Felony – An open-source PGP keychain • Hacker News Board

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#181

Post by cyphar » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 8:34 PM UTC

fabiom wrote: post #179

cyphar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PGP is a great choice when you want to be able to send encrypted messages over any channel you want. That has nothing to do with PGP. You could do the same by base64-ing an OTR session (in fact, people do that all the time). I don't like the choice of PGP because it has non-repudability. If you send me a message, I can prove to anyone in the world that you sent me the message. OTR and Axolotl don't have this proble…

> If you send me a message, I can prove to anyone in the world that you sent me the message. Only if you sign the message, right? But you can use PGP to send encrypted messages without signing them.

And then if the message is corrupted you have know way of knowing. Not to mention that essentially nobody uses those modes.

Axolotl and OTR provide signatures, just that they are "non-transferrable" (so to speak). Not to mention that the actual crypto is more modern.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#182

Post by slacka » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 8:40 PM UTC

cdnsteve wrote: post #16

henryboldi wrote: post #2

Hi I'm Henry, the creator of Felony I’ve had a passion for politics, history, and programming since the age of 12 growing up in a suburb of Chicago. During my freshman year, I developed an interest in software. A couple of apps and hackathons (programming competitions) later, I was working on my own startups when I made the leap to drop out of high school to become a software engineer at a venture-backed tech startup…

This looks like an interesting project but has a poor name choice. If it's targeted at non technical users, it may actually prevent them from using it, out of fear that just using it is illegal.

How about "The Fourth"? The name denotes privacy and won't scare off people by sounding illegal.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#183

Post by asimjalis » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 8:54 PM UTC

henryboldi wrote: post #2

Hi I'm Henry, the creator of Felony I’ve had a passion for politics, history, and programming since the age of 12 growing up in a suburb of Chicago. During my freshman year, I developed an interest in software. A couple of apps and hackathons (programming competitions) later, I was working on my own startups when I made the leap to drop out of high school to become a software engineer at a venture-backed tech startup…

Nice. How do you encrypt something? I see Add Key, Verify, Sign, Decrypt as options. I don’t see Encrypt.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#184

Post by Retra » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 9:18 PM UTC

Gargoyle wrote: post #52

masukomi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely horrible choice of a name. There's so much BS regarding the use of encryption and it keeps coming up in criminal cases, that normal folks are going to avoid using a think that might somehow be linked with a felony.

Fork it, name it whatever you want. Problem solved, welcome to open source.

That doesn't solve the problem. Now your problem is you use "X" and nobody knows what that is unless you're going to say "it's a fork of Felony," which puts you back at square one.

You might as well just be offering to not refer to it at all by any name.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#185

Post by datashovel » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 9:26 PM UTC

henryboldi wrote: post #2

Hi I'm Henry, the creator of Felony I’ve had a passion for politics, history, and programming since the age of 12 growing up in a suburb of Chicago. During my freshman year, I developed an interest in software. A couple of apps and hackathons (programming competitions) later, I was working on my own startups when I made the leap to drop out of high school to become a software engineer at a venture-backed tech startup…

So many comments about the name. All of a sudden I have a strange urge to see the next big open source project name themselves fjoi43isoitoei. Because names of technology projects only have as much importance as the reader attributes to them. If you can't see beyond that, and if your primary focus is what others might think of you because of what you named your project, I don't know what to say to you.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#186

Post by tokenizerrr » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 9:31 PM UTC

The Gnu Privacy Assistant (GPA, https://www.gnupg.org/(en)/related_software/gpa/screenshots...., bundled with https://www.gpg4win.org/) is also pretty good. Though it does require you to already know the right words and a basic knowledge of GPG.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#187

Post by brightball » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 9:32 PM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #95

henryboldi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how it works... 1. Add public keys to your buddies list— A public key is like a username - Adding someone’s public key to your buddies list lets you send them messages. You can find other public keys on markets like keybase.io and darknet. 2. Encrypt a message— Select a recipient from your buddies list and compose a message. Only your chosen recipient(s) can read the message. Encrypted messages might contain s…

1. Why did you choose PGP, when we have OTR and Axolotl -- which are specifically designed for informal communication where repudiation (recipient Y not being able to prove to others that X sent the original message) matters. 2. How are the public keys securely distributed? You say that "a public key is like a username", but without a central authority you hit a lot of issues (essentially the CAP tradeoff, but for us…

As for #3 I would think that it makes fun of the idea that encryption is somehow a crime. That's how I read it at least.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#188

Post by Sir_Substance » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 9:35 PM UTC

brashrat wrote: post #94

callumlocke wrote: post #27

Although the name is ironic, it will reinforce the common vague notion that encryption is something politicized/controversial/illegal, and that's not a good thing for infosec. Looks great otherwise.

the name may be intended to be ironic, but the irony of the irony is that if you are interested in communicating about conducting one or more felonies, I would in fact urge you to use encryption. I hate when people hate the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care?" question because it's a valid question. You can answer, "because I fear the creeping growth of a surveillance state like in 1984", but then again, i…

>if you do that you no longer get to claim that other "slippery slope arguments are fallacies".

You probably shouldn't be making that claim, to be honest. It's only a slippery slope fallacy if there's no historical evidence to support it. Part of the reason we record history is so we can tell whether a slippery slope might be a real danger.

There's several instances where a historical collection of information on citizens, done under claims to protect the people, turned into an oppressive regime, sometimes leading to the deaths of innocent citizens. The SS, Stasi and OVRA are all good examples, and a more current example can be found in China.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#189

Post by rxlim » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 9:36 PM UTC

After reading the README I think that "Felony" is a very appropriate name:

... built on the modern web with Electron, React, and Redux.

Building desktop applications with web frameworks should definitely count as a felony.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#190

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC

rxlim wrote: post #189

After reading the README I think that "Felony" is a very appropriate name: ... built on the modern web with Electron, React, and Redux. Building desktop applications with web frameworks should definitely count as a felony.

[deleted]