One more point... this patent pool thing is all bad, in that it keeps out new players, reducing innovation. Also, it does nothing to stop trolls, who have no product to protect. You can't counter-sue a troll, since they don't do anything, making it impossible for them to violate patents. Billions of dollars are being flushed down the toilet in this anti-innovation patent-lawyer shake-down.

Patents back in the 1970s were only slightly broken compared to today. I've met several inventors or their relatives who invented things like milk cartons and every-day items we now take for granted. Up through the 1970s, "inventor" was a potential career path.

That all changed rapidly starting in 1982, when Congress voted to give all patent appeal cases to a single appeals court in Washington DC. This court basically created the patent troll industry. Before 1982, trolls would have been thrown out of court. Since then, this court has become a puppet to the patent troll industry through something called regulatory capture.

I wont go into the evils of software patents here. It is a regular flame topic on slashdot. However, we can blame this appeals court for them. Most recently, I was shocked when they changed long standing precident and declared that APIs are copyrightable, which if upheld, has potential to end software development as we know it.

I have several software patents. We are required to get them for defensive purposes. This is essentially a lawyer's tax on the software industry, with zero benefit to non-lawyers, so far as I can tell.

It sounds like you know a bit about modern DRAM architecture. Data sheets now days are not avalable to the public, so it's hard to figure out basic things, like how much power is burned in the DRAM in a simple loop. Do you have a simple rule of thumb for modern DRAM power loss? If I understand correctly, static power is minimal, but dynamic power can generate several watts of power.

AT&T agreed to offer $10 DSL as a condition of merging with Bell South. I tried many times, calling AT&T, Googled a ton, etc. They fucked us. They probably offered the $10 DSL to exactly one rich ass hole. Why should we expect better this time around?

I just want you and the other Slashdotters to know we're taking your suggestions very seriously. Cryptonomy seems to be a leading condender. Thank you for the suggestion!

No, we can't use TrueCrypt in the name. The license terms are clear about that. We're trying not to use True, and we have been told that it would be best not to use Crypt, though I think that's going a bit far.

IronCrypt is a good suggestion. It is fucking squated. God I hate squatters. Worse than lice or ticks.

This is not correct. Each individual file in TrueCrypt has a clear copyright notice at the top. Every file with any E4M license will be replaced from scratch. After that, we'll do the files that have TrueCrypt license, though mainly so we can migrate to a better FOSS license.

Some people post warrat canaries, but I stopped. Our current defense strategy is having developers around the world. Also, we have weekly voice meetings that are hard to fake, and enable us to know we're dealing with the same person each week.

Personally, I've boning up on skills for finding weaknesses in crypto code. I just did a 2-week marathon of being a huge a-hole over at the Password Hashing Competition. Telling people why you think their algorithms are not secure does not make you popular, but I have to admit it was fun. Applying the same sort of analysis to TrueCrypt makes me want to set my hair on fire.

TrueCrypt's saving grace is that it is not an on-line app. Even in the first "rebranding" release, we're removing it's tendency to ping the Internet whenever you click on a help button. If an attacker could hack the volume data, for example, he'd totally pwn TrueCrypt. But... in that case, he already owns you most likely.

I find EncryptAll not bad. The bar here is not that high... just has to be an improvement. The guys on the CipherShed team would kill me for suggesting Pure-Crypt, but I think that's available and also aligns us well with Pure-Privacy, the new foundation promoting online privacy.

I totally agree with your list, which means you are better than most of us geeks at picking, or at least evaluating names. I would love an alternative to CipherShed. I bet you could help here. Can you think of better names.

I like the name password-hashing entry in the PHC called OmegaCrypt. I was considering contacting the author, Brandon, to see if he'd let us use it. Some people on the CipherShed project don't want either True or Crypt in the name, partly for fear of trade-mark dispute, and partly to show that we're doing an honest clean fork, with an intent to rewrite it all under a popular FOSS license (the latest BSD license is currently the leading condender).

Infringement has a lot to do with who you're pissing off. I this case, I am not so worried about the original TrueCrypt team. These guys did a ton of work for years, almost for free, because they thought the world needed it. Well, the world still needs it, and we have some new volunteers (but need more!). The E4M owner has some gripes about use of E4M licensed code in the tool. I think we need to focus on the E4M code and get it out of there ASAP. We can then take some more time to redo the whole GUI and everything else.

So, I'm invovled in the CipherShed project. In fact, I bought the domain originally when Niklas suggested it. I also bought FalseCrypt :-)

This thread is actually very helpful. I've been very concerned that we need to pick a better name. The unfortunate truth is that we geeks totally suck at picking name!

RealCrypt is excellent, IMO. That's why the RealCrypt fork of TrueCrypt exists :-) It's a Fedora-packaged fork that drops all the Windows stuff. There's also a VeraCrypt fork. OpenCrypt.net was offered to us by the owner, which is very generous, but there is an OpenCrypt already, which oddly enough has to do with encryption rather than vampires.

Please keep picking on the name, and suggesting alternatives! If someone here provides one, I'll try to have it adopted. We *barely* still have time to make a name change.

It's GNU/Linux's fault. Android, still based on Linux, could likely win the desktop if Google got their act together and stopped pushing ChromeOS. Notice how my binary applications run on *very* many Android devices without recompilation, even when I write in C using the NDK. Notice how Android does not introduce bugs in my applications by swapping in a buggy shared library which I never tested. Notice how nearly impossible it is to publish a GNU/Linux app in comparison. In one case, you just publish your app to Google and wait a day or so. Notice how my app simply installs in a comparitavely secure jailed directory rather than having to disperse crap all over the file system. For Linux, you need to write and test different and binary incompatible installatoin packages for RedHat, Arch, Debian, Suse, then wait a few years for your package to be accepted and migrate from unstable to testing to stable, and even then you don't run everywhere.

Just freaking stupid.... year of the GNU/Linux Desktop my butt!

On a completely unrelated note, WTF is up with the new slashdot site? I had the newly dumbed-down ads disabled with a check-box. The check box is gone, and the ads are back, and dumber than ever! I miss the days of Barracuda ads that made sense on slashdot. The new ones aren't targeted at geeks at all.