E2EMail research project has left the nest (opens in new tab)

(security.googleblog.com)

6 pointsrmhrisk9y ago5 comments

5 comments

4 comments · 1 top-level

HerraBRE9y ago· 3 in thread

This appears to be a weak attempt to spin as positive the news that Google have abandoned the end-to-end project... mysteriously posted when everyone is busy processing the SHA1 and Cloudbleed news. From the post:

E2EMail is not a Google product, it’s now a fully community-driven open source project, to which passionate security engineers from across the industry have already contributed.

Contrast that with their Github repo, which has seen no commits since August, as well as pull requests and issues that nobody has responded to.

I would dearly love to be proven wrong; if there has been ongoing work from "passionate security engineers" somewhere else and I'm just missing it, hopefully someone can post some details here?

(edit: Disclosure, I work on Mailpile, which is arguably a "competitor" to both e2e and GMail. But I did genuinely want to see this project succeed and improve e-mail security.)

dragonwriter9y ago

There was a pull request merged a few minutes ago, by someone whose username suggests that they are also the first named author on the Google blog post.

HerraBRE9y ago

If this is all that has happened since August, well, the commit speaks for itself:

https://github.com/e2email-org/e2email/commit/434f99c66efe49...

Hopefully there's more to come! :-P

dragonwriter9y ago

Possible that it was in internal limbo for a while, and that the decision to release it as a community project actually may bring it back to life, even among Google staff.

(Never worked in Google, but it may be easier for interested employees to contribute to external open-source projects than internal projects with no resource allocation.)

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5 comments

4 comments · 1 top-level

HerraBRE9y ago· 3 in thread

This appears to be a weak attempt to spin as positive the news that Google have abandoned the end-to-end project... mysteriously posted when everyone is busy processing the SHA1 and Cloudbleed news. From the post:

E2EMail is not a Google product, it’s now a fully community-driven open source project, to which passionate security engineers from across the industry have already contributed.

Contrast that with their Github repo, which has seen no commits since August, as well as pull requests and issues that nobody has responded to.

I would dearly love to be proven wrong; if there has been ongoing work from "passionate security engineers" somewhere else and I'm just missing it, hopefully someone can post some details here?

(edit: Disclosure, I work on Mailpile, which is arguably a "competitor" to both e2e and GMail. But I did genuinely want to see this project succeed and improve e-mail security.)

dragonwriter9y ago

There was a pull request merged a few minutes ago, by someone whose username suggests that they are also the first named author on the Google blog post.

HerraBRE9y ago

If this is all that has happened since August, well, the commit speaks for itself:

https://github.com/e2email-org/e2email/commit/434f99c66efe49...

Hopefully there's more to come! :-P

dragonwriter9y ago

Possible that it was in internal limbo for a while, and that the decision to release it as a community project actually may bring it back to life, even among Google staff.

(Never worked in Google, but it may be easier for interested employees to contribute to external open-source projects than internal projects with no resource allocation.)

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse