News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Signal Desktop. Parent comment

Re:Signal Desktop by tptacek on Wednesday December 02, 2015 @04:48PM (#10666089)
In fact, he may have even said it on Cryptocat; Poitras and Greenwald used it to collaborate with him. Snowden also used Lavabit to send email. Why? Because Lavabit had superior UX to his other options --- because Lavabit handled all the crypto serverside. NSA has presumably read everything he sent on both of those systems. Despite the extreme ease of use both systems boasted, they were both so badly designed that they enabled retroactive decryption.

So I think, if that was an attempt at a rebuttal, it was not a very effective one.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Signal Desktop by mynewtb on Wednesday December 02, 2015 @05:31PM (#10666343)
So they used bad products because their UX was good. That seems to be grandparent's point?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Signal Desktop by tptacek on Wednesday December 02, 2015 @05:40PM (#10666406)
Secure messaging products with good UX and bad security should wait to launch until they can have good security; the alternative puts people at risk, as it did to Snowden.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Signal Desktop by mynewtb on Wednesday December 02, 2015 @06:41PM (#10666721)
They should but they don't. That's why have competitive UX is important for the good tools or people won't even consider using them. We have seen that happen countless times.
[ Parent | on HN ]