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Silent Circle is in the midst of a troubled period

• sschueller 10y ago
  How far will they go to save the company? Let's hope they don't take money from In-Q-Tel[1] which is probably eager to give them what they need (in exchange for certain things of course). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
  • 2close4comfort 10y ago
    They are based in MD with military people as founders so I would think this would be the desired outcome. Sad but kind of expected.
    • sailfast 10y ago
      Yes and no. Getting paid to produce a very secure device to their specs would be a great option for survival, provided they don't insert a backdoor because of their customer's demands.
  • tptacek 10y ago
    People who say things like this generally have no idea what In-Q-Tel actually is. Wait'll they find out where Tor's funding came from!
    • wglb 10y ago
      Heck, not even that. The original funding for computers as we know them came from that general area as well.
• eis 10y ago
  When I clicked the link, I got a gray page with a "Quote of the day" in big font. Nothing else visible on the page, no X to close this or similar. I was about to close the tab when it suddenly redirected to the article. What kind of nonsense is this? I mean, seriously Forbes? http://i.imgur.com/ALe3s1v.png http://i.imgur.com/ALe3s1v.png
  • DiabloD3 10y ago
    Closing the tab, and then clicking the link again makes it go away. I think Forbes links need to be banned on HN until Forbes stops doing this shit.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• girvo 10y ago
  Apologies for the meta comment: I'd like to read the article, but the obnoxious ads on Forbes and the even more obnoxious splash screen that won't let you through if you use a blocker show me that Forbes web presence is obviously in a troubled period. Does someone have the text of the article elsewhere?
  • Canada 10y ago
    Having the article open without an ad blocker increased my battery utilization by well over 1000 mA.
    • walterbell 10y ago
      What software do you use to measure utilization?
      • Canada 10y ago
        coconutBattery
  • cocotino 10y ago
    I copied it here for you http://pastebin.com/2W00arZC http://pastebin.com/2W00arZC
  • mirimir 10y ago
    It let me through the spash just fine, using AdBlock Plus and NoScript on Firefox.
  • ominous 10y ago
    Archive.is seems to work without showing you that overlay: http://archive.is/76nRX http://archive.is/76nRX I removed the trailing hash after #, 'a2fe2c560df31', in the original URL, before posting it to archive.is. What is that for anyway? For them to log the source of the URL?
    • jessaustin 10y ago
• cocotino 10y ago
  This letter makes me cringe. Is this how this stuff works, or they were stupidly naïve? https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2941005-Silent-Circle-Considers-Bankruptcy.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2941005-Silent-Circl...
• alister 10y ago
  It continually depresses me that privacy and software security products have such a difficult time. I very much hope that Silent Circle makes it, but the landscape is littered with privacy/security products that went nowhere. But there have been some billion-dollar success stories. Off the top of my head, they are: (1) Security Dynamics who invented the little token with ever-changing 6-digit numbers that you have to enter to login to your remote office computer. You probably know it today as the RSA SecurID: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/RSA-SecurID-Tokens.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/RSA-Secu... The hardware was simple (microcontroller, real time clock, and an LCD display) and the proof of concept for the software could've been written in an afternoon by a crypto-knowledgable programmer. I genuinely admire this idea as having the least amount of technical development required to create a billion-dollar market. (2) Paper shredders. Fellowes created a billion-dollar market for personal shredders. Seriously, before this market existed, if you told the average Joe that they needed a shredder for their home, you would have been laughed at. Then came along all the brouhaha about identity theft, and now Office Depot and Staples sell dozens of home models. (3) Firewalls. When I first heard the concept of a network firewall--and this is going back a long time--my first thought was "What a stupid idea, why don't they instead fix the bugs that would allow you to penetrate the network?" Turns out to be a multi-billion dollar market. (4) Password managers like LastPass and 1Password. I doubt these have reached a billion in sales, but I figure they will. (5) Certificate authorities. An early implementation of that idea made Mark Shuttleworth into a billionaire with enough money to visit the International Space Station just for fun. Looking at the list, the threats are sometimes abstract. I do have a home shredder, but I'll admit that it's very unlikely I'd be a victim of identity theft if I never shredded. However, the threat that Silent Circle addresses is proven worldwide surveillance, yet it's a much harder sale. It's very difficult to predict what privacy/security product will succeed.
  • danieltillett 10y ago
    Great list. I am wondering what is going to be next?
    • andrey_utkin 10y ago
• andrey_utkin 10y ago
  When I first met Silent Circle and its products, my opinion was that their product design is impractical and not convincing for customers. With all respect to Phil Zimmermann (he really deserves a decent pension). Either you ditch Android and go fully FOSS (no firmware blobs!) and OSHW with as little software footprint as possible and get software stack audited and thoroughly pentested. Or you are fine with Android and you just provide some additional applications and maybe services. But this doesn't justify selling a _device_. You know, there's no such thing like Angry Birds Phone. There's no Facebook Phone either.
  • SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
    > There's no Facebook Phone either Well, not any more, but they tried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First
  • dexterdog 10y ago
    But it's hard to go full tinfoil without owning the device. I applaud their effort, but there are just too many interests vested against it.
    • andrey_utkin 10y ago
      But you cannot be owning the Android device because Google is owning it by means of closed-source core components. Well, manufacturers also aren't going to let you own your device because they release only blob-stuffed devices. There's actually no such thing as fully open-source Android: https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/9HHRURorE7g https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/9HHRURorE7g It feels very silly, but still running Linux kernel self-built from sources on modern ARM devices is mostly discouraged, and if it works, it's result of volunteer effort. And even if drivers are there in source, datasheets for hardware are often not public and one needs to sign NDA to read it.
