[deanCommie]

Okay, I'll be the contrarian one: I HATE the name.

There have already been trends in the mainstream and right wing media that "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear", that the NSA only monitors the communication of criminals, and that things like iPhone encryption help terrorists first.

With that in mind, can you imagine the reaction that the average lay-person will have when they see a clickbait headline or morning news report that says "A new app called Felony allows ISIS and online pedophiles to communicate in secret with ease."

It looks like a great app, and I will honestly use it.

But I don't think the name helps the cause of promoting easy and default end-to-end encryption for all to remove the implication that the only people that use it have something to hide.

[jackweirdy]

Nor does it help the cause of explaining to the general public that encryption is something they do use and should use in their own lives.

[mysterypie]

An "edgy" name can get you in real trouble. The brilliant programmer Dan Farmer [1] who developed the security tool that he named SATAN [2] was fired from his job when he published his program. If you haven't heard of SATAN, it was the most important network security analysis tool in the late 1990s.

I feel certain that the name was the critical factor that made his company so nervous. For a while he had two different names for the program, SATAN and SANTA, to try and reduce the stigma, but it didn't work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Farmer

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_fo...

[api]

Artists and musicians can get away with invoking (haha) such names for effect. But tech despite its abandonment of the suit is still pretty straight laced and Ivy League at heart and interfaces with a high corporate and financial world that is even more so.

It's okay if your audience is strictly other tech people, but this is built for general use.

[startling]

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...

> The Web site Serge had used (which has the word “subversion” in its name) as well as the location of its server (Germany) McSwain clearly found highly suspicious.

[masukomi]

Absolutely horrible choice of a name. There's so much BS regarding the use of encryption and it keeps coming up in criminal cases, that normal folks are going to avoid using a think that might somehow be linked with a felony.

[centizen]

And it seems the author is refusing to even have a discussion on the name choice, closing any issues that are opened to address it without comment.

What a great missed opportunity...

[Gargoyle]

Fork it, name it whatever you want.

Problem solved, welcome to open source.

[theli0nheart]

I really dislike this attitude. Sure, you can change the name (or do whatever you want) by forking, but what would that really achieve? Forking for a reason like this without a conversation isn't polite, nor will it likely achieve the best outcome.

[tzakrajs]

What it could achieve is a clone that simply replaces the names and requires very little maintenance. If the community agrees and adopts, then politeness be damned.

Edit: To put the converse: If it's a shitty idea, then no one will use it and it didn't matter that you were polite anyways.

[cyphar]

To be fair, this did happen with GCC. But everyone hated everyone else for years as a result. Forking fractures a community -- for something as trivial as this it isn't worth it. But it is worth DoSing the maintainer until they realise that making an encryption program called "Felony" is a brain-dead idea.

[freshhawk]

Yeah, hostile forks for minor reasons go over real well in the open source community. Don't welcome people to a community you obviously don't have much experience in please!

[Retra]

That doesn't solve the problem. Now your problem is you use "X" and nobody knows what that is unless you're going to say "it's a fork of Felony," which puts you back at square one.

You might as well just be offering to not refer to it at all by any name.

[madgar]

An idea which creates a new social problem. Welcome to open source!

[api]

There's been a rule: encryption must have terrible UX. Most encryption stuff even has awful UX by command line Linux hacker standards.

Now we have an effort otherwise but... cannot... resist... doing... something... to make it unfriendly...

[unixhero]

Luksus begs to differ. http://thomasfrivold.github.io/luksus

[winter_blue]

It's been 2 years since the author last committed to it: https://github.com/thomasfrivold/luksus

[unixhero]

And then?

[kbart]

Agree. Epithets like "darknet", "dark mail", "underground net" etc. along with names like this certainly doesn't help to improve encryption and privacy promoting software image to general public and media. I understand that it's a joke, but only a handful people will get that, for most others it will be another app that enables pedophiles and terrorist to get away with their crimes.

[ourmandave]

You forgot Bitcoin.

[henryboldi]

crimes and misdemeanors, i guess, but that's not the goal

[zouhair]

This is one of my pet peeves, calling it felony is utterly stupid and childish. Encryption and the use of encryption are serious matters and their PR should be handled with the utmost seriousness.

The first picture that came to mind is this http://i.imgur.com/EyFFRsa.gifv

[mildavw]

Suggestions and/or concepts you (OP) want to evoke:

  Patriot
  Freedom
  Liberty 
  Good Citizen
  Free Speech
  America
  Fourth Amendment
  Secure In Papers
  Right To Privacy

[darklajid]

I disagree that "America" and "Fourth Amendment" are a good concept, unless you target a very limited subset of humanity.

