Grepular

TextSecure is an Android application for sending and receiving encrypted SMS. Even if the people you’re communicating with don’t use it, it’s still useful because it intercepts your incoming SMS and stores them encrypted on the phone. For an Android security application, it’s surprisingly well polished and easy to use. The inPulse SmartWatch is a wrist watch which connects to various different types of phones via bluetooth and displays notifications of incoming calls, SMS, email and other things. Unfortunately, the two aren’t (weren’t) compatible.

On the 17th of December, I sent the following email to a friend:

FYI, I’ve uninstalled TextSecure from my phone, so if you send me any encrypted SMS in future, I wont be able to read them.

You can delete my key by going into TextSecure and then entering Settings -> Manage Identity Keys.

I’ve done this for several reason. It’s not compatible with my watch. It’s never really sat well with me that he hasn’t released the source code for it. Twitter has bought Whisper Systems.

Three days later, Twitter made the following announcement.

Last month, Moxie Marlinspike (@moxie) and Stuart Anderson (@emblem__) from Whisper Systems joined our team at Twitter. Today, we’re happy to announce our plan to open source some of the Whisper Systems software on Github.

Pretty strange coincidence. One day later, I’d forked TextSecure, added basic support for my watch, which was the primary reason for me uninstalling it, and was running my own compiled version on my phone. Free software rocks.