• rbcgerard 10y ago
  Honest question - who is the market for this phone? Very security minded corporate it departments? From first glance it would seem I would need other people to have silence circle in order for most of the features to be useful...I don't know anyone who uses it - why would I be an early adopter as a consumer?
  • dexterdog 10y ago
    That's always the problem. They had an app before (maybe they still do) that worked great for me for calls and texts, but I know knew one person who had it. I'm better of with Signal, but even there I only have a few contacts on it.
  • wepple 10y ago
    I've followed the blackphone for a while with quite a bit of interest, and TBH I didn't get a strong indication that they knew who their target market was. BP1 was aimed at individuals I think, and when they realised they weren't selling like hotcakes decided that enterprise may be a better chance for BP2?
  • cordite 10y ago
    I have the phone. Despite its problems and my plan to ditch it soon, I do hope that silent circle survives and eventually thrives. I support their purpose and ideals, even if it hasn't worked out for me personally with them.
  • senectus1 10y ago
    we bought a handful of these. The execs demanded them. Then, they sat in the bottom drawer of each of their desks because their iphones were a lot simpler and more useful to them. (multi billion $$ Mining company)
• Bartweiss 10y ago
  > in the belief it had secured big distributor agreements with three partners This line reads very strangely, especially with the followup about one agreement having some legitimacy. Did Silent Circle have actual, signed purchase agreements with these distributors? If so, are they suing, and why is it not mentioned in the article? If not, why did they think they had agreements?
• SEJeff 10y ago
  With how intrusive Forbes's ads are, even with uBlock origin, I wish HN would just disallow stories from forbes.
  • sp332 10y ago
    With the adblocker, the full-page quote will only show up once per day. Reload the page and it goes away.
• masmullin 10y ago
  Who provides the baseband for the Blackphone? EDIT: To answer my own question. Qualcomm
• rdtsc 10y ago
  I interviewed with them. It was team of very bright people and I enjoyed interacting with them. Hopefully everyone I talked to is still there and didn't have to be let go. Wish them all the best. In general, for privacy related software there these large segments -- the enterprise, the government, personal / casual. Sometimes it is hard to find a single product to appeal to entice all of those segments. The requirements are just so different. (Well there is also the other type of segment -- the criminal segment, drug lords will pay cold hard cash for ability to secure their communications, but you know building a business selling mostly to them is not healthy for doing well in other segments). Government wants to control and certify the system in certain ways. Just getting over the certification red tape mountain is huge hassle. Spending time doing that means ignoring other segments largely, just because of costs and time involved. Enterprise wants centralized management of devices (they'd have thousands or more potentially), that means monitoring and controlling what employees do or who they use the phones. Personal / casual might involve a free tier or being able to pay less, this needs to be very user friendly, with no hassles, and the biggest thing needed is a network effect. If none of ones' friends are on the network, it is hard to justify using the service. As for Blackphone, SEAndroid (NSA Secure Android) research project has slowly been incorporated into latest version of Android but hardware remains a problem. If there is a closed source firmware blob running on the baseband processor, and if it can read main system memory, the situation is quite bleak, it is hard to convince governments or serious enterprise customers that the platform is secure. I believe the idea with Blackphone to address that was to ensure baseband processor talks to the main system via a serial interface + AT style model commands. So perhaps Silent Circle just need to publicize more those features? Focusing on the Enterprise market is smart but perhaps it will take another Sony-like enterprise breach before companies will get scared into spending more on this.
• vabmit 10y ago
  I been involved in the cryptography/security community for many years. I continually see privacy/security start-ups struggle. There are lots of reasons. But, I think the key one is that doing something online securely will always be more difficult and expensive that doing it insecurely. This truth was instilled like a law of physics when the internet was first designed. There's only a certain number of people that are deeply passionate enough about their privacy to put in the extra effort or pay the extra cost. So, companies in the space tend to plateau after 2-4 years. They essentially saturate their markets and the (rather static) size of these markets are rarely large enough to sustain the company (this is especially true when hardware is involved in the business plan). In cases where they are sustainable, I have seen it be at the level of "life style business" rather than exponentially growing startup that can IPO at a level that will provide investors a significant return. While there have been exceptions over the years, I would caution people on HN from doing privacy and security startups until you sit down and honestly and truthfully estimate the size of the market that you are targeting. Us old folk remember another secure phone company before SilentCircle/Blackphone - CryptoPhone. I have talked with some friends that remember the CryptoPhone product failure. Some thought that the Snowden revelations changed things. They thought that such companies would be viable now due to mainstream market apatite. But, I think over the next few years we'll see more evidence that this isn't the case. Privacy is an area that is very easy to get passionate about and become emotionally invested in. But, it's probably not a great space for your startup (or for your investment).
  • rdtsc 10y ago
    > But, I think the key one is that doing something online securely will always be more difficult and expensive that doing it insecurely. Yeah that is a good way to put it. There are periodic spikes for demand when there are large publicized security breaches -- Snowden, Sony, Target etc. Most people out there are hard to convince to jump through extra hoops to get more security unless they see those around them or themselves being hurt by not having it. There is market for silly "rfid wallet blockers" because the story is "it protects you against identity theft". It is mostly a scam, but the point is people relate to identity theft, it happened to someone they know probably. > There's only a certain number of people that are deeply passionate enough Yap. An additional observation, from talking to a few people at Silent Circle is that those working there are also deeply passionate about it (why would they hire anyone who isn't, right?). That is good of course, but is also bad, because it translates to rose colored glasses when it comes to market demand. Everyone thinks there are many others out there, who are just as interested and passionate as themselves, so it is easy to overestimate demand. I think to a certain extent that the idea behind the lawsuit. Someone somewhere massively overestimated the market demand.