German ct magazine postulates death of pgp encryption

Bjarni Runar Einarsson bre at pagekite.net
Sat Feb 28 16:25:11 CET 2015


Peter Lebbing <peter at digitalbrains.com> wrote:
> On 28/02/15 14:06, Ralph Seichter wrote:
> > but PGP does not work for mass e-mail protection
> 
> Let me stress again that the proper course might be to replace SMTP (e-mail) and
> then work from that. If you have a sieve and wish for something to hold liquids,
> you could plug up all the holes or say "Blow this for a lark" and get a pan.

People keep saying this. I see this as both less realistic and more
harmful than the voices that are now claiming that OpenPGP should die.

E-mail is the *only* surviving decentralized free and open messaging
system with any clout today. Literally everything else in common use is
proprietary and centralized. We should all be deeply worried about this.

Either way, even if this were a reasonable attitude, it doesn't in any
way diminish or excuse the fact that OpenPGP in all its glory is too
complicated for all but a handful of humans on the planet, most of whom
are probably on this mailing list. :-) OpenPGP may be hard to use over
SMTP, but it isn't any easier over XMPP or Facebook messages or carrier
pigeons either.

That said, the DIME proposal is one attempt at "next gen SMTP". From
what I've read it's pretty well thought out. It's really, really
complicated though, so I'm not particularly optimistic about its chances
of success.

Cheers!
 - Bjarni

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