Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by danielweber 4402 days ago
The developer(s?) who made TrueCrypt did it for their own reasons.

They didn't necessarily do it because they wanted to "stop teh NSA." A lot of people who wanted to "stop teh NSA" started using TrueCrypt, and so they assumed that their goals lined up with TrueCrypt's. But maybe they didn't.

Maybe the developer using TrueCrypt was perfectly happy with "defend against anyone short of the NSA, especially since the NSA would need to expose their ability to break into this in order to do anything bad to me." There are millions of people who legitimately share that threat model.

We can parse out each comment in the source code like lawyers fighting about a comma before SCOTUS or biblical scholars debating on the definition of a word in Hebrew. We will never know. But there is a really big possibility that the developer(s) consider BitLocker acceptable, even if it's closed-source by Microsoft.

EDIT replaced an instance of "BitLocker" with "TrueCrypt" in second paragraph, whooops!
2 comments
xcrunner529 4402 days ago
Exactly, and it's amazing what a sudden lack of motivation (for a FREE project after 10 years) will do to someone compared to how you feel when you first are building and all giddy and have high aspirations. They're probably worn out and tired and so suddenly they don't feel as strict need to adhere to their previous guidelines.

However, I personally find that interesting since I'd think in today's climate it's even more important and they were getting lots of exposure.

link
Andrew_Quentin 4402 days ago
At what point did you answer that simple question of - well why didn't they just say they are not motivated to continue the project any longer, but instead say Truecrypt is not secure.
link
danielweber 4402 days ago
I'm not sure you can apply Occam's Razor here. You will only break your blades as you search for a simple answer.

Maybe he was pissed.

Maybe he really didn't want to support it any more, and would feel really bad if people's stuff got compromised on his watch, so he wanted everyone to stop using his stuff as hard as possible.

link