On Mon, 14 Apr 1997, Toto wrote:
I have found that rather than promoting encryption and anony remailers, that it is much more effective for me just to be aware of when someone mentions a problem they are having that can be solved by crypto/remailers.
Do you do consulting work for a specific audience that would be inclined to need to use remailers and encryption more than the average user, or are you referring more to just "average" friends? If it is the second case, especially, I think that many of us might benefit from some specific scenarios in which you proposed encryption and remailers as solutions.
The biggest thing to me is to try to point them toward a level of technology that they are capable of using, or will be capable of learning, given the level of their problem.
What programs do you usually suggest? On my Linux box, I use pine 3.95's filter hooks to use PGP relatively seamlessly, but the multiuser system that most of my peers use email on does not have a version of pine capable of supporting filters. I've looked into Raph's premail, and have set it up successfully, but it seems a bit obtuse for a normal user. (Plus I *REALLY* don't like the idea of storing my passphrase on the multiuser system as well.)
Also, if a wide range of people are using crypto, whether it is strong and secure or not, then there will be a larger group of people interested in the government or their employer not interfering with their use of it.
This brings up an interesting point -- should we crypto users try and work with the system administrators to get PGP set up systemwide, or should we just try to do it on our own, as unobtrusively as possible? A systemwide implimentation of PGP would probably be advantageous, but to ask for that certainly risks bringing attention to otherwise unobtrusive activities that the system administrators might not like. -Eric -- Thus the time may have come to abandon the cool, measured language of technical reports -- all that talk of "perturbations" and "surprises" and "unanticipated events" -- and simply blurt out: "Holy shit! Ten thousand years! That's incredible!" -- Kai Erikson, _A_New_Species_of_Trouble_, 1994.