[HN Gopher] Poor Johnny still won't encrypt
___________________________________________________________________
Poor Johnny still won't encrypt
Author : zdw
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-12-13 04:21 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bfswa.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bfswa.substack.com)
| tomlockwood wrote:
| I thought this title was a reference to this David Bowie/NIN
| song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT3cERVRoQo
| erelong wrote:
| Issue 1: Establishing lots of reasons why people should encrypt
|
| Issue 2: Making it easy to encrypt
|
| Issue 3: Popularizing encryption or getting more people to do it
| FerretFred wrote:
| Issue 3.. most/many governments are taking active steps to
| discourage this practice or better still (for them), stamp it
| out completely.
| xeonmc wrote:
| If you want encrypted communication over email, there's
| DeltaChat.
| rainingmonkey wrote:
| DeltaChat are moving away from "classic email" in favour of the
| ChatMail protocol.
|
| I wish someone would fork DeltaChat so I can keep using it as a
| client for "classic email".
| 627467 wrote:
| True, I found out the hard way a couple of months ago as I
| seem to have lost the ability to recover my previously
| profile setup from Google workspace email
| bradley13 wrote:
| It's weird. Almost all web traffic is now https - even though
| very little of it is sensitive. Email, on the other hand, is
| quite often sensitive, and yet...no one cares.
|
| Why?
| wmf wrote:
| HTTPS is pervasive because Google encouraged it. Gmail could
| force S/MIME but they don't care.
| hugo1789 wrote:
| I think mandatory S/MIME without user-friendly key management
| would either be reverted pretty soon or it would kill Gmail.
| wmf wrote:
| Google would have to build some kind of Let's Encrypt for
| S/MIME before they turned on the encouragement.
| ghssds wrote:
| why did google wanted it?
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Google makes money off search, which requires that users
| want to visit websites. All websites using HTTP are not
| secure. Unsecure websites are uninteresting to most users,
| but most users don't have the know-how to distinguish what
| sites are using HTTPS and which aren't. So the simplest
| solution is to get all websits to switch to HTTPS before it
| becomes a problem
| mmooss wrote:
| Another possibility is Google is in an industry that
| makes money by collecting information about users, and by
| supporting universal HTTPS, they gained a competitive
| advantage over ISPs and others regarding user data for
| Google searches and other services.
| jcranmer wrote:
| No, they couldn't. What they could do--and what they _did_ do
| --was push for the move of TLS connections for the MX-MX hop
| of email; I don 't have the stats off the top of my head for
| how prevalent that is, but I think it's in the 80-90% range
| of email being delivered in this method.
|
| But end-to-end encrypted email? It breaks everything. You
| need to get all the MUAs to support it (very few do either
| S/MIME or PGP). You'll break webmail--the most popular way to
| use email--without lots of major investment. And encrypted
| email breaks things like spam filtering or server-side
| filters catastrophically. Key discovery is also unsolved.
|
| There was a time when I was on the everybody-should-use-
| encrypted-email train. But I've since grown up and realized
| that encrypted email fundamentally breaks email in ways that
| people are unprepared for, and people have already figured
| out how to route around the insecurity of email via other
| mechanisms.
| laserbeam wrote:
| Unfortunately, those are 2 different problems. It's easy to
| have servers store encryption keys to make https work. You only
| need to encrypt trafic between you and a server for 5 seconds
| at a time.
|
| It's hard for personal communications. The server shouldn't
| know the keys, and they need to survive for decades.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Nearly all email is encrypted in transit. All major MTA systems
| send encrypted and accept encrypted as the default.
|
| This article is about encrypting the body of the email which is
| easy* but no widely implemented standard exists.
|
| * Stupid easy for two nerds to email securely.
|
| * Stupid hard to work with multiple people and non-nerds.
| xeonmc wrote:
| might age fit the bill?
| mwwaters wrote:
| It seems like the bigger day to day issue is the possibility
| of downgrades from STARTTLS or a server that doesn't support
| TLS. Encryption in the GPG isn't necessary or even would be
| unwanted (for a company to have records of all the emails).
|
| So there are mechanisms to put encrypted things in workplace
| emails and then have some mechanism for receiver in a
| different organization to unencrypt. I have seen a mechanism
| that comes down to magic links, which I found ironic (though
| yes, intercepting is less of a threat than sending the data
| unencrypted).