Patriotism is something I wouldn't like either, I think that's a rather odd concept (and not related to liberty, freedom or security).

Good Citizen sounds like it comes straight from a famous book inventing doublespeak.

Even Free Speech is not a global concept - the way you capitalize it I assume you're after the US version again.

Probably the lesson is (again) that naming things is a hard problem (I agree that Felony might not be a good name too by the way)

[viraptor]

Other names have a funny coincidence: Secure In Papers and Right To Privacy. Both SIP and RTP are existing protocols for chat/calls/presence on the internet. Most voip phones use them, so if people started using the initialisms, it could confuse some people in the context of internet message exchange.

[programmarchy]

I'll add a counter point and say that I like the name. Politicians have a history of inverting meanings, e.g. Patriot Act, Affordable Health Care Act, etc. -- the public is almost conditioned to invert logic to understand things at this point. Personally, I find the terms above to be patronizing and even suspicious in the political context.

The mental operation of inverting the word felony is kind of interesting and thought provoking, IMO.

[mysterypie]

> the public is almost conditioned to invert logic

Only a Hacker News type of person will invert the logic. The general public won't.

Ask your neighbor to guess the purpose of the Banking Secrecy Act [1]. Does it protect your money and your financial privacy, or does it make banks snitch on you and strip away financial privacy?

Even I was surprised that the name of the law and the actual text are exact opposites.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act

[rwallace]

If you're going to invert meanings, you need to be careful about the polarity. The way politicians (and corporations) do it is, as you observe, to take something bad (that they want to support) and put a good label on it; for obvious reasons, this is a winning move. What's going on here is taking something good and putting a bad label on it; for reasons which should be equally obvious, this is a losing move.

[mildavw]

I hear ya. And I'm sure most HN readers understand and share your cynicism. But I think naming it something satirical and anti-double-speak ultimately increases your odds of being misunderstood.

The OP is honestly interested in furthering the right to privacy. State it plainly and simply. (It doesn't inoculate the app from being painted as a terrorist abetter, but it's the best you can do.)

[ryanSrich]

It's almost satirical, which I'm fine with.

[api]

That's not ironic inversion of meaning. That's straight up deception.

[clarkmoody]

+1 for Liberty

That's the concept that encapsulates privacy, speech, etc.

The America-centric names are less appealing to me, since many equate "America" with the federal government, which is definitely not the friend of liberty / free speech / privacy.

[nailer]

+1 for 'Privacy'. Liberty is America centric. And privacy is more specific.

[ZenoArrow]

> "Liberty is America centric."

I wouldn't say it belongs to any nation, though if it had to belong to one it'd probably be France. The first two things that come to mind when I think of the word 'liberty' are both of French origin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberté,_égalité,_fraternité

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty

[nailer]

You're right re: France, but people in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Australia talk much less about liberties than they do about privacy.

Oddly, this government minister [http://news.sky.com/story/1675276/conservative-mp-calls-for-...] was so shocked and outraged about requests for leaders to reveal their tax returns he suggested banning curtains as a equivalent. He's from the same government that collects and reads all email of all citizens.

[henryboldi]

Hence launching on the 4th of july ;)

[eganist]

Should've called it Liberty. :)

[mildavw]

  4th Of July

[takeda]

IMO liberty is probably the best name from that list.

[callumlocke]

Disagree with all of these. Why politicise it at all? Why not just allude to security or communication?

[pmorici]

Patriot Paper

[wmluke]

Currently, the trending HN commentry is focused on this name, and as much I like a good naming debate, I feel it is distracting from more "significant" concerns, such as...

How does the app handle encryption? Has there been a security review?How are keys handled? How are conversations persisted in the app? Does it use iCloud? Etc...

[biokoda]

> How does the app handle encryption? Has there been a security review?

It's built on Electron, React and Redux. There is no security as it is a fundamentally insecure environment.

[mwcampbell]

It's fashionable around here to criticize that tech stack, but do you have anything to back up that claim?

[biokoda]

Running a large list of dependencies controlled by someone else. Stores data on disk unencrypted. Stores code that gets executed, on disk in text form unencrypted and unsigned. Executes code while running directly from a website (github).

All in all an order of magnitude less security then a native app to put it mildly.

http://blog.scottlogic.com/2016/03/09/As-It-Stands-Electron-...

[Taek]

Security is very hard. You need carefully constructed apps with carefully chosen dependencies, and generally you want the number of lines of code to be very small.

