the Great Filter of private communication

Scott Blaydes scott at sbce.org
Sun Apr 20 22:55:43 PDT 2014


On Apr 20, 2014, at 7:05 PM, coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:

> we have the maths! we have the technology!
> 
> ... yet actual robust, private communications remain elusive.
> 
> where the "Great Filter" thwarting our privacy codes?
> 
> 
> 
> is it usability; anything more than invisibly automatic a failure?

Yes. People keep claiming that it is just too hard to encrypt email. There are plugins for all platforms. If you can’t send encrypted email, sending email in the first place is probably too difficult, just txt everyone on your fone. The smartfone has made for such stupid people that if it can’t be done in just a few keystrokes (content included) then it is too hard or tl;dr.

Remember the old days when there wasn’t PPP and SLIP connections? Before broadband. When a conversation on IRC was enjoyable, the right amounts of humor and actual thought? And you knew not to ask for help in #unix on efnet.

> 
> is it cost; anything more than zero too much to bear in the market?
> 

No, everyone can afford a smartfone now a days.

> is it correctness; anything less than a single mode always secure, broken?

Life is full of levels of grey, and so is security. That password you use on new sites you don’t trust vs your gpg/pgp passphrase. The sheeple don’t have levels of grey with regards to security, either take it to their grave or everyone can see.

Chatting with someone who was looking to start his own desktop Linux distro. I suggested an encrypted messaging platform over the security-hole-riddled platform he was using and he told me he had nothing to hide. I told him he wasn’t the kind of person who should be developing anything security related.

Security takes effort that people are not will to expend.
> 
> 
> 
> perhaps all of these above, each a requisite element of robustness,
> further compounding the difficulty of realizing an ideal.

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