|
| I feel like supporting an option to not send an email unless
| STARTTLS happens is the way to go. There's probably a lot of
| practical problems for, say, online Outlook or Gmail
| supporting that option when sending an email. But I feel like
| that's the easiest solution.
| laserbeam wrote:
| Someone needs to design a super dumb and robust system where I
| can safely store all my keys on all devices I use an account. The
| fact that whatsapp, signal and other platforms tend to have a
| primary device for keys is bonkers to me. A primary device that
| can randomly die, get stolen or fall in a lake.
|
| I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I
| have to be extra diligent about this these days.
|
| I don't even want to think about pgp when I have to manually take
| care of this problem. Not because of my own skills, but because I
| could never make it reliable for my family and friends on their
| side.
| wmf wrote:
| Apple/Google passkeys.
| throwaway82931 wrote:
| Indeed, passkeys would seem to represent a step forward from
| single-device to single-account.
| lazide wrote:
| Passkeys are often stored/locked per device?
| ho_schi wrote:
| Two problems: Apple. And Google.
| AnonC wrote:
| > I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember,
| and I have to be extra diligent about this these days.
|
| As per Signal's diehard proponents, losing chat history is a
| feature, not a bug (I'm not being facetious when saying this,
| and you can see comments of this kind in Signal related threads
| here).
|
| Edited to add: I don't agree with that premise and have long
| disliked losing chat history.
| laserbeam wrote:
| I know you are not being facetious. My problem is random Joe
| on the street sees it as a bug. He really does care more
| about actually being able to talk with his wife than Signal's
| mathematically correct principles. He needs it to be reliable
| first, secure second.
| AnonC wrote:
| GP here. I agree. I should've stated that I don't like
| losing chat history and have seen that as a problem with
| Signal.
|
| I have edited my previous comment to reflect that I don't
| like losing chat history.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| > He needs it to be reliable first, secure second.
|
| Than he should use something else. I need signal to be
| secure first, second and third and reliable in edge cases
| like this a distant number.
| golem14 wrote:
| Yeah, but if use proton for everything else and signal
| only for my secret world domination plans, traffic
| analysis will be so much easier...
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Congrats on not being one of the people concerned about
| being targeted by their government, now or in the future.
|
| Hundreds of millions are not so lucky.
| integralid wrote:
| (i am a security person who prioritizes security over
| usability but) you missed the point a bit. If a privacy
| program is used _only_ by people that have something to
| hide it turns into a smoking gun. If you care about being
| targeted by government you should really hope regular
| people use signal a lot, because government absolutely
| has (or can procure) a list of people that use signal.
| kelnos wrote:
| You've been downvoted, but I think that's a fair take.
| There will always be tension between security and
| usability; it's difficult (impossible?) to do the
| absolute best in both metrics.
|
| Signal's development team can decide that they prioritize
| security over usability to whatever degree they like, and
| that's their prerogative. That may result in fewer users,
| and a less than stellar reputation in the usability
| space, but that's up to them. And if we (the unpaying
| user base) don't like it, we are free to use something
| else that better meets our needs.
| tim333 wrote:
| Maybe an answer is to have a control for each message
| that you can set to plain text or encrypted based on a
| cloud backed up key of encrypted based on a key only on
| this device. The you could message "hi mum, running late"
| without complications while being able to hard encrypt
| when you want?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Signal is already complication free (at least until your
| phone falls in a lake) making the control useless.
|
| (And you probably don't need to worry about losing the
| 'running late' message in the lake... The need for good
| encryption and reliable backup on any given message is
| likely somewhat correlated.)
| zbentley wrote:
| Perhaps it's a marketing problem, then. Signal is
| marketed as a secure and full-featured alternative to
| things like WhatsApp and iMessage. Most people start
| reading that sentence after the word "secure", and then
| are surprised and disappointed when a device replacement
| loses all their history.
|
| I think it would be better if Signal more loudly
| communicated the drawbacks of its encryption approach up-
| front, warning away casual users before they get a nasty
| surprise after storing a lot of important data in Signal.
|
| I've heard Signal lovers say the opposite--that getting
| burned with data loss is somehow educational for or
| deserved by casual users--and I think that's asinine and
| misguided. It's the equivalent of someone saying "ha!
| See? You were trading away privacy for convenience and
| relying on service-provider-readable message history as a
| record all along, don't you feel dumb?", to which most
| users' will respond "no, now that you've explained the
| tradeoffs...that is exactly how I want it to work; you
| can use Signal, but I want iMessage".
