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: 2) by HiThere on Saturday June 21 2014, @05:00AM
And if you do fork it, they have no reasonable way to stop you. They can't prove who they are and go to court on it. But on your head be the results...and, of course, on the head of everyone who trusts you.
OTOH, it's quite likely that only one small group of people knows how to get through the encryption, so probably for most users it won't matter. Probably.
OTOH, this is just a guess at what's going on. You guess the other way, and you might be right. Perhaps.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.