On 21 Nov 2001, at 21:00, Sandy Sandfort wrote:
David wrote:
Declan's comment on operating a physical remailer for suitably valuable cargo, plus some of Tim's recent comments about integration, made me think of the question in the subject line. So far I see at least three possible answers.
1) Make lots of money.
2) Spread awareness (that "funny feeling in the stomach" recently discussed) and save our fellow man. Make the world safe for privacy.
3) Ensure that cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies have uses besides "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse," so that they aren't banned.
anything else?
Yes, a corollary to 2) is that by saving our fellow man, we are saving ourselves as well. The elitist idea that it doesn't make any difference what happens to the little people is wrong-headed. Because the world is set up to make cars affordable for the little people, you and I can have personal automotive transportation at a fraction of the cost if we were to try and assemble them up in Galt's Gulch. If crypto gets wide-spread use by the little people, our use will be lost in the noise.
S a n d y
I gave a little bit of thought about what an encrypted email client should look like for joe sixpack to use. Here's how the DEFAULT behavior would work: When you install the software, it generates a public-private key pair. It saves your private key right there on your hard disk unencrypted, no tricky passphrase to remember. It then uploads your private key to some central server. The software maintains a list of public keys, if you want to send mail to someone for whom you don't have a public key, it'll check the server for one. If you have a key for someone, it'll automatically encrypt. If you receive encrypted mail, it'll automatically decrypt (and save the decrypted mail on your hard drive). It'll have a little icon on a mail message indicating if it was encrypted, and there'll be an icon next to each name in the address book indicating if you have a key for that address, but for the most part it'll encrypt opportunistically and the user won't need to know or care if a message is encrypted or not. I'm sure I don't need to go into detail explaining what's wrong with this, but it should be obvious that every convenience violates an important security rule. And it pretty much has to be that way. You either have to remember a passphrase and key it in, or any fool who gets access to your computer can easily read your private key, and so on. Personally, I think it'd be better if the sixpackers used this kind of encryption than no encryption at all, if I thought that people wuld use this kind of email client I would write it, it shouldn't be too hard since I could probably steal most of the code. George