|
| It shouldn't take data loss to make that understood.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| My company recently really cut back on slack retention. At
| first I was frustrated, but we all quickly got over it and
| work carried on getting done at the same pace as before and
| nothing really got impacted like many of us imagined it
| might.
| wavemode wrote:
| That bears little resemblance to the Signal concerns. The
| reason people are worried about losing their personal
| messages is not lost productivity.
|
| It's also not even really the same situation. A more apt
| analogy would be, if switching work laptops sometimes meant
| you could no longer read any Slack history.
| Sevii wrote:
| It's fine until you need evidence someone agreed to
| something months ago but all records have been deleted.
| lazide wrote:
| A certain type of person sees this as a feature, not a
| bug.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Methinks the better solution here is to get better
| friends?
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Well I don't think most people choose who they work with.
| Even if you like your team a lot, you might have a
| discussion with someone from another team or division,
| and that's where it's useful to have a good chat history
| haha.
| snowfield wrote:
| Yeah, mail is the primary source of this.
|
| Once communication with my customers moved to teams. I've
| had a very hard time to find historical agreements and
| decisions.
|
| I try very hard to create a robust system for ADR logging
| now. And not just for system architecture. But for all
| decisions and agreements in my projects and across
| changes.
| kelnos wrote:
| I expect that some types of people (in middle management,
| especially) may see the lack of this as a good thing.
| mnahkies wrote:
| I'd hate this, slack is an extension of my memory and it
| being long lived and searchable can be a super power - you
| don't have to remember all the details of everything, just
| enough of the who, what, when to find the rest.
| mmooss wrote:
| Signal has a backup service in beta, that you can use right
| now.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I set up automatic backups of WhatsApp to my self-hosted
| Nextcloud once. Since you need 'tested backups', I tried to
| decrypt these WhatsApp backups independent of my phone, but
| this was not possible. You need the original device. There are
| some hacks online, but they are always out of date.
|
| I am tending now to running Mautrix Whatsapp bridge and backing
| up my data through this.
| laserbeam wrote:
| Ask yourself. If you want things to be encrypted by default
| in the world, would a florist be able to self host nextcloud?
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Agreed. I am still unhappy, but perhaps this is entirely my
| problem.
| nine_k wrote:
| This is a difference in the threat model.
|
| Signal's threat model is that everything around you is hostile
| to you, except the parties you interact with. You are an
| undercover rebel in a totalitarian sect which would sacrifice
| you to Cthulhu if they see your chat history. Losing it is much
| better than disclosing it.
|
| Your threat model is likely random black hat hackers who would
| try to get into your communication channels and dig some dirt
| to blackmail you, or to impersonate you to scam your
| grandmother out of several thousand dollars. Signal protects
| quite well against it. But the chance of this happening even in
| an unencrypted channel is low enough. You don't mind making the
| security posture somehow weaker, but preserve the possibility
| to restore your chat history if your secure device is lost or
| destroyed.
|
| I suppose the problem could be solved by an encrypted backup
| with a long key which you keep on a piece of paper in your
| wallet, and / or in a bank in a safe deposit box. Ideally it
| would be in the format that the `age` utility supports.
|
| But there is no way around that paper with the long code. If
| this code is stored on your device, and can be copied, it will
| be copied by some exploit. No matter how inconspicuous a
| backdoor you are making, somebody will find it and sneak into
| it. Should it happen in a publicized case, the public opinion
| will be "XYZ is insecure, run away from it!".
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > If this code is stored on your device, and can be copied,
| it will be copied by some exploit.
|
| Yeah... We really need some key-management hardware where the
| secrets can be copied by some channel that is not the primary
| one. This used to be more common, before the IT companies
| started pushing everything into the cloud.
|
| I have recently started to see computer boards with write
| protection for the UEFI data, what is a related thing that
| also did go away because mostly of Microsoft. So, maybe
| things are changing back.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| my proposal devices is like yubikey but instead of yubikey
| hardware in place like USB devices form
|
| its in the form of ring or bracelet, its small enough and can
| be carried everywhere with you all the time
|
| its use NFC like technology, it works without battery, fast and
| "secure enough" for 99% of people
|
| what if the device is stolen???? we can add authorization like
| biometric (fingerprint etc) while touching devices so it can be
| sure the real owner is "giving" auth
| BaconVonPork wrote:
| The problem is not a personal hardware security module, as
| you noted we have them. The problem is that people want
| redundancy that undermines the point. If you can easily have
| a copy of your ring just in case, how do you know who has
| done that process and watches you all the time? Biometrics
| sounds like a solution yet they are implemented as a cosmetic
| security layer and this situation is pointless to fix since
| we leave them everywhere we go.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| if people want to copy then let them copy
|
| -how is that secure????
