happened.

[1]: istruecryptauditedyet.com

Probably because they can't legally disclose the reason.

If they discovered an issue in Windows, and it led to gag orders, why would they tell people to move to BitLocker (a Microsoft product)?

LUKS is an on-disk format where as TrueCrypt is both an on-disk format and an application.zuluCrypt is only an application that supports multiple on-disk formats so your question is not easy to answer since it mixes up different things.

LUKS advantages over TrueCrypt is that it can support up to 8 different passwords and each password security can be fine tuned by a changeable pbkdf2 iteration count that is set per password.

TrueCrypt on-disk format advantages over LUKS is that it can support two volumes(outer one and hidden one) and its header is completely hidden since its encrypted.LUKS volume header is unencrypted and hence visible.

With a LUKS based encrypted volume,its possible to mimic a hidden header on a device through the usage of a "detached header" but this is a property of tools that manage LUKS volumes and not of a LUKS volume on disk-format.It is also possible to mimic a hidden volume through a plain dm-crypt volume at a non zero offset but this is also a property of a tool that manages LUKS volume and not of a LUKS volume format.

When it comes to binary applications,zuluCrypt is better than TrueCrypt because it supports TrueCrypt on-disk format together with other formats and it also supports multiple hidden volumes through the use of plain dm-crypt volumes.

zuluCrypt also supports LUKS volumes with a detached header and this is more or less like TrueCrypt volume that requires a password and a keyfile(the detached header will act as a keyfile in this case).

zuluCrypt also supports plain dm-crypt volumes at a none zero offset and this means it can have more than one "hidden volumes" although it does not offer protection of these hidden volumes.