In practice this already happened a couple of years ago, now we are just making it official.
For those who don’t know, Hawkpost is a side project that I started while at Whitesmith back in 2016 (8+ years ago). I’ve written about it here in the blog on several occasions.
To sum it up, it is a tool made to solve a problem that at the time I frequently saw in the wild, while doing the typical agency/studio work. Clients and most people shared credentials and other secrets for their projects through insecure means (in plain text on chats, emails, etc.). It bothered me to the point of trying to figure out a solution, that was both, easy to use for me and my coworkers, and obvious/transparent to people who simply don’t care about it.
Awareness about encryption at the time, while making rapid progress, was not as widespread as it is today. Tools were not as easy to use.
Hawkpost ended up being very useful for many people. It didn’t have to be perfect, it just needed to improve the existing state of affairs, as it did.
Eight years after, things have changed. I no longer do agency work, I’ve changed workplaces, awareness improved a lot, and many other tools appeared in the market. Hawkpost’s development has stalled, and while it still has its users, we haven’t seen much overall interest to keep working on it.
To be sincere, I don’t use it anymore. That’s because I have other tools at my disposal that are much better for the specific use-cases they address, and perhaps also better for Hawkpost’s original purpose.
Here are some examples:
- For sharing credentials within a non-technical team (if you really must): Use a proper team password manager such as Bitwarden or 1Password.
- For sharing files and other sizable data: one good alternative is to use send (the successor of Firefox Send). It also has an official CLI client.
- For sharing and working on encrypted documents: CryptPad has a whole range of applications where data is encrypted E2E.
So, this week, we released the version 1.4.0 of Hawkpost. It fixes some bugs, updates major dependencies and makes sure the project is in good shape to continue to receive small updates. The full list of changes can be found here.
However, new features or other big improvements won’t be merged from now on (at least for the foreseeable future). The project is in “maintenance only” mode. Security issues and anything that could make the project unusable, will be handled, but nothing else.