I don't want to re-tell the whole Snowden and NSA story at this place but keep it in mind while reading.
Many of you are using cloud services like DropBox, SkyDrive and Google Drive, you name them.
Dropping your files unencryptedly into the cloud is something really dangerous. Everyone can access it potentially, by chance, by a security leak, by authorities, etc. Or the cloud provider has access (Dropbox opens word documents , Dropbox Security issue, etc. )
Encrypting your files before uploading is the only way to go - this is what everyone should do.
What is OpenScrambler ?
OpenScrambler is inspired mainly by EncFS , TrueCrypt and 7-Zip - but these are very hard to use for non technical people - especially in combination. Moreover I had more features in mind...
With this campaign I want to provide you a software for encrypting and digital signing your files (not container based) with comfort to use with common cloud providers and also for local use.
Supported systems will be Windows, Mac (later), Linux (later) and mobile devices.
Open source and for free. Easy to use for anyone.
At the end of the article you can find some technical details, if you're interested.
Why for free?
The concept for this piece of software is ready since 2011 when EncFS became alive. I have some small tools which I use personally, but they're not very user friendly or eye candy.
At first instance I wanted to release a commercial product. Closed source. But after a lot of thinking I found out this is no good idea.
Reason: The whole "who can I trust" issue is just shifting. If you don't trust the cloud provider, you will have to trust me... no deal.
If I release a closed source project, people have to trust me that I don't implement backdoors, keep their passwords or spy them - no good idea.
Moreover I can become a potential target of legal authorities which can force me to help them to unsecure your personal secrets (If I would have them). Single target - no good. This is what happened to lavabit...
So the idea is to provide an open source solution which you can use for free and have a look at the source code - no strings attached and transparent. When finished (and also while developing) I will hand it over to the community into public domain - so this software will be all yours. Including the source code of course, the GPL license will make sure that no one can make a commercial project out of it. There will be no dual licensing.
Now for the geeks :-) Here are some technical details: