Hacker News Reader

Comment by nknighthb | Hacker News Reader

> I understand your point.

No, you don't, because you continue to make worthless tautological statements like "anyone can make mistakes".

I've designed an airplane. I have no experience in doing so. I have no more than a layman's understanding of aerodynamics. I know nothing of materials science. I've hardly even looked inside any kind of engine. I have heard some fancy words before, though, and I'm sure my quick read of various Wikipedia articles has prepared me.

I'm going to start building these planes and selling them to the public as a great way to travel.

Do you think it is overreacting for an aviation engineer to tell people that my plane is dangerous, just because Boeing sometimes makes mistakes?

If you don't, then you shouldn't have a problem with the public being told that Cryptocat is dangerous.

If you do think it's overreacting, well, as it happens I'm no more competent to deal with insanity than with aeronautics.

View on HN

His "jerks" point still stands though. You just called him insane because he made a couple of careful wrong assumptions and tried to verify them.

Yes, crypto is serious stuff. Yes, people should be warned about insecure security products. No, you don't have to be a jerk while doing that. See for example jdiez17's reply for what I think would be an effective and persuasive approach.

> You just called him insane

No, I didn't. I called a hypothetical and clearly homicidal person who I doubt was ever participating in this thread insane.

You can try to weasel out of it, but for all intents and purposes you did. Here is how you did it:

1. You compared the situation A to a hypothetical situation B, claiming it to be equivalent or comparable - A <=> B

2. You claim that someone describing the hypothetical situation as an overreacting description of the hypothetical situation - Describe (P, O (B)) => Insane (P)

3. By extension you imply that the person considering the first situation overreacting is also insane - Describe (P, O (A)) => I (P)

    (A <=> B, Describe (P, O (B)) => Insane (P))
      => (Describe (P, O (A)) => Insane (P)

Its probably unintentional as you did attempt to soothe it out (but that didn't help)

Personally I find that using the "understanding" method works much better than the "sootheing" method i.e.

"I understand why you think this way - <explanation of your understanding of the thought process of the other person> but you're wrong because <explanation where thought process goes wrong>"

You're insane. I say that not because you disagree with me, but because you have tried to turn an informal discussion into a math problem, apparently thinking it would be in any way persuasive.

For the record, the final line of my comment was intended to mean, basically, "If you don't think airplanes built my amateurs are dangerous, then we're not going to get anywhere, because I would consider you insane."

Whatever else you got out of it is your own invention.

You're an asshole.

The problem is that your argument is based on false equivalence.

The counterpoint is the classic trade-off between usability and security. I would (as would many) argue that charges against the Cryptocat team of poor cryptographic implementation or indeed knowledge are rational, appropriate and correct.

Charges of unbounded incompetence are irrational, inappropriate and incorrect. The cryptocat team understand usability, UX, general architecture and programming. That does not chime with sweeping statements of incompetence. Where they fail (and you may see this as a fatal flaw, it may surprise you to see that others may not but it appears that others do) is at crypto.

When it comes to real world attacks so far, it seems that Cryptocat is dangerous, but as dangerous as using any other TLS website. I totally accept that there is substantial evidence pointing to a lack of understanding of cryptography, but unbounded claims of incompetence only undermine a cryptographer's position.

There is no trade-off. A product is either secure for its intended purpose, or it is not. CryptoCat is not. An insecure crypto product is a useless crypto product, and no amount of user-friendliness will make it useful.

There is no "charge of unbounded incompetence". The charge of incompetence is concerned with cryptography (though there is evidence of surprisingly basic programming incompetence, too). Their competence at UX or anything else is totally irrelevant.

> A product is either secure for its intended purpose, or it is not.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree here. All products have bugs and a proportion of those bugs will be security-related. Crypto buys you temporary secrecy, based on the class of crypto used and the technology available to break it. DES was considered fine decades ago because even though it had weaknesses it was considered to provide sufficient protection of assets carrying certain classifications of data for a certain period of time.

AES256 is good for a period of time dependent on the projected capabilities of your perceived adversary and the sensitivity of the data.

> There is no "charge of unbounded incompetence". The charge of incompetence is concerned with cryptography (though there is evidence of surprisingly basic programming incompetence, too). Their competence at UX or anything else is totally irrelevant.

Where do I start with this? First you say there's no unbounded charge then go off charging Cryptocat in two areas. The UK "or anything else" is not totally irrelevant. The whole purpose of Cryptocat is to provide an easy to use chat system that encrypts conversations. Note that easy to use comes before encrypt in the description on the front page of the website. Nowhere on the front page does Cryptocat say that they're secure, because they know they're not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com