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Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

Call me old-fashioned, but I like to make informed decisions before signing up for something – so where are the specs?

    - What sort of encryption is used where?
    - How is this encryption ‘enforced’?
    - How are messages stored/logged and accessible to whom?
    - How highly available are these services?
    - How are users authenticated?
    - What limitations exist for use on tablets?
    - …

Just calling something ‘real geeky’ and throwing out some buzzwords is…well, insufficient to convince me.

Edit: added ‘to convince me’

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It's usually sufficient to be honest.

37signals' Campfire doesn't have information about some of the questions you answered on their website, but their app as you is wildly popular.

I think the 37signals guys benefit from their corporate/individual brands in that case. If you're just some person popping up on HN without that kind of historical track record, it's a lot easier to be dubious that the proper precautions have bene taken.

- AES 256 SSL - www.tesla.im works ONLY in an always on HTTPS mode. - Messages are visible ONLY to chat room members. - The servers are in an auto-scaling mode. - A combination of a valid email + bcrypt passwords. - A few UI glitches when using on low resolution/small screen tablets.

Hope this helps. Have a nice day.

SSL is secure connections, but not message encryption. This still means the messages are visible to Tesla.im or any server that transfers the mssages, even if you do not log it at some point is available is cleartext. That poses a privacy risk just like the mass majority of modern communication apps. https://www.cyphrd.com/ is working on a new communication app that actually poses client-side encryption with proper key sharing to keep communication private between the participents.

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