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from the they-don't-seem-as-secretive-anymore dept.
Last month, SoylentNews reported that TrueCrypt was discontinued. Many have speculated that a fork would happen, but the TrueCrypt license makes that complicated. Now, Ars Technica reports about contact with a TrueCrypt developer on the subject:
In the days immediately following last month's TrueCrypt retirement, Johns Hopkins University professor Matt Green asked one of the secretive developers if it would be OK for other software engineers to use the existing source code to start an independent version. The developer responded:
"I am sorry, but I think what you're asking for here is impossible. I don't feel that forking truecrypt would be a good idea, a complete rewrite was something we wanted to do for a while. I believe that starting from scratch wouldn't require much more work than actually learning and understanding all of truecrypt's current codebase.
I have no problem with the source code being used as reference."
So, it looks like a fork won't happen after all. But a commenter there noted the existence of FreeOTFE, and I had previously noted tc-play. So even without a TrueCrypt fork, maybe developers won't have to start completely from scratch.
[Ed'sNote: At the time of posting, the Wikipedia entry for FreeOTFE notes that the domain has been dormant for some time. Whether work continues on FreeOTFE is uncertain. The concept sounds very much like the full disk encryption that has been available for linux for quite some time, but which does not provide plausible deniability. If I am wrong in these assumptions, I would welcome being corrected!]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Saturday June 21 2014, @04:52AM
You learned the wrong lesson. The right lesson is that one shouldn't depend on software that uses a proprietary data format to store the data. It's almost the same idea, but not quite. A text editor can be as closed as it wants to be, because the files that it creates are open. A word processor that uses a proprietary format can leave you unable to access your data. It isn't only fancy disk encryption schemes that present this kind of danger, all applications do. And the code doesn't really NEED to be open, as long as the file formats are. (That said, I *much* prefer FOSS, after having some applications I trusted an paid good money for suddenly stop working, but that's just a preference. The file formats are the necessity.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.