Anything webkit based is going to lose on all of those points almost immediately. Anything nodejs based is also going to lose on all of those points, because nodejs has a culture of massive dependency stacks run by whomever. Javascript in general is a pretty insecure language, unless you are using explicit subsets but even then javascript has a horrible reputation for security.

Something is better than nothing. I'd rather people use Telegram (pretty well known for terrible crypto) than people use nothing at all. Same with Felony. I'd rather people use bad crypto than no crypto.

But in general it would seem likely that anything built on a webstack has a low chance of passing a security audit. The cultures surrounding the webstack technologies prioritize shipping product and doing cool things over shipping bug-free or secure code. It's one of the reasons that the webstack is so popular. It's easy, and if you ship something buggy it's generally not too bad to go back and fix it later, especially for something like a webpage, because your users will get your updates immediately.

[danjoc]

Besides NPMgate?

http://incolumitas.com/2016/06/08/typosquatting-package-mana...

https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/4016

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141702881055/package-install-scri...

[tmalsburg2]

Unfortunately, these endless tangents are becoming increasingly common on HN. I guess these are people who want to show off how smart they are but really don't have anything interesting to say about the topic at hand, so they go for the low-hanging fruits like spelling, layout, titles, and so on.

[cyphar]

Calling a "user friendly" encryption program "felony" feels like an attack on encryption. Yes it will evoke a reaction, because if the author didn't do it deliberately to sabotage the PR of the crypto community then they need to be made aware of their mistake.

Of course, there are other concerns (why PGP and not Axolotl or OTR, how on earth does "your key is your username" work without causing other CAP-like issues, etc). But I'm not going to spend any time trying to improve a project that is working against encryption for everyone.

[unimpressive]

The name is an actual show stopper, and the author is being intransigent about changing it so it's only natural for it to be the lions share of the discussion.

[GavinMcG]

I don't think that's it. Sure, the name is low-hanging fruit, but it's important low-hanging fruit.

Criticizing a name is hardly something that "shows off" smarts. Dismissing everyone for having nothing interesting to say, on the other hand...

[tmalsburg2]

A comment about the name is ok, but an endless discussion about it hardly.

[turar]

At Aleynikov's trial, prosecutors used the name of Subversion to imply nefarious intent.

[ascendantlogic]

I just put in an issue to change the name. Looks like one was put in prior and closed without comment by the repo owner. I hope he doesn't think this is some edgy way to be "cool"

EDIT: He closed my issue without comment.

[krisdol]

fork it and maintain your own name if you feel strongly about it.

[ascendantlogic]

Or maybe he shouldn't be giving opponents of strong encryption a PR gift on a platter.

[vtlynch]

Agreed. There is real irresponsibility in choosing this name. Thinking that this wont be used against the encryption community is naive and short-sided.

[grenoire]

Fully agreed. The name sounds 'cool,' but may end up being the thing that leads to the project's early death. Completely counter-productive.

[superswordfish]

It doesn't even sound cool to me. "Felony" is an ugly word, meaning aside.

[croon]

Agreed. I understand the choice, but for the same effect at least pick "no felony" or "NotAFelony" or "Constitutional" just to hope that it gets debated in court whether "Constitutional" is illegal and used by IS*.

[henryboldi]

I don't think "no felony" has the same ring to it though! ;)

[mathiasrw]

I suggest "Nofello"

[asimjalis]

I will be the contra-contrarian. I agree that the name makes the app sound illegal. At the same time notoriety could work as a marketing strategy for the app. The clickbait headlines could get the word out there that this app exists. The more people know about the more are likely to use it.

[henryboldi]

Fair points. The title was kinda a joke originally and then it just stuck.

[cyphar]

There's a "rename" button on Github. It will handle redirects for you. Fixing a future PR nightmare couldn't be easier.

[pwinnski]

It's still a joke.

Five hours on HN, and the name's not changed yet? I'll check the next time this is posted with a usable name. IOW, when you start taking it seriously, so will I.

[JshWright]

Says the guy with "Commie" in his nick ;p

[hasenj]

Although I think anyone can fork it and rebrand it and always keep the fork up to date. It would be an exact replica, just with a different name.

[grandalf]

Fork and rename?

[Sylos]

Yeah, and on the other side we have propaganda-names like "USA PATRIOT Act" or "Privacy Shield".

[takeda]

As someone here mentioned:

Those are taking something negative and wrap it in a positive name (positive gain for the author)

We're taking something positive and wrap it in a negative name. This will only cause negative gain. Not only for the author but also for making encryption seem like something evil. This is especially bad time when politicians are trying to ban encryption.

[networked]

Besides, the name suggests a new Scheme implementation rather than cryptographic software.