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

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

#181

Post by junto »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #95
ChuckMcM wrote: post #42

I hope they are successful. For a long time I have wished that someone with the expertise and time would be motivated to create a new email system from the ground up, and make that system widely available and 'open' (in the sense of open protocols). There are many challenges, but if they can pull it off there are many benefits as well. And perhaps the nicest part is that it is hard to actively oppose such efforts wit…

I think the biggest barrier to entry of any new and secure email protocol will be GMail. GMail (and similar services) are what most people seem to use at this point. And GMail won't update to 3.0 in any meaningful way, no matter what, since they want to be able to mine the data in your email, so they will still be storing it on their servers "in the clear." Which means the next time NSA hacks their servers, they'll s…

I think that the greatest barrier will be Exchange and other corporate email servers software. Without corporate buy-in, this will never take off.

Corps "need" to have an overview of the messages unsecured. There is no such thing as personal privacy in the corporate world, only corporate privacy.

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

#182

Post by dingaling »

hackula1 wrote: post #165
gknoy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... keep their software in a so called 'subversion' repository, clearly for nefarious ends."

"... it's worse than that. They used git. They can git your kids, git your job, git your family; all with one command. They can even clone you. These hackers will be pulling and pushing this country apart!"

Interesting! I hadn't considered that connotation of git.

To Euro-English speakers, 'git' is a rather coarse pejorative term for a person:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=git

It's fairly vulgar, of a similar coarseness to calling someone a 'stupid fucker' in US terms.

The in-joke being that Mr Torvalds chose the name specifically to cause offense.

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

#183

Post by dingaling »

bigiain wrote: post #141
pixelcort wrote: post #130

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, OS X and iOS already support S/MIME encrypted email, and having the private keys live on users' devices and doing encryption of outgoing messages on users' devices is probably the safest setup.

Hmmm, I don't know if I'm being outrageously paranoid, but I'm resisting the temptation to put my PGP private key on my iPhone - because it'd be _way_ too easy for Apple to extract the key/passphrase if they were coerced by someone powerful enough, and those "powerful enough" have shown that they consider a court order granting them the private key used to secure 400,000 people's email is an appropriate tool when tar…

> I'm resisting the temptation to put my PGP private key on my iPhone

S/MIME doesn't use PGP keys, it uses X509 certificates. You can quite easily deploy multiple certificates, one for each communication partner or channel.

So for example your mail sent to / from your iPhone would be encrypted with one cert, whereas from your desktop for Super Secret Stuff you'd use another.

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

#184

Post by louischatriot »

natural219 wrote: post #45

I appreciate the cheekiness of calling it the "Dark Mail Alliance", but from a purely PR perspective, it would make sense to reconsider your name if you are taking the position that encrypted end-to-end email is not solely an interest of those pursuing shady or deviant activities.

Totally agree, dark mail feels too threatening.

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

#185

Post by Cort3z »

This is very good news. An interesting not here: In Norway the official postal service, Posten, has introduced something called DigiPost. Post means mail, so DigiMail. This is essential a secure way of sending information and it is approved by the Norwegian government for sending and receiving sensitive information. So you can ask to get your sensitive government stuff through DigiPost.

My point being: There is already a big market for sending secure emails. If this Dark Mail, or whatever it is called, is secure enough for a government to use then the adoption will be huge.

This probably means that it should be called something else than dark. "Normal people" don't know what encryption is, what NSA is or even why it is bad that companies like Google read and use their email. They won't know why or even that their email is insecure. They might have ssl in their Web browser showing a small lock, so they think they are already secure and don't need this "SecureMail". It is absolutely critical that the name of this thing is something that a normal person will feel that he/she needs. Something as simple as "New Email". Yes, the nerds will rage, but the nerds already knows why this is a big deal. The name does not need to cater to them. What is important is to get adoption of this new email platform. And naming it secure mail will probably not help. And having a dark alliance behind it all is the worst idea so far. Both words have negative annotations and sounds like a untrustworthy hacker group or even a terrorist organization. Needless to say, they need some serious re-branding, and fast.

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

#187

Post by PavlovsCat »

sliverstorm wrote: post #149
sandstrom wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree, I really think you should change the name. Some suggestions: - Locke Mail [from John Locke] - Mill Mail [from John Stuart Mill] - Hobbes Mail - Liberty Mail

Liberty Mail seems cheesy and try-hard.

So does "Hacker News", but who cares? I sure don't. Name it XB483 for all I care, just make it work..

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

#188

Post by chalst »

StavrosK wrote: post #96
RamiK wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom \ Liberty \ Patriot \ Constitution Mail would be very effective in blocking political speeches and biased headlines from cheap attacks. My personal favorite is Lincoln Mail... Seems highly appropriate on many levels and should be FOX News proof.

As a European, something called "Lincoln mail" would give me a bit of a rash...

Robin Hood's freedom and privacy-loving band were dressed in Lincoln green...

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

#189

Post by digitalengineer »

Can we stop with 'the name sucks' meta discussion and focus on the topic? I for one would love to see this work out. It'd be goddamntime someone clever did something about it and I could not imagine two better parties starting this.
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