I think their point was that the person who made the icon is anonymous, so it's harder to blame and therefor benefits you. Not that you had that goal in mind to begin with.
You don't actually seem to be using the logo anywhere, though. On your site you write that "I had (have) plans to write an Instant Messenger client with proper support for privacy. This was the logo concept for the project"[1], but this project does not actually seem to exist (at least not in any public manner).
As such, why not just leave the logo of Tox in peace? Especially since it's a FOSS project with noble goals (even if they have yet to reach those goals, which is not surprising considering how early in the development the entire project is) and not some commercial entity intending to profit off of it.
And I'm quite sure that the logo's in the link below are intended to be used or are IN use. So, tell me, why are these companies with many highly experienced legal advisers not fighting eachother over a logo?
Only Apple go so far as to take such petty things to court.
Most of their law suits can be generalised as "It looks similar from this side of the room"
I think I'm safe in assuming when you say "Only Apple" you mean Apple Computers. However, it was actually Apple Records who sued Apple Computers, not the other way around.
Many people make plans, few carry them out. You posted that March 21, 2012. Now, 1 year and 4 months later, someone apparently independently created a similar logo and is actually doing something with it, not just planning to do so. If you do something with it as well then great! I don't see what the big deal is.
I think you misinterpreted what he meant by "true nature" - it is not "true nature" of people to communicate anonymously; however, doing so exposes the "true nature" of people.
Like Oscar Wilde has said: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
If you extrapolate my comment into points I wasn't trying to make, I think you'll find those arguments very easy to tear down. If that's a productive exercise for you, be my guest.
I strongly disagreed that the concept was't unique and original. I'm clarifying though, not trying to give you flak; like I said, I don't much care about this leg of the thread.
It's saddening that so much of the thread is spent dwelling on this issue. I'd love to hear your take on the actual crypto at play here, if you have time for a critique?
I still use it to play Terraria because its creator never fixed the multiplayer (which by the way if you play will be updated very soon with lots of new content).
It's funny how many focus on what are rather trivial things, the logo and name, instead of looking at the actual things which matter: the code, the security, and the idea itself.
DH is zero-knowledge in the sense that the two peers have no knowledge of each other, and yet share a knowledge at the end.
Again, I admit my word usage is a little bit liberal, but although I haven't done serious crypto for a couple of years now, I have the strange feeling you are nitpicking. Is it just a feeling? :)
Curiously, although I've always preferred DLP-based crypto, I actually never implemented any. So I gladly admit my knowledge of DH key exchange might not be as profound as I would like it to be.
That's not what "zero knowledge" means. In the context of STS or, more generally, DH, a ZKP is something you'd add after DH, to verify that one party or the other had arrived at the expected DH result.
I don't think I'm nitpicking: I see where you're coming from but I think you might be entirely wrong.
I don't know what it means to "prefer" DLP crypto. Over what? I just don't understand what you're trying to say with that last graf.
Well, if you exchange your keys via DH and start using that key to cipher the communication, you're going to find out very soon if you exchanged the key properly, won't you?
In essence, once you've agreed on a key you won't keep it to yourself (although you could, in theory). But am I missing the point? Are we talking about two different things? I'm talking about ZK from a mathematical point of view, you know, the cavern, the treasure, the two paths... (if you know this layman example about ZK)
Unfortunately I cannot go into details, but what I meant about my preference for DLP is that although I was mathematically more attracted to DLP based algorithms (when it came to asymmetric cryptography) I didn't really have the chance to "play" with them and spent more time with RSA.
So it's probable my knowledge of the DH key exchange algorithm is imperfect and last time I wrote crypto it was very mundane (it was using RC4, that's saying a lot!), so maybe I should just refrain from commenting about crypto.
SRP is a good example of DH with a bolted-on ZK system; the client and the server arrive at a key using a hash of a password as, effectively, the basis of a DH parameter, then use a hash-based zero-knowledge proof to "authenticate" each other.
