Tonkeeper 2.7: Hilarious
Or sad? It's astounding to me...
Careful readers will have noted in my long post about the "bug finding contest" that I made a prediction that two bugs — one serious which has already resulted in someone losing TON, and another hilarious but an important UX issue — would not be found?
And I can finally say that they weren't, because 2.7 is now here and I've just installed it.
So, let me repeat: a hilarious bug that any user should see immediately (ok, perhaps not every user, I know that I'm a bug finder and bugs also find me, but this one is just too obvious) remains, and, a more serious one that can result in losing TON, remains.
To use the analogy of a modern aircraft crash: for civilian airliners, crashes are almost never the result of one single failure. Likewise, losing TON in a TON wallet is, with the current versions of the wallets, also not the point of one single failure.
But, you have to prevent things that can, when combined with even one other factor, and ideally more, by making appropriate changes to prevent such losses.
Tonkeeper thus remains a toy — for teens, to play with experimental new features — and still is the only wallet with built-in NFT handling, so those who require such a feature in a wallet currently don't have other options.
Let us immediately forget web wallets, since by nature those are high risk hot-hot wallets, and let's forget those wallets which are neither popular even after extensive marketing and do not take any real care about security and safety issues: and remember, it is not only about security itself but also about user safety during use.
So, will I reveal what these two bugs are, one hilarious, and one serious? No. Not yet*.
Yes, I should do my duty and report it as people will lose money. However, given the very unfair playing field currently around TON with Tonkeeper being part of those with unfair advantages and endless promotion, and given that at the start of the year there was no polite reception and appreciation when I freely offered my help...
And given that I instead decided to assist in the creation of a SAFE and professional TON wallet, which has now materialized as TonSafe, and given that TonSafe went through serious efforts to release stable and thoroughly tested versions before any marketing and promotion, without any experimentations on the masses, and using no resources from the TON Foundation, I'm really not going to help the "competition".
Bottom line is this: users wanting the safest TON wallet, are only going to find that in TonSafe (although the version 3 wallet Toncoin is still acceptable where it works), and the only safe ecosystem with high moral standards and values will also be TonSafe.
Until and unless the TON Foundation changes course and stops promoting questionable and even outright unprincipled projects (and here, I do not refer to Tonkeeper), and gives promotion and funding to projects which have proven their worth and value to the TON "ecosystem", that is not going to change any time soon.
What makes the latest release of Tonkeeper hilarious is the wording used to promote this latest update, and, it refers to two things: security and usability. The two bugs are exactly related to each concept promoted in its release marketing. Big fail.
That is not to say that the security features which they have released (without fixing the existing one, and look, it is open source, and those affected have already reported it to them, and as usual they did not listen, or understand, or care), are not good features: as always we must be grateful to Tonkeeper for leading the way in experimentation, and to Tonkeeper users for being guineapigs and unpaid beta testers.
A big thank you, and please carry on, it is good, and it helps projects such as TonSafe.
*) Of course, once they fix one or the other, I'll report the fact, and what it was.
PS: I have NOT done extensive bug finding on Tonkeeper, I don't have time nor interest in it, the two examples I've found, were only discovered during casual occasional use.