News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on DecryptoCat. Parent comment

Re:DecryptoCat by rst on Thursday July 04, 2013 @03:21PM (#5992074)
From a recent interview with Brewster Kahle[1]:

  Q: Do you encrypt all your own email, as a result
     of this stuff?

  A: No, that's really hard.
Brewster is the founder of the Internet Archive; the subject of the interview was an NSL that he fought off in court. He's also a pretty smart techie in his own right. But I suppose you could still argue that he's lazy, stupid, or not in need of strong crypto.

Or maybe, just maybe, the available tools for the purpose take a lot more than ten minutes to install and configure well enough for even an intelligent and technically skilled user to have any confidence that they've done it correctly.

People can't install good crypto tools in ten minutes. Not even people like Brewster. And if you're making one of those tools, and you want it to be anything more than a research toy, that's your problem, not theirs.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/06/what-... (If you want to see the part I quoted, scroll right to the end.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DecryptoCat by Dylan16807 on Thursday July 04, 2013 @05:47PM (#5992591)
People don't need cryptography everywhere. Where they need it, they should be willing to spend ten minutes. Where they don't need it, such as coupon mailing lists, they go with the flow.

The only way to have 100% encrypted email is to avoid a massive number of services. This is something to be done only when it actually provides safety.

Basically you're arguing a point (100% crypto) that is completely different from the post you're replying to (crypto on critical conversations).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DecryptoCat by im3w1l on Thursday July 04, 2013 @07:03PM (#5992795)
People need cryptography everywhere. Otherwise the fact that cryptography is being used leaks information.
[ Parent | on HN ]