It might be people who miss the forest for the trees. Right now Moxie is working on bringing encryption to the masses. That involves a whole-product view, with empathy for the unsophisticated (think about a kid who's only computing device is a phone).

I know stereotypes often treat people unfairly, but the kind of person who has the dedication required to use PGP seems, to me, to often coincide with the people who find fault with everyone who hasn't had the dedication or focus to learn sophisticated software techniques.

And, if I were Moxie, that would be a source of constant frustration to me. The very people who have the ability to make things better -at best- don't empathize with the people they could help, and at worst harbor a bit of contempt for them.

Considering Moxie seems to be dedicating a large part of his life's work to helping average people, I believe the attitude I described could play foil to the inspirational messages he also receives. But I don't pretend to know him or anything.

> Considering Moxie seems to be dedicating a large part of his life's work to helping average people, I believe the attitude I described could play foil to the inspirational messages he also receives. But I don't pretend to know him or anything.

You may say that, but after the "we specifically work to make TextSecure impossible without Google Play because using Android without google is 'going back to the old broken desktop security model'" thing, I'm not convinced.

I'm sure moxie is good with crypto, but sadly, he's on different side of war on general purpose computers than I am. He's on the side of walled gardens and limits what can you do on your own device, and I can't accept that.

EDIT: and of course he would spit on GPG. For moxie, GPG is competition.

Moxie's stance on non-Play releases is not as extreme as you suggest:

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/127

To quote another commenter:

"Way to take a dump on people who make an effort."

It's the same as people who voluntarily use Windows. It says something about them, that's all.

I can guess why you're being downvoted, but your comment is ironically correct. It /does/ say something about them! But what that is depends on who you ask. And that, again, says something about /them/.

Which says something about the downvoters.

Irony everywhere.

People are getting offended, but I could have replaced Windows with almost anything. Our choices say things about us. Getting back to the subject at hand, though, I assume 'moxie meant that people who choose to use GPG for casual conversation must be slightly masochistic and therefore slightly less likely to have something interesting to say.

... just like Windows users ;)

Yes, of course, but I'm very curious about moxie's interpretation of what using GPG says about the people who randomly email him; certainly more curious than constructing my own stereotype.

Get out of your bubble. Windows is ubiquitous. It has 90% of the desktop market share. There is no generalization you can come up with about that many people.

> Windows is ubiquitous. It has 90% of the desktop market share. There is no generalization you can come up with about that many people.

'People who use Windows do not have both the intelligence not to desire it and the power to do as they wish.'

I think the OP meant that, given a choice, say, of getting a Mac or a Windows PC at work, you voluntarily pick the Windows PC.

That's also a false dichotomy, a dangerous one at that. Sort of like two party system.