|
| we would let only 1 device active at a time
|
| if you think secure enclave with Biometric security is
| "weak" then no one is secure
|
| if you think combination of (fingerprint,DNA,blood
| variance,retina, star time + position, mental memory etc)
| is not enough then no one is enough
|
| (we are assuming this is future where we can access all
| this technology) << this is important point here
|
| also if this is not enough, ppffttt (I dont want to go
| here) Neuralink device that lives under your skin
| pmontra wrote:
| So, the requirement is a system to store all your keys and that
| it can be duplicated as many times you wish. It looks like a
| local password manager, let's say keepass. I use it and have
| copies of the encrypted db on every device of mine, plus the
| client to access the passwords. I don't know if it qualifies
| for dumbness but it feels pretty robust. It survived the fall
| into the lake test (a river in my case.)
|
| But I see every customer of mine using web based password
| managers, because they want to share and update passwords with
| all their team. Of course those password managers can use E2E
| encryption and many do, but my instinct is that if you are
| using somebody's else service for your data, you can be locked
| out from your data.
|
| Anyway, it's the concept of having many passwords and having to
| manage them that's not dumb enough. The most that people do is
| letting the browser store and complete passwords. The password
| can be the same 1234pass on every single site.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| Web-based password manager user here! It's worth noting that
| Bitwarden and 1Password (probably all the others too) let you
| export all of your data into an encrypted archive, so anyone
| who does this periodically won't be "locked out".
|
| (Naturally, this requires extra effort on the users' part, so
| who knows how many are actually using this ability.)
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| Maybe I'm old but I never expect chat history to be a permanent
| thing. It's like talking to someone, it should be ephemeral.
|
| If you need a record, use email. Recording and archiving every
| conversation with someone is just weird.
|
| Thanks for listening, now you dang kids can get off my lawn
| zkmon wrote:
| Maybe Johnny doesn't have a need to encrypt. The post card in
| India was just a card with message written on both sides, fully
| visible in plain text. It's very common that a postman would read
| out the letter to recipients sometimes, when they deliver it.
| Privacy is not an universal need.
|
| Poor are those people who are forced to hide their message in
| encrypted formats,
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Nobody expects privacy when they send a postcard.
|
| Most people keep their emails behind a password for a reason...
| zkmon wrote:
| The point is, why not let people to have freedom of not
| having to encrypt? And why such freedom is considered as
| poor? This is like forcing everyone to have a smart phone,
| car, passport, zillions of IDs, internet profiles and calling
| their shackled life as rich.
|
| The other day someone was shocked to see that I don't have FB
| and instagram accounts. When did people lose their freedom
| not have social media accounts?
| viraptor wrote:
| Because if the default is unencrypted, you'll accidentally
| send secrets in plaintext one day. And if the default is
| encrypted and works well - why would you ever take time to
| explicitly disable that? What's the situation where you
| want to say "just in case someone intercepts this message,
| I _want_ them to be able to read it "?
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Encrypted communication has lots of practical drawbacks.
|
| For me email is just fine the way it is. Deliverability
| could be better and Google/Microsoft duopoly is a problem
| but that's it.
|
| Stop reinventing the wheel.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > Proton is a notable exception.
|
| Proton doesn't provide public APIs for retrieving the public GPG
| keys associated with their users' accounts, nor do they provide a
| way to send encrypted mail to their users' accounts without using
| their official apps.
|
| Ergo, Proton is not really working to further the state of
| cryptography for email, they're only working to compel users to
| use their proprietary software (and ultimately their paid
| services).
|
| If services which do automated sending of emails to their
| subscribers/users have no way to encrypt those emails for its
| users who are on proton mail, I don't understand how Proton can
| claim to care about encryption.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Proton still appears to suffer from Lavabit's pathologies in
| several ways because it ultimately stores GPG private keys,
| hasn't had their "zero-access encryption" audited by an
| independent third-party, it hosts servers in privacy-hostile
| jurisdictions that can be seized, and they've already handed
| user data to authorities over 30k times. [0] Proton Mail is a
| simulacra of privacy as a service that lies to its customers.
|
| At present time, the best way to assure privacy is to lease
| (using cryptocurrency) VPS instances in a neutral, privacy-
| respecting country and self-host a web-mail stack oneself.
| There isn't really a practical way around this because powerful
| nation states are able to demand access to customer data from
| almost every cloud/VPS provider in their jurisdiction.
|
| 0. https://proton.me/legal/transparency
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| If you're at the point where your hosting your own mail, you
| may as well GPG encrypt your own messages (with your locally
| stored private key), which makes the jurisdiction irrelevant
|
| Of course, this still assumes your correspondents will be
| capable of doing the same.
| e12e wrote:
| Encrypt with your public key, surely?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Fair, encrypt your recipient's public key, sign with your
| private key.
|
| Assume your correspondents can do the same as in, encrypt
| with _your_ public key and sign with their private key
| hulitu wrote:
| > in a neutral, privacy-respecting country
|
| Is there such a thing ?
| nulbyte wrote:
| > ...nor do they provide a way to send encrypted mail to their
| users' accounts without using their official apps.
|
| I'm confused by this complaint. Sending encrypted mail is the
| job of the sender. You can PGP encrypt your mail and send it to
| a Proton user just like any other recipient. I've done this at
| work when I need to send myself paystubs.
| arielcostas wrote:
| You can fetch a user's PGP public key via their HKPS endpoint,
| for example https://mail-
| api.proton.me/pks/lookup?op=get&search=username.... The one who
| apparently doesn't support PGP at all is Tuta.
|
| Ideally, you'd be able to provide the service your key directly
| (you can do it in Sourcehut for example, IIRC), and they use
| that key without relying on a third-party server. Maybe using
| something like WebFinger could be a solution too, for automatic
| key discovery from a "trusted" party (the recipient's email
| server).
| KAMSPioneer wrote:
| Uhm you can curl
| https://api.protonmail.ch/pks/lookup?op=get&search=$email_ad...
| for any valid $email_address and get the public key.
|
| I have used this to send signed/encrypted mail to a ProtonMail
| recipient. It worked, until he responded inline without
| encrypting it to my private key, thereby completely defeating
| the point.
|
| (Later I informed him of how to automatically sign and encrypt
| outgoing mails to my account, as that is possible too, but not
| obvious at all.)
|
| PM should make the more obvious, but in principle the
| interoperability is there and works.
| sorbusherra wrote:
| I consider e-mails to be digital versions of postcards. Both are
| obsolete but have some usage scenarios. There is no need to use
| private communication in obsolete postcard type messaging, so
| there is no need for encryption. For private communications there
| are other better(easier) means which people use.
| yardstick wrote:
| I've got hundreds of emails from the early 2010s between a couple
| of coworkers and myself that I can no longer read because they
| were S/MIME encrypted and I've got no idea what happened to my
| keys or even if my current client supports it anymore.
|
| I wish the client stored it decrypted once received.
| mhitza wrote:
| > I wish the client stored it decrypted once received.
|
| Me too. I already have my systems with fulldisk encryption, I
| need the communication to be end encrypted.
|
| Email clients (like Thunderbird) keeping emails stored
| encrypted, just makes it harder for these tools to search,
| label and automate stuff around content.
| m3047 wrote:
| I'm sorry for your loss, but this sounds like an antipattern.
| Hundreds of emails between co-workers and it was all
| contemporaneously related to work in progress or cat pictures
| of your own cats, didn't contain PII or proprietary information
| of your employer or unaware third parties? And you want it
| back? From far enough away (that I might as well be in orbit)
| this seems preferable to an unencrypted drive ending up in
| somebody's hands for "refurbishment" ( _cough_ printers with
| hard drives).
|
| No one is innocent. I refuse to use LE and operate my own CA
| instead, and as a consequence of scareware browser warnings I
| publish http: links instead of https: (if anyone cares, you
| know to add the "s" don't you?). I run my own mailserver which
| opportunistically encrypts, and at least when it gets to me
| it's on hardware which I own and somebody needs a search
| warrant to access.. as opposed to y'all and your gmail
| accounts. I do have a PGP key, but I don't include it on the
| first email with every new correspondent because too many times
| it's been flagged as a "virus" or "malicious".
|
| Clearly we live in a world only barely removed from crystals
| and ouija boards.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Hundreds of emails between co-workers and it was all
| contemporaneously related to work in progress or cat pictures
| of your own cats, didn't contain PII or proprietary
| information of your employer or unaware third parties?
|
| You're merely defining away the problem. You have no idea
| what was in those emails.
