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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Virtually everyone on the Internet is using an OS that has the built-in capability to encrypt files with AES. Why would anyone delegate that to a server?

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Only thing I could think of is that you can transfer it from one computer to another quickly. And you don't need to create an account (like say if I transferred it through DropBox), just type in a password.

Right, so you encrypt locally, upload to Dropbox, pass the link to your friend, and they decrypt locally. Still not seeing why you'd opt to trust this doohickey.

I always found DropBox a pain, you have to email them the link, which is a bit more effort than saying going to a short URL and typing in a password. So I could see this being somewhat useful :)

If you've invented the most convenient file transfer tool on the whole Internet, you've buried the lede here; forget about the encryption, and get your Dropbox-competitor funded.

If you haven't, well, people should use that other service instead of this one.

Either way: I'm still totally unclear on why anyone would allow a server to encrypt files for them. I don't even reach the question of whether it's possible to do it securely, because it seems like such a weird thing to want.

I agree. But it's good that people are playing with cryptography though. The more that play, the better the whole can be.

If you want to learn how cryptography works, learn how to break it. Building sites like this isn't a very good educational tool.

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