here's the reason this is a good idea: there's a lot of "edgy" things we'd like to provide to people.
This is investor talk right now... Armory isn't even out of beta, and lets just put a huge open hole right in the middle of it. Lets not even talk about attacks what if someone builds the greatest plugin ever, but hey they have a bug, then BAM coins gone. I hope you have a good lawyer because this now money we are talking... and when people lose money they gain lawyers
Also I disabled that security downloader, and announcement thing, I don't know if you are tracking ips and stuff like that. My firewall blocks any outgoing or incoming communication with armory.
I will not be using armory anymore, I just sent all my coins from armory to paper wallets until I find a new wallet. This is exactly what happens when you get investors, I thought it be different but no it is the same, bottom line. I hope Trace makes a lot of money from this instead of just keeping what was a good project going.
Holy moly. No one is forcing you to install any plugins, and any plugins that we make optionally available will have same distribution and verification security as the software releases themselves (using our offline signing key). As for the secure downloader: it was integrated to make it easier for users to care about security, because GPG isn't the most friendly thing to use, yet people want to be able to verify their downloads. It also gives us a secure channel to issue notifications in the event of hard forks where people could lose money. Everything is offline signed and verified at the time of execution. It's as secure as the offline GPG signing key you already trust.
This is nothing to do with investors. It simply gives us a channel to help out individuals and organizations (or for them to help themselves) expand Armory to meet their needs. Should we ignore our users needs? Should we
not expand the app in ways we see extremely useful with no visible security downsides? This is about making Armory more modular (than it already is) so we can provide useful features to portions of our usebase that want us to provide it for security reasons. And allows others to extend Armory for themselves.
We have operated as a for-profit company without any revenue for a long time because we legitimately care about making a rock solid, secure app, and not compromising that process by having to prioritize revenue. You think I will wildly and recklessly disregard all security judgment just to add useful feature? I have explained to you the way this will be implemented in a known, secure manner. You have disregarded it all under the explanation that some organizations have failed to implement security properly, without regard to the differences of the situations. And with no regard for our [Armory's] history of extreme rigor and conservatism to provide you something that is secure first, then as useful as possible.
I think your reaction is extraordinary and the reasons you state are not backed by the technical details. If trust is gone, nothing I can do about that, but I hope you will look at this conversation with a fresh set of eyes and realize that I have always aimed to maximize security before all other factors, and this is no different.