| m3047 wrote:
| Whatever was in those emails wasn't important enough for
| them to unencrypt them in a durable fashion, or put the
| keys in a safe with the gold bars.
|
| We call this the "scream test" in BOFH land.
| mmooss wrote:
| It wasn't important enough at the time to the BOFH.
| yardstick wrote:
| Who knew I'd need to do this? I'd never needed to do this
| either my emails in the decades prior.
|
| You've also got no idea what was in those emails. Could
| be some valuable knowledge or logs about some crazy rare
| bug or scenario, and would be useful to review today.
|
| We just turned on S/MIME by default, to "be secure",
| whatever that means. There was no warning in the email
| client about losing access to the email if you lost your
| keys.
|
| Citing BOFH is all well and good inside certain circles.
| In the real world, people don't like spending time or
| effort on poorly thought out and implemented solutions.
| tptacek wrote:
| Yeah, at some point people are going to work out that the problem
| isn't Johnny, it's email. Email is distinctively hostile to
| secure messaging. No matter what software Johnny uses, "secure"
| email will always be inferior to alternative options.
|
| https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypte...
| bgwalter wrote:
| "The most popular modern secure messaging tool is Signal"
|
| As Mike Waltz had found out. And Snowden used gpg and I haven't
| heard of a single message of his having been decrypted.
| MrDresden wrote:
| Both PGP and Signal will leak if you use them incorrectly, so
| that comparison doesn't really hold up.
|
| I say this as someone who uses both.
| akerl_ wrote:
| One key difference is that Signal intentionally makes
| design choices to make it harder to use incorrectly, and
| PGP is comically easy to use incorrectly.
| mmooss wrote:
| PGP email doesn't match Signal security:
|
| * PGP doesn't encrypt email metadata, so the attacker gets
| a record of every senders, receiver, time, date, and
| _subject line_ , for free, with PGP actually working at its
| best.
|
| * Email usually isn't usable without storing it server-side
| (for multi-client access), and without being able to search
| it. That requires your email to be in clear text on the
| server. That's solved with an on-prem mail server, but not
| many people have that - very few end users can operate one.
|
| * Email endpoints generally aren't secure, so even if you
| somehow secure your personal mail store, possibly nothing
| is secure except your draft messages. Every email is sent
| to or received from other people, so your messages are
| subject to their security practices.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Snowden also endorsed Signal, fwiw:
| https://x.com/Snowden/status/661313394906161152
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Mike Waltz is just about dumb enough to pile out his own eyes
| with his thumbs. At which point we will be regaled with the
| danger of thumbs forevermore.
| tptacek wrote:
| Snowden also used Cryptocat.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Poor Johnny still won't encrypt
|
| As long as Google, Apple or Microsoft controls your device, all
| bets are off. You can "encrypt"mails in Outlook but, Microsoft
| also has your key.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> Auditors obsess over encryption at rest--from laptop FDE to
| databases' security theaterish at-rest encryption--and over
| encryption in transit, usually meaning TLS._
|
| Very hard to parse sentence. The monospace font means the em-dash
| isnt emmy enough, so I couldn't tell it apart from the hyphen on
| first, second, and third attempt. I wish people would put spaces
| around it, and to hell with what the style guide says.
| jmclnx wrote:
| >In 2025, it's pretty much the same. In some respects, it's
| worse:
|
| Well not quite, if you use mutt, it is easy to encrypt emails
| with gpg. The setup could be a bit hard for new people, but if
| they have good reading comprehension it is easy.
|
| Thunderbird has its own gpg-like based internal encryption. I
| really do not like it, I wish they built it on gnupg like the old
| plugin did.
|
| All you need to do is get your key to the people you want to send
| encrypted email to and you need to get theirs. There are key
| servers or you can mail the public key to them.
|
| To me, if on Cell Phones, all bets are off. I would never use
| email on Cell Phones.
| mhitza wrote:
| There is also Mailvelope, a browser plugin, that simplifies PGP
| encryption across web email clients.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| It's email. 90% of the emails I get are marketing spam or GitHub
| notifications. Nobody I know uses email to chat with friends
| mid-kid wrote:
| Of course not, but unlike chat services, everyone has an email
| address or phone number, so if I need to reach out to them for
| something other than a casual chat, e.g. an invitation, a
| birthday felicitation, or a document that they should review
| later, email is a method through which I can reach all of them.
|
| Similarly, reaching out to companies for support also often
| happens over email.
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