This is why I believe in the federated client-server model. It is much easier to build a system with a few trusted parties that a system with zero trusted parties.
Eg in XMPP, only your server sees your IP address until you initiate some out-of-band p2p thing such as file transfer. Federated client-server architectures such as email and XMPP are also pretty well understood by now, especially email has been around a long time.
Sit in the thread monitoring progress. Then congratulating progress when it's made.
Or, if they want to contribute without causing arguments. Go upvote this on Reddit, WOT, Twitter, and whatever else in a way which won't cause a shitstorm in /g/.
you are missing nothing. But you can also see the development of the logo into what it became.
There were also many doodles and whatnot in threads for weeks before this logo was developed.
Congrats on the progress made so far. I'm eager to see how things shape up.
Would love to see a community project analogous to this one develop in the e-mail space since too many users find PGP to be cumbersome, despite some very nice implementations. Bitmessage and I2P's bote are both very interesting, but the prior project needs more experienced security people working on it (and some serious refactoring), and the latter suffers from the perceived issues of the "darknet" (not an issue for me, but...).
Would love to see a community project analogous to this one develop in the e-mail space since too many users find PGP to be cumbersome, despite some very nice implementations.
We're on it! https://parley.co will be entering pre-beta later this week. Maybe not technically a "community project" because it's being built by a company that is at least partly motivated by profit, but the whole thing is BSD-licensed so people can do whatever they want with it.
Great! Yeah, community would be ideal but a small company like yours is definitely wonderful, as well. As long as it's open source, it's fine by me.
I see you're building on PGP, which has been historically confusing for non-tech folks, but I look forward to see what you've come up with to counter that confusion.
A couple of issues:
1. Not sure if you'll be using the same server/TLS cert for your actual web-based e-mail sender, but I got a giant warning on Android (Kindle Fire running Chrome for Android) about the certificate being invalid. It's probably the fact that you need to host the intermediate certificates on your site (i.e., the chain of trust is "broken"). If you are hosting them, then it might be this issue:
http://www.unrelatedshit.com/2011/10/21/positivessl-not-work...
2. Again on the https, have you considered upgrading to TLS 1.1, or 1.2? You'd be able to offer ECDHE for forward secrecy, among other advantages. But you may have reasons for sticking with 1.0.
3. Are you vulnerable to SSL stripping attacks, like Moxie Marlinspike proposed? You are redirecting http requests to https.
Again, you may not be using this server for your actual registration, but just fyi.
One more suggestion: you may want to simplify the pricing. Do you really need 6 different categories? I'd try to eliminate at least 1, and ideally 2 or 3. Three categories may be the sweet spot (I think there's actual empirical research underlying this, but don't have time to search for citations). For a (non-scientific) summary of this, see:
http://thinktraffic.net/most-common-pricing-mistake
Good luck, and feel free to e-mail me at my username @ gmail if you need a beta tester.
Thank you very much for the feedback! We won't be using the same server/cert for the API (though it does make calls to the API for registration), but have had to move the website server around a couple of times already since setting up the cert and it's likely that I cocked something up. I'll look into it ASAP.
We are going to simplify the pricing, at least for the time being. Our beta is going to be more of a pre-beta, and completely free. Supporters will be able to pre-purchase a professional plan at less than half price, but otherwise we still have a lot of kinks to iron out before we feel comfortable charging for Parley (details will all be announced Thursday).
If you want in on the pre-beta, you can either sign up for the mailing list or check back at https://parley.co on Thursday :)
I'm glad that people familiar with security and cryptography in this thread are trying to poke holes in the product. As long as the development team uses these comments as productive criticism and fixes potential issues, everybody benefits in the end.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if your intent is to get around NSA snooping this doesn't do that. All you have really done is made sure that your communications are target for closer scrutiny. Remember I don't care _what_ you say I care _who_ your saying it to. Once I know who is talking to who and which person might be a good source of information there are much easier ways to get that information then trying to break encryption[1]
If the NSA is collecting everything, then it's possible to go back in time once you become a person of interest. This doesn't necessarily help you if you are actively planning something that the government is interested in, but if you become a political opponent to the NSA, they could look into your past for skeletons to blackmail you with. Who you are talking to may not give them enough information to do anything without the content of the conversations.
