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Announcing The Dark Mail Alliance – Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit

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21–30 of 217 posts

Re: Announcing The Dark Mail Alliance – Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit

#21

Terrible name.

Agreed. One of the biggest issues with security-conscious systems is that people don't want to be seen as using something that only "people with something to hide" would be using. The average American watches a show like SVU and learns that TOR is how kiddie porn is traded, not that it is how dissidents in Iran or Russia communicate with Journalists. They hear about the "darknet" and assume that that is where illegal…

They may as well have named it "Mobster Mail"

Re: Announcing The Dark Mail Alliance – Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit

#23

As much as I hate promotion emails, I do hope they make sure that companies can still send mass "dark mails" securely, rather than sending the one by one...

Wait wait wait! Requiring very strong encryption may help make spam email computationally infeasible. That alone might be worth it!

See Bitmessage. It has two options. Either senders can spend a significant amount of time (~30 seconds) doing a proof-of-work calculation and send a message to a single person, or they can spend the same amount of time and send a message to an arbitrary number of people, but only if those people are subscribed to the person sending the message.

Re: Announcing The Dark Mail Alliance – Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait wait wait! Requiring very strong encryption may help make spam email computationally infeasible. That alone might be worth it!

I thought even extremely strong encryption was computationally quite light- it's cracking the crypto that takes computing muscle.

Maybe they are going to require "Proof of work" - https://bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work

Re: Announcing The Dark Mail Alliance – Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit

#25
The name "Dark Mail" is going to automatically be associated with the "Dark Net" which brings up thoughts of drug dealing and child pornography. This is their first problem.

The second is their approach. Overcoming the install base of current email, no matter how much better your new offering, is practically impossible. So instead secure layers on top of existing email is your only feasible option.

Re: Announcing The Dark Mail Alliance – Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit

#26

What's wrong with bitmessage?

Only solves a subset of the email problem, IIUC.

What's missing? I was very skeptical about Bitmessage, but it totally surpassed my expectations when I tried it.

Re: Announcing The Dark Mail Alliance – Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit

#29

Terrible name.

Like everyone else (with any common marketing sense), it seems like something like "security" or "privacy" would be much more positive connotations than "dark."

A quick search shows SecureMail and PrivateMail are commercially used, but LockedMail and SignedMail aren't.

I don't think it'd be too late to (eventually?) do a rebrand/cobrand for the product, especially if someone comes up w/ something particularly good. I think something that even a slight bit of spitballing would turn up something much better.

Some thoughts on naming:

* If the first word ends in e like securemail/privatemail you actually get email in the word

* something that could be shortened like email, but will connote secure sending - "send me that via pmail/smail"

* something that has familiar connotations of privacy/sealed delivery (registered mail?) or something might work as well

Re: Announcing The Dark Mail Alliance – Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit

#30
post #22

I'm really interested in their solution for solving metadata leakage. I just looked over the SCIMP white paper, and it didn't mention anything about metadata.

I think not sending all of the data in cleartext will still be a huge improvement.
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