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The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

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131–140 of 191 posts

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#131
post #104
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is one country out of ~200.

Yes but it has 350M people living in it, half the HN, Silicon Valley, and Moxie with his team. It's not honest to say the US is just another country among 200.

yep, in other words around 4% of the world's population live in the US and of course this pales in comparison to actually large nation states, like india or china.

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#132
post #113

I still can't get over Moxie wanting Google and Apple and Microsoft to be gatekeepers of what you can and can't do with your device and calling sideloading "that old broken desktop security model". I admire your work Moxie, but sadly we stand on different sides of war on general purpose computing. I can't help but be saddened that "the other side" got someone so talented and dedicated.

There is no war on general purpose computing. Who even came up with the idea?

Cory Doctorow

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-p...

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#133
post #5

I get a lot of credit for the stuff that Open Whisper Systems does, but it's not all me by a long shot. Trevor Perrin, Frederic Jacobs, Christine Corbett, Tyler Reinhard, Lilia Kai, Jake McGinty, and Rhodey Orbits are the crew that really made all this work happen.

Thank you for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unZZCykRa5w . Your notion of 'bundling' was one of my top three most mulled ideas in the past five years. Once I started looking, I see it everywhere.

For those of us who don't do YouTube, is there anywhere else we can read about Moxie's "bundling"?

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#134
post #55

Didn't TextSecure stop encrypting SMS a while back? If you lose data connectivity you're sending in the clear, right?

Yes. This is really annoying it was one of the major selling points - I'd got several people to install it on this basis. They had a reason for the change but I was un-impressed The best thing that one can say is that it is well indicated by the UI whether the message will be secure. Blue for encrypted. Green for clear. I've managed to explain this to some very tech unsavy people.

Just in case, do you know about https://github.com/SMSSecure/SMSSecure?

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#135
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll find that this is true for every messenger on Android, since there is no way to detect someone uninstalling without unregistering. TextSecure has delivery receipts so you can see when your messages aren't being delivered, and there's a web-based unregistration flow on the Open Whisper Systems website so that users can unregister their numbers if they've uninstalled.

"there is no way to detect someone uninstalling without unregistering" The TextSecure app could ping your server with a "I am still here" message if it goes a week without sending any messages. Don't hear from it for two weeks? Unregister it. Would this not work?

Not having a connection for a month doesn't necessarily mean you're not "still here".

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#136
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie, the progress on TextSecure/Signal integration seems to have slowed down quite a bit (at least as seen from the outside). I think it's been almost a year since Signal for iOS came out - yet still no word on Signal for Android. What is taking so long, if you don't mind me asking? Is there some sort of Signal 3.0 overhaul planned for all the platforms along with a big launch? Also, I think you've been quite retre…

I used to be a "fan" of TextSecure, but have become disillusioned lately. The development have always been slow. Very few people use it, even among my geek friends. Convincing people to use it is hard as well. Confusion over what it does, having to give out their phone number and no desktop client doesn't help. When I'm actually in need of encryption it doesn't even work, since Google Play services are blocked in Chi…

I've used TextSecure since sometime last year and my impression is that development has been speeding up in the past few months. [0] Seems like there's a new version every week. Most recent update brought a nicer UI, week before that "quick reply" from notifications, .. it really is very slick these days, and it works so well as a drop-in replacement that I've had no problem making my whole family (and various friends) use it. Not much explaining needed: you send texts just like before, but if the other person also uses TextSecure it's - well - secure (and free) and you don't have to think about it.

[0] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/commits/master

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#137
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie, the progress on TextSecure/Signal integration seems to have slowed down quite a bit (at least as seen from the outside). I think it's been almost a year since Signal for iOS came out - yet still no word on Signal for Android. What is taking so long, if you don't mind me asking? Is there some sort of Signal 3.0 overhaul planned for all the platforms along with a big launch? Also, I think you've been quite retre…

I used to be a "fan" of TextSecure, but have become disillusioned lately. The development have always been slow. Very few people use it, even among my geek friends. Convincing people to use it is hard as well. Confusion over what it does, having to give out their phone number and no desktop client doesn't help. When I'm actually in need of encryption it doesn't even work, since Google Play services are blocked in Chi…

This. I used to recommend TextSecure to all my friends, but it didn't interact well with other services, and then IIRC it stopped working with SMSes entirely.

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#138

So it looks like I might have understood something wrong regarding TextSecure. Installed it, used it, uninstalled it. Years later, a contact asks me that he "saw me in TextSecure", sent me a message. Obviously, I didn't get that message. Why - o why - was/is TextSecure pretending to not know about metadata when it does? Why could that happen? Moxie?

This problem is not specific to TextSecure, it also exist with iMessage and whatsapp as far as I know. You can unregister here: https://whispersystems.org/textsecure/unregister

> You can unregister here: https://whispersystems.org/textsecure/unregister

Well, _maybe_ you can. I spent several days six months ago trying to unregister, and finally just accepted the fact that TextSecure will never let me go. Oh well.

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#139
post #120
post #113

I still can't get over Moxie wanting Google and Apple and Microsoft to be gatekeepers of what you can and can't do with your device and calling sideloading "that old broken desktop security model". I admire your work Moxie, but sadly we stand on different sides of war on general purpose computing. I can't help but be saddened that "the other side" got someone so talented and dedicated.

I don't know about Apple or MS, but building TextSecure from source and installing it on an android phone is about as easy as you could reasonably expect it to be. It seems churlish to complain that there are also easier ways to install it. Edit: although, of course you have to trust Github or whoever if you install from source.

They are actively opposing their apps to be published on F-Droid. Instead, they prefer on proprietary services for various (imo bad) reasons>

https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/redphone-and-textsecure/#po...

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#140
post #5

I get a lot of credit for the stuff that Open Whisper Systems does, but it's not all me by a long shot. Trevor Perrin, Frederic Jacobs, Christine Corbett, Tyler Reinhard, Lilia Kai, Jake McGinty, and Rhodey Orbits are the crew that really made all this work happen.

I remember being in an applied crypto class with you at CMU taught by Virgil Gligor if I am not mistaken and was thoroughly impressed with your knowledge of cryptosystems. I am happy for you! Way to go.

He went to CMU?
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