On the other hand, if you're having an affair with someone that you have a good excuse to talk to all of the time (family friend, co-worker, etc), the content matters.
Also, that "OMG you were talking to a pedo!" threat doesn't mean much of the conversations were innocuous. To make that threat, they would need a good confidence that you couldn't (for whatever reason[1]) just turn over chat logs proving that nothing was amiss.
[1] E.g. The chat reveals something you want to keep hidden, even if it doesn't relate to the fact that the person is a paedophile, or maybe the logs just don't exist, etc.
The project that Latitude[1] was talking about. I am not saying you are legally obligated to do something (IANAL). I am just saying it is common courtesy.
Trust me. The logo does not make or break your program.
As far as we know, said project only exists in latitude's mind, and the only public information about it is that he may or may not still have plans for a "secure chat" program. I'd be hard-pressed to call that an "existing project", since for all practical purposes, it isn't.
You are asserting a made-up argument. Having an active public project behind a logo is not a necessary condition for not re-purposing the logo for another project. This particular concept just happens to be taken.
Every good logo is trivial in retrospect, it's finding a strong concept that's a bitch. I looked at /gd/ thread and virtually all of it revolves around shaping a keyhole this way or that way. Then suddenly someone says - "Here, done". Turning an empty space into a chat bubble requires a step up, it's an altogether stronger and more complex concept. It is possible that another person came up with it independently, but also consider that with all the variety of secure messaging apps no one had thought of it before 2012. It's not an easy concept to stumble upon.
(edit) This is getting meta. It is plenty obvious that Tox fellas think they are in the clear and it's OK to recycle an existing logo. I think that it's not. That's hard to reconcile.
>Re-purposing the logo
>recycle an existing logo
No-one is re-purposing the logo. You are going out of your way to make it seem as if they have literally stolen your logo, when in reality, they have a similar design that is not a copy.
Stop being a baby. Someone even commented on your post that they had the same idea months ago. But instead of whining about it, he shrugged it off and said "Great minds must think alike."
The current Tox logo wasn't even the first proposed logo with the chat bubble/padlock idea. There were a lot of other ones. People were taking the idea from other logos and improving it. That's innovation.
You weren't the first one to come up with the idea; and even if you were, that doesn't give you exclusive rights to it.
Grow a pair and show some "professional courtesy" yourself by not giving a fuck.
>It'd be nice if HN allowed us to collapse entire conversations.
There's a whole bunch of extensions/plugins/userscripts for HN out there, including ones that implement thread hiding. I personally use Hacker News Enhancement Suite for Chrome.
If you mean that it is communicated over TCP/IP(what i gathered from reading the doc), what is stopping someone who has access to whatever is connected to your IP from redirecting traffic to that port in order to do what was already discussed.
if you mean that it is shared in person off the internet, then what is the point of this program. Diffe Hellman, ECC, zero Knowledge proofs are all dependent on the discrete log problem being hard, so you might as well just start broadcasting to their ip with the key that they gave you in person instead of going through the trouble(and increase in vulnerability) of trying to establish that the person is who they say they are. maybe I'm wrong but I don't think that math is wrong.
in any case, I feel like the problem for this program stems from the fact that validating the IP address of the person is much more complicated than it seems. Its pretty much the reason centralized databases are needed for connections between people(those are bad things in our world now).
123 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadAs such, why not just leave the logo of Tox in peace? Especially since it's a FOSS project with noble goals (even if they have yet to reach those goals, which is not surprising considering how early in the development the entire project is) and not some commercial entity intending to profit off of it.
