51–60 of 281 posts
I do think there ought to be a way to do good cryptography in email. Email is not going away anytime soon, so giving up on it as a legitimate place where cryptography is needed seems too ivory tower for me. The “dead simple solution” is to just run the Signal protocol over SMTP, although I’m sure it’s possible there is a better design if you were to think about the specifics.
Good for them, but PGP is essentially dead for any non-technical zealot users. S/MIME is better supported and easier to use.
It works quite well within groups. If you use it every day it’s a total non issue. The problem is people who set it up, forget about it, and finally get encrypted message two years later. Of course that is then confusing to try to remember how to use.
I used to love PGP, but I now think encrypted email is a bad idea. https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.... Better to use a protocol designed with encryption in mind, like Signal, to get forward secrecy, avoid leaking metadata, and have encryption always on by default. UPDATE: I have been reminded that PGP does not have to be used with email. I meant to say that I used to love using PGP with em…
If you try to actually build a secure environment within a group that tries to maximize security while getting real work done you find you want to be encrypted by default at least with each other. Signal is pretty suboptimal for heavy volumes of messages. If you and I have three threads going they are all jumbled together. If I want to send to more than one person I have to whip out my phone and form a group and name it.
PGP is imperfect but with the right settings and defaults it is far better than having email default to clear text. And in any long term endeavor with more than a few people you will find you want email.
Signal is great for what it does. It is not designed to be a high volume working tool like email though.
I do think there ought to be a way to do good cryptography in email. Email is not going away anytime soon, so giving up on it as a legitimate place where cryptography is needed seems too ivory tower for me. The “dead simple solution” is to just run the Signal protocol over SMTP, although I’m sure it’s possible there is a better design if you were to think about the specifics.
How do you do key exchange?
I used to love PGP, but I now think encrypted email is a bad idea. https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.... Better to use a protocol designed with encryption in mind, like Signal, to get forward secrecy, avoid leaking metadata, and have encryption always on by default. UPDATE: I have been reminded that PGP does not have to be used with email. I meant to say that I used to love using PGP with em…
Signal is great as an all in one solution if encrypted messaging is a hobby. It is also very good for mobile and encrypted occasional messages. If you try to actually build a secure environment within a group that tries to maximize security while getting real work done you find you want to be encrypted by default at least with each other. Signal is pretty suboptimal for heavy volumes of messages. If you and I have th…
It's not possible to make email secure, the flaws are on the protocol level. To fix it, you would need to change it until it is no longer email.
I used to love PGP, but I now think encrypted email is a bad idea. https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.... Better to use a protocol designed with encryption in mind, like Signal, to get forward secrecy, avoid leaking metadata, and have encryption always on by default. UPDATE: I have been reminded that PGP does not have to be used with email. I meant to say that I used to love using PGP with em…
(Open)PGP is first and foremost a flexible packet format (and other specs), and GnuPG is more of a CLI "library" to interface with it -- all of it. You can build something that hides metadata, you can have forward secrecy, and encryption always-on by default with PGP (and GnuPG). You can use it for whatever trust model you want, neither OpenPGP (the specs) nor GnuPG prescribe a certain model. It provides building blocks. It just happens that no good client exists and no more high level specs were written that use it, which is highly unfortunate. The client in this case here used to be "Enigmail" (a wrapper around GnuPG), and now is built-in since plugins are not allowed to be as powerful with the new browser architecture that Thunderbird piggybacks on and this was the only way to bring PGP to Thunderbird users. Also, there are some more modern libraries nowadays for standard use cases around PGP.
Signal was able to move faster since it did not exist, did not try to build things in an open and collaborative fashion, still refuses to work in any open way. Its founder Moxie even openly argues against standards [x]. I am not saying he does not have "a point", but in the long run this will lead to just more silos and ultimately technical stagnation, and for me goes against the ethos of "a public and open inter-net." (and the learnings behind it. 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.')
That said, I do agree with your comment on a pure end-user level. It still makes me sad to always see this confused and not acknowledged better in places like HN, where people "should know". Technologists can defend and strive for the most promising long-term solution and "proper way to do it", and at the same time recommend "the best of the bad that is currently available". Even if it is confusing sometimes.
Just to give an example, there are plenty of high security use cases that require using smartcards. I'm very grateful that the OpenPGP standard and GnuPG exist that (can be made to) work in such cases. Signal does nothing in that space, rightfully so. But you are comparing different fruit to each other, which is kind of unfair.
[x] and still calls himself an "anarchist". You would think those know better...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Signal is great as an all in one solution if encrypted messaging is a hobby. It is also very good for mobile and encrypted occasional messages. If you try to actually build a secure environment within a group that tries to maximize security while getting real work done you find you want to be encrypted by default at least with each other. Signal is pretty suboptimal for heavy volumes of messages. If you and I have th…
So you're saying that if you're building a professional secure environment, you don't need forward secrecy and it's ok to leak metadata? This doesn't make sense to me. The US gov't kills people based on metadata: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/why-metadata-matters It's not possible to make email secure, the flaws are on the protocol level. To fix it, you would need to change it until it is no longer email.
If you’re saying Signal is strictly more secure I agee 100%. It’s just not suitable for using for large amounts of comms within a group. I wish they’d improve it and have even detailed features I think they should add (I made an HN thread when they got that donation from the whatsapp guy).
For now it’s not realistic to expect people to know how to put ALL sensitive comms in Signal. You need to build an environment where as many channels as possible are secure by default. Setting everyone up with GPG and using it by default actually works in group settings and is much better than not doing it. The “just use Signal” meme is wrong. Because you can’t. Not at high volumes.
(Also, metadata is a lot less important in the context of a group that openly associates with one another as a great many do. It does suck that subject lines leak. But better to encrypt the message body than throw up hands and give up because no perfect substitute exists. One learns not to put much info into subject lines. You can always just not use them. Signal does not have them.)
Is this the longest time between request/bug and fix?
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233 16 years and still pending! All bets are off for this dark horse
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried turning off some of the columns in the message list and using Vertical view? There's an absurd number of them that you really don't need all the time.
I have, but the biggest horizontal space eaters in that view are the most important ones - subject, from, and date. Turning off the others don't really help that much. Besides, Mail.app gives me the all the same information as in Thunderbird's, but the list of messages is rearranged for that view. It doesn't eat into the message plane. Thunderbird's vertical layout is just a re-arrangement of the panes. Edit: I mixed…
Above the three panes I simply have the message filter box and above that is the main toolbar (get messages, write, address book, view drop down, quick filter button).
Simple but works well for me on 1920x1080 or higher (and dealing with about a hundred or so emails a day).