Twitter To Open Source Android Security Tech 164
itwbennett writes "Following last month's acquisition of Whisper Systems, Twitter is open sourcing 'some' of the company's Android security products. First up: TextSecure, a text messaging client that encrypts messages. Souce code is on GitHub now. 'Offering the technology to the community so soon after the acquisition could indicate that Twitter made the acquisition primarily for the developer talent,' writes IDG News Service's Nancy Gohring."
Re:More "Web 2.0" crap that we had years ago? (Score:5, Informative)
The truly funny part is Web 2.0 is back to classic Client/Server programming, utilizing an HTML engine as the client. I believe that existed since the 60s with dumb terminals, but certainly no later than the early 80s with the current modern thick client/server model (think X11 and the like)
Regarding the open sourcing of the encryption code, generally self-written encryption routines are inadequate at best. If you're not leveraging one of the well vetted encryption libraries, odds are that your solution is weak and will only stand up to cursory inspection. Otherwise, you're using PGP, RSA, Blowfish, etc, and your code is merely a light wrapper around those libraries. (No, I did not review the code)
As for chat clients and the like connecting to each other with encryption, this has been around and open sourced a long time, one implementation is Off-the-Record [cypherpunks.ca]. And of course there's the PGP solution that has been around since the early 90s.