[guardian-dev] DarkMatter and Pond on Android - DISCUSS!

Thu Oct 16 22:02:19 EDT 2014

Nathan of Guardian wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 15, 2014, at 12:23 PM, Josh Steiner wrote:
>> Love their focus on hiding in plain sight.  Curious about Pond though,
>> seems great in concept but as the author says* in boldface:
>>
>> "Dear God, please don't use Pond for anything real yet. I've hammered
>> out nearly 20K lines of code that have never been reviewed. Unless
>> you're looking to experiment you should go use something that actually
>> works."
>>
>> I wonder if maybe this news is a bit premature?
>>
>> *here: https://pond.imperialviolet.org/
> 
> Yes, that is a good reminder of the state of Pond. Also, the state of
> the UI of their mobile app is extremely minimal.
> 
> That said, there will come a time in the very near future I suspect when
> that disclaimer will be updated to something more like: "Please don't
> use this for life and death matters", but then people still will.

Sounds like a good effort.  About POND, it sounds like it is based on Tor in
DarkMatter.  So that means it won't really work in China.  That's a pretty big
downside.  Another thing, its use of TrueCrypt requires a custom kernel, and
root access. So that's why they are making a ROM, but it won't work otherwise:
https://github.com/grugq/darkmatter/issues/16

They are looking at somethings that are right up our alley:

SQLCipher - drop in encrypted replacement for SQLite
https://github.com/grugq/darkmatter/issues/4

non root encrypted containers
https://github.com/grugq/darkmatter/issues/1

Securing Application Data
https://github.com/grugq/darkmatter/issues/3

.hc

-- 
PGP fingerprint: 5E61 C878 0F86 295C E17D  8677 9F0F E587 374B BE81