[jheriko]

it is a bit disappointing that so many developers dive into making things without making some minimum research effort into what others have done before. its a recurring theme... however i'm torn because its nice that useful software can hit the market so quickly.

the usual piracy arguments are fine, and yes information that can be viewed by the intended recipient is necessarily crackable, but i think we owe it to our industry and community to not ignore the past X years of work in this field and implement embarrassingly naive amateur solutions. however it does require knowledge and effort to exploit this - particularly physical or close access to the device - imo no layers of security are not worth much once an attacker has physical access.

SnapChat is not alone - there are much, much worse offenders. That recent memory optimisation article about Firefox was imo considerably more shocking... browsers in general seem to be littered with amateurish crap. Even things like Office have some serious problems (why is this file locked? have you memory mapped it? do you need to actively stream my 1.2MB of excel file? really?) the Visual Studio devs have classically thrown away and rebuilt lots of good work over the last two iterations, whilst damaging the quality of the compiler - despite adding features. if valid code from popular libraries stops building between releases i wonder what regression tests are being done if any...