Edward Snowden was only able to communicate with Glenn Greenwald and other journalists after Laura Poitras taught Greenwald how to implement encryption and other operational security measures. Journalists and others who are less technically-inclined-or just more impatient-will often jump on a less-safe platform if it seems like it will save them a lot of time and headache in the process. The encryption program Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), is as pretty-good as its name suggests (it is in fact excellent), but there’s a learning curve involved, and it only works when both the sender and receiver are using it. In other words, it doesn’t matter if an encryption program is safe if no one wants to use it. “You’re making accessibility and ease-of-use security processes-if those fail, it’s just the same as having encryption failure.” “This cuteness is a security feature,” Kobeissi explained in a recent TED talk. The aesthetics will be just as inviting when Cryptocat’s mobile version launches in a few days, too. The aesthetics of the program were his starting point, he said, as he set out to make an encrypted communication program that was accessible to everyone, regardless of technical know-how. This nostalgic and friendly vibe isn’t just an artistic whim of its lead developer, Nadim Kobeissi, who started the project three years ago as a 21-year-old college student in Montreal and recent émigré from Lebanon. The chatroom that you enter to start a new chat looks and sounds like something out of a videogame from the 1980s. The encrypted-chat program’s logo is a pixellated cat, and its homepage is colorful but uncluttered. Update, January 6, 2014: As of the end of December 2013, the Cryptocat app for iPhone had been rejected by Apple, but Kobeissi was optimistic the problem could be resolved.Ĭryptocat is really, really cute.
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