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Comment Re:3G is terrible for all these things (Score 1) 118

The thing is that 3G adds complexity and power requirements to support higher speeds. It is designed from the ground up for higher bandwidth. The majority of IoT applications need long battery life and long range communications, not high link speeds. Using 3g for IoT is re-purposing technology engineered for something else: Sure it might work, but it's hardly optimal

Comment 3G is terrible for all these things (Score 5, Interesting) 118

Actually the problem with 3G is not the size of the module at all, but the fact that 3G drains the battery very fast, and the costs from the providers are vastly higher compared to other technologies. Sure 3G for Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication might make sense since the yearly cost in a car is far higher than the cost of 3g connection and there's plenty of electricity to go around, but for smart meters? No way. Especially for industrial applications with thousand of devices, the costs rack up pretty fast, especially when you want your IoT-network to last years, not months. There are other technologies out there that are far more suitable for these kind of things (802.15.4 protocols, SIGFOX's network, OnRamp's network etc)

Comment Re:Expect a FISA or PRISM notice in... (Score 3, Informative) 270

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.

Comment Re:FOSS names (Score 2) 270

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.

Comment Re:GIMP, Ubuntu, Xfce (Score 1) 270

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).

Comment Re:Like LAME (Score 2) 270

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.

Comment Re:"CipherShed" (Score 4, Informative) 270

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.

Comment Re:Torvalds is true to form.... (Score 3, Interesting) 727

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.

Comment Linux could own the desktop... (Score 4, Interesting) 727

All Google has to do is dump that stupid steaming pile called ChromeOS, and admit that Android wins. A desktop customized version of Android (complete with a real desktop) is still based on Linux (at least Google's fork of it), already has hundreds of thousands of apps, and could be better in nearly every way than Windows or Mac OS-X in 2 years, IMO.

The other broken OS, GNU/Linux, needs a major overhaul before it will ever be popular among anyone but geeks who are willing to accept that their OS is hostile to sharing new apps, or too blinded by fan-boy-ism to notice. I write this from my Ubuntu laptop, where my code contributions are far lower than Android or even Windows, even though I put in most of my effort here. It's just easier to publish an Android app. It's even easier to publish software for Windows. If Mark Shuttleworth were just a bit smarter, I think he'd realize he needs to abandon managing .deb packages and start this whole mess over based on a more git-like aproach. He's done a lot in that direction - user PPAs for example, but it's still not there. No RPM or .deb based Linux OS will ever become the basis for the Year of the Linux Desktop.

Comment GPL is about User/Owner Freedoms (Score 1) 117

The funny thing here is that Digia is still going to support Tivoization, but customers will have to pay for it! I suppose that's better than letting hardware manufacturers Tivoize their hardware for free, but this is the first time I have ever seen anyone upgrade their GPL license simply to force customers to pay more. It seems wrong somehow...

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