Re: Harvard and MIT Students Launch ‘NSA-Proof’ Email Service | Betabeat

[grarpamp]

> In the end, we need to trust someone. But we dont read their minds:). And it could be, after all, a big fall.

No, you don't need to trust anyone, and should not.
That model's long been broken.
You should audit the code, spec and docs and
then trust that.

> We"ve got pgp. Thanks God.

And have only thus secured the message body.
A valuable tech advance to be sure. But far
from approaching a near wishfully complete
checklist solution.

> But a 100% reliable and bulletproof email provider?
> No.

Countless businesses fail, sellout, etc every day
and that will not change. It is proven since dawn of
business for them to fail or at least morph into
something unrecognizable.

[Note it doesn't take $much/account to run a good
barebones email service 100%, especially if you stick
to only mail and cut features. There's no reason we
shouldn't have 50 punkish ones in curious jurisdictions
to choose from by now.]

Back to p2p... your recipient, and your peers are all
independent businesses. Look out in your city, other than
you and Alice who both are 'up' by definition of wanting
to talk some method, you could fail many people/nodes/businesses
and still route a p2p message through. It's hard to
eval trust of a single business or %'s of nodes. Yet
just like all the millions of torrenters, your odds of
the majority of the nodes [which have real IP's hard
to fake in the disparate millions] being on your side are
probably better with p2p than whether one single brick
and mortar business is screwing you over, or forced to
to so.

Business centralization, vanity, monetization, etc to run
the lava*'s, proton's and so on is counter to some
of the problems they attempt to solve. Their real benefit is often
adding research to the educational pile of debunked non-solutions
to such problems. A natural selection process of sorts.
And as legal test cases for fighting the good fight, pushing
boundaries and changing that end of things.
If Ladar didn't stand up and speak out we wouldn't know to
evolve those parts of our process. We need more people
like that.