Your Thoughts

[Ryan McGinnis]

That is true that I am probably being unfair - my focus on GPG for email is more a nostalgic sadness that secure (beyond TLS transport) email never really became ubiquitous.  In the end the protocol of email itself couldn’t keep up with way people needed to communicate, so email is now a bit of a niche thing -  used for business and as a repository for “unimportant and lacking urgency, but still desired” types of communications.  As a run of the mill IT fire putter outer it seems nuts that I run across institutions still using fax machines (just regular old unencrypted data turned to audio over POTS lines) because they are somehow still compliant with data protection laws, and they see encrypted email as less viable as it much more expensive to set up with much more overhead.

But I also agree - it certainly does make sense to focus development on what the users primarily use it for.

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On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 07:18, Robert J. Hansen <rjh at sixdemonbag.org> wrote:

>> Signal went the other way. Build a verifiably secure communications platform so easy that literally anyone can figure it out.
>
> I think this is a misunderstanding of Signal.
>
> OpenPGP is, by its very nature, agnostic to ... well, just about
> everything. It was originally intended for email but spread to become
> just about everywhere. It's used for package verification mostly
> nowadays. That is the genuine 99% use case, and that's where our
> attention really should be focused on. Email is a niche, and even
> moreso nowadays as email _itself_ is becoming a niche. OpenPGP in email
> is a niche within a niche.
>
> Signal is, by its very nature, tightly tied to one specific
> communications platform -- that of the smartphone. It's not likely to
> break out of its home.
>
> It's true that Signal has had more impact than OpenPGP in email -- but I
> think that's an unfair statement to make, as you're cherrypicking the
> one niche where OpenPGP has had the *least* adoption. Anything looks
> like a failure if you only look at where it's failed.
>
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