[1] http://swapped.cc/#!/logotypes
I have plans for it. It wasn't just an idle doodle.
http://img.ctrlv.in/img/51f6b5b849ebf.jpg
In this case, the products/ideas are straight-up competitors.
Oh wait
This isn't competition. It's complaining on a professional level.
Like Oscar Wilde has said: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
Again, I admit my word usage is a little bit liberal, but although I haven't done serious crypto for a couple of years now, I have the strange feeling you are nitpicking. Is it just a feeling? :)
I'm referring to this paper: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00124891
Curiously, although I've always preferred DLP-based crypto, I actually never implemented any. So I gladly admit my knowledge of DH key exchange might not be as profound as I would like it to be.
I don't think I'm nitpicking: I see where you're coming from but I think you might be entirely wrong.
I don't know what it means to "prefer" DLP crypto. Over what? I just don't understand what you're trying to say with that last graf.
In essence, once you've agreed on a key you won't keep it to yourself (although you could, in theory). But am I missing the point? Are we talking about two different things? I'm talking about ZK from a mathematical point of view, you know, the cavern, the treasure, the two paths... (if you know this layman example about ZK)
Unfortunately I cannot go into details, but what I meant about my preference for DLP is that although I was mathematically more attracted to DLP based algorithms (when it came to asymmetric cryptography) I didn't really have the chance to "play" with them and spent more time with RSA.
So it's probable my knowledge of the DH key exchange algorithm is imperfect and last time I wrote crypto it was very mundane (it was using RC4, that's saying a lot!), so maybe I should just refrain from commenting about crypto.
I feel it's strange that your IP is shared to the world together with your public key, so it is, in this sense, anti-anonymous.
You cannot even use it with Tor, because it uses UDP.
Eg in XMPP, only your server sees your IP address until you initiate some out-of-band p2p thing such as file transfer. Federated client-server architectures such as email and XMPP are also pretty well understood by now, especially email has been around a long time.
Trade-offs, trade-offs everywhere!
This is still a pretty heavy argument about it on the 4Chan threads.
The only reason that occurs is because all the non-technical lurkers want a way to contribute.
Sit in the thread monitoring progress. Then congratulating progress when it's made.
Or, if they want to contribute without causing arguments. Go upvote this on Reddit, WOT, Twitter, and whatever else in a way which won't cause a shitstorm in /g/.
Would love to see a community project analogous to this one develop in the e-mail space since too many users find PGP to be cumbersome, despite some very nice implementations. Bitmessage and I2P's bote are both very interesting, but the prior project needs more experienced security people working on it (and some serious refactoring), and the latter suffers from the perceived issues of the "darknet" (not an issue for me, but...).
We're on it! https://parley.co will be entering pre-beta later this week. Maybe not technically a "community project" because it's being built by a company that is at least partly motivated by profit, but the whole thing is BSD-licensed so people can do whatever they want with it.
I see you're building on PGP, which has been historically confusing for non-tech folks, but I look forward to see what you've come up with to counter that confusion.
A couple of issues:
1. Not sure if you'll be using the same server/TLS cert for your actual web-based e-mail sender, but I got a giant warning on Android (Kindle Fire running Chrome for Android) about the certificate being invalid. It's probably the fact that you need to host the intermediate certificates on your site (i.e., the chain of trust is "broken"). If you are hosting them, then it might be this issue: http://www.unrelatedshit.com/2011/10/21/positivessl-not-work...
2. Again on the https, have you considered upgrading to TLS 1.1, or 1.2? You'd be able to offer ECDHE for forward secrecy, among other advantages. But you may have reasons for sticking with 1.0.
3. Are you vulnerable to SSL stripping attacks, like Moxie Marlinspike proposed? You are redirecting http requests to https.
Again, you may not be using this server for your actual registration, but just fyi.
