They probably just decided to end the project. My experience is that it has been slowly dieing for a long time.
I have been heavily involved with truecrpyt and its source code for many years. I make programs to custom edit the boot screen and otherwise customise TC's appearance. My programs are not forks, rather they edit the actual binary code installed, so that users can easily use it on existing installations.
What you have to understand is that truecrypt has added very little functionality for a very long time. In particular they seem to have lost the key developers who did the code in the boot sectors. For those who don't know, along time ago the program was to big to fit into the boot sectors, and a special deflate algorithm was added to decompression the boot sector code. My code to unzip the boot program and edit its string display strings is still the same code from tc 5.0, and it still works on the latest edition. The guys who code this section appear to be long gone from the project, hence absolutely nothing done over UEFI. The changes that have occured look questionable, in that the people making them seem to have very limited assembly understanding and were hacking on bits instead of properly modifing the programs flow.
Secondly getting TC to work with operating systems is extremely complicated, especially for windows. It was micorosoft who eventually released the API's that were used to make truecrypt properly handle sleep/hibernate. These API's are not forthcoming to Win8 or beyond, and in all honesty - windows is the only market that matters.
I am going to guess that one of the last known developers knows there is a bug that they can not longer believe they have the experience or skill to fix properly, and hence has decided to shut it down.
Yes that would be a sensible excuse except, programs which are abandoned typically do not cause:
- the website to be defaced and debranded. - a new version of the software to be released with gutted functionality. - old versions to be removed. - recommend commercial alternatives to open source programs. - pretend that the announcement happened due to loss of support for an OS still used by 20% of all machines. - not get in contact with the outside world.
Someone went to great lengths to make this look as nefarious as possible. This isn't the typical project shutting down. Actually my first thought was hacked, and my second through was NSA'd even though I swore not to follow the typical Slashdot NSA paranoia.
This is the strongest argument I've seen against NSL theories, but if it's true why did they do this in such a sensationalistic way? Why not gently explain the situation? Why the over the top site defacement and source code warnings? Why not release all of the source (not decrypt only) under the GPL so a fork could develop? Why the laughable non-sequitur reference to XP's EOL? And why did they recommend Bitlocker over, say, the excellent GPL that is DiskCryptor? Or mention this might be a good time to mig
Memory fault -- core...uh...um...core... Oh dammit, I forget!
The reason is... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The reason is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes that would be a sensible excuse except, programs which are abandoned typically do not cause:
- the website to be defaced and debranded.
- a new version of the software to be released with gutted functionality.
- old versions to be removed.
- recommend commercial alternatives to open source programs.
- pretend that the announcement happened due to loss of support for an OS still used by 20% of all machines.
- not get in contact with the outside world.
Someone went to great lengths to make this look as nefarious as possible. This isn't the typical project shutting down. Actually my first thought was hacked, and my second through was NSA'd even though I swore not to follow the typical Slashdot NSA paranoia.
Unanswered Questions (Score:2)