On Sun, Feb 03, 2013 at 10:34:17PM +0700, Nathan of Guardian wrote: > Just to be clear, I am not against 1) trying to make money through > software 2) tech startups 3) enthusiastic tech journalism and 4) > entrepreneurs who truly want to make people's lives better.
I concur that these are good goals, nice goals, fine goals. However...and to focus on one issue that Wickr and Gryphn have in common: > [...] setting self-destruct timers that will delete the communication > from the recipient's phone. This is -- depending on how you look at it -- worthless or malware. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't do what it says it does and any illusion of security it provides is just that. (My guess: it doesn't work. It can probably be undercut at the network, OS, application or firmware levels. And then there's "take a picture of the screen".) If it does work, then it does so by subverting someone's desire to make their hardware -- their property -- work the way they wish it to. We call that "malware". I'm not picking on these, per se: I can say and have said the same thing about DRM-enforcement software: it's malware, because it endeavors to take away control of someone's hardware and hand it over to someone else. But I do think it's long past time to abandon the entire concept of "self-destructing X". I've watched many attempts to make it work and they've all failed. ---rsk -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
