STEED - Usable end-to-end encryption

[Robert J. Hansen]

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On 10/25/11 6:46 PM, MFPA wrote:
> If people don't care about privavy, why did envelopes rather than
> postcards develop as the default for sending messages through the 
> post?

This one should be obvious: because a postcard doesn't allow you to
write much more than a Twitter post, and many times people need to
send more than a handful of characters.  In the mid-to-late '90s,
prior to the adoption of email, I was routinely sending my girlfriend
ten-page letters.  The envelope was pretty handy for keeping all those
pages together.

We keep on trotting out the envelope analogy, but perhaps we should do
some more thinking before we do that.  It doesn't appear to me to be
as advantageous to our position as we think.  The envelope gives the
letter author immediate benefits beyond just enhanced privacy.