Comment by tveita | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tveita | Hacker News Reader

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I didn't mind much that TextSecure removed the SMS feature, since I didn't use it anyway, but I think the removal was badly handled. I'm glad someone is catering to the users who used this feature, it gets more eyes on the code and increases the pressure on the Signal team to do things right.

When TextSecure removed SMS encryption there wasn't a clear warning about it in the what's new message, and as far as I can tell there was no deprecation period or warning to users who had been using it. You'd be sending encrypted messages before the update, and unencrypted messages after. For some reason they didn't link to their blog post[1] in the what's new message. It looks to me like they didn't want people to notice that they were removing a feature.

This lessens my trust in the creators and makes me hesitate to update the app since I don't know if they will change or remove features I do use in the future without warning. Hopefully they'll review their process so they don't scare more people over to SMSSecure.

[1] https://whispersystems.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/

If you didn't use the feature, you might have missed it, but we talked about its removal publicly for over a year. We also made many incremental changes over that year in order to phase it out so that it wasn't a sudden removal. We did all of that, despite the fact that it was used by an incredibly tiny fraction of our total install base. The people who used encrypted SMS are very vocal, but the users we're really targeting never even knew it existed.

I think projects like this one are great. I have no idea if the people behind it know what they're doing or can write secure software, but we've always wanted some place where the people who want to import their GPG key, manually select their underlying block cipher, or support WoT style key signatures can go. Projects like these might be a better fit for those users.

Can you say which users you're really targeting or point me to where you've said it before? Keep up the good work, man!

I don't have a link other than their website[1], but the copy there suggests that the goal is to make encrypted communication ubiquitous by making it easy to use. They are targeting the people who would never get gpg set up due to how much of a PITA it is; the people who don't know the difference between AES and 3DES much less CBC and GCM.

1: https://whispersystems.org/

I am an avid TS user. I hate that they stopped SMS because the move is contrary to their stated goal[s]. Taking that as understood, I do not feel they mishandled notification of their stupid decision.

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