One more suggestion: you may want to simplify the pricing. Do you really need 6 different categories? I'd try to eliminate at least 1, and ideally 2 or 3. Three categories may be the sweet spot (I think there's actual empirical research underlying this, but don't have time to search for citations). For a (non-scientific) summary of this, see: http://thinktraffic.net/most-common-pricing-mistake
Good luck, and feel free to e-mail me at my username @ gmail if you need a beta tester.
We are going to simplify the pricing, at least for the time being. Our beta is going to be more of a pre-beta, and completely free. Supporters will be able to pre-purchase a professional plan at less than half price, but otherwise we still have a lot of kinks to iron out before we feel comfortable charging for Parley (details will all be announced Thursday).
If you want in on the pre-beta, you can either sign up for the mailing list or check back at https://parley.co on Thursday :)
1. http://xkcd.com/538/
If the NSA is collecting everything, then it's possible to go back in time once you become a person of interest. This doesn't necessarily help you if you are actively planning something that the government is interested in, but if you become a political opponent to the NSA, they could look into your past for skeletons to blackmail you with. Who you are talking to may not give them enough information to do anything without the content of the conversations.
""" I see in 2013 you had many long encrypted conversations with someone we now know to be a pedophile, what were you talking about exactly """
Also, that "OMG you were talking to a pedo!" threat doesn't mean much of the conversations were innocuous. To make that threat, they would need a good confidence that you couldn't (for whatever reason[1]) just turn over chat logs proving that nothing was amiss.
[1] E.g. The chat reveals something you want to keep hidden, even if it doesn't relate to the fact that the person is a paedophile, or maybe the logs just don't exist, etc.
Trust me. The logo does not make or break your program.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=latitude
Every good logo is trivial in retrospect, it's finding a strong concept that's a bitch. I looked at /gd/ thread and virtually all of it revolves around shaping a keyhole this way or that way. Then suddenly someone says - "Here, done". Turning an empty space into a chat bubble requires a step up, it's an altogether stronger and more complex concept. It is possible that another person came up with it independently, but also consider that with all the variety of secure messaging apps no one had thought of it before 2012. It's not an easy concept to stumble upon.
(edit) This is getting meta. It is plenty obvious that Tox fellas think they are in the clear and it's OK to recycle an existing logo. I think that it's not. That's hard to reconcile.
Edit:
From your Dribbble link - http://imgur.com/CYyDy48
I really think it's clear that you're just upset some other people had the same idea, but did it better.
The current Tox logo wasn't even the first proposed logo with the chat bubble/padlock idea. There were a lot of other ones. People were taking the idea from other logos and improving it. That's innovation.
You weren't the first one to come up with the idea; and even if you were, that doesn't give you exclusive rights to it.
Grow a pair and show some "professional courtesy" yourself by not giving a fuck.
[+] [137 messages] "Bunch of people arguing about logo copyright & design for an open-source project."
There's a whole bunch of extensions/plugins/userscripts for HN out there, including ones that implement thread hiding. I personally use Hacker News Enhancement Suite for Chrome.
0: it's a lib, and there are at least 2 client being developed (ncurse and qt)
1: it currently compile on linux/os x/window
2: see 0.
3: no, but you could potentially host a "private" boostrap node and have a separate network.
So how could the proxy pass for another person?
If you mean that it is communicated over TCP/IP(what i gathered from reading the doc), what is stopping someone who has access to whatever is connected to your IP from redirecting traffic to that port in order to do what was already discussed.
if you mean that it is shared in person off the internet, then what is the point of this program. Diffe Hellman, ECC, zero Knowledge proofs are all dependent on the discrete log problem being hard, so you might as well just start broadcasting to their ip with the key that they gave you in person instead of going through the trouble(and increase in vulnerability) of trying to establish that the person is who they say they are. maybe I'm wrong but I don't think that math is wrong.
in any case, I feel like the problem for this program stems from the fact that validating the IP address of the person is much more complicated than it seems. Its pretty much the reason centralized databases are needed for connections between people(those are bad things in our world now).
this is pretty much what is needed for this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust