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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

#101

Post by adeptus »

sandstrom wrote: post #57
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.

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

I suggest names that don't have limited country/cultural references if the intent is to make this a global success. Some other suggestions:

-SecMail (Secure Email)

-PrivMail (private/privacy email)

-FMail (freedom email)

-NetMail (New Internet standard email)

And thank you for taking this on, it is seriously needed. And please, no reliance on CA certs, chances are the NSA has compromised at least some of those.

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

#102

Post by [deleted] »

RamiK wrote: post #89
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

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.

[deleted]

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

#103

Post by femto »

RamiK wrote: post #89
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

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.

Some of those suggestions lose their punch when moved to a non-American context.

I'd argue that the name should work on the assumption that it is the defacto standard, and so there is no need to distinguish between "normal mail" and "new mail". It should also contain a possessive pronoun. (Something like "YourMail", if not already taken?).

With such a name, when someone attacks the mail service it will be difficult to avoid attacking the person, as an attacker will have to attack "YourMail". Attack the person and the person will react.

Not distinguishing between normal and new will have two effects:

1) It will seem a normal thing for the uninitiated to use it.

2) In the case of an attack, it will be easier for people to say the attack is directed at themselves, since the generic name will draw people in, rather than letting them dismiss it as an exclusive club.

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

#104

Post by JshWright »

netgineer wrote: post #46
r0muald wrote: post #7

"Stay connected with the Dark Mail Alliance [Enter your e-mail] "

And over an unencrypted channel no less, www.darkmail.info doesn't have ssl, so the NSA will know if you are interested.

Given the extremely limited nature of the site, what protection do you think TLS would offer (against an adversary like the NSA that could trivially correlate your IP address with your email address).

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

#106

Post by lucajona »

smoorman1024 wrote: post #67
fulafel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IETF has become less relevant of late, they don't get stuff adopted and have been taken over largely by architecture astronauts.

What do you mean by architecture astronaut?

See "Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You" by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

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

#107

Post by rhythmvs »

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.

The “dark” part is not so much the issue: why not leave out “mail” altogether? E-mail 3.0 won’t be e-mail as people know it (and will continue to associate with the very concepts 3.0 seeks to avoid). It shall be something different enough to give it another name — at least to avoid confusion, or to prevent spin doctors from taking advantage of the associations and mental model people have on the concept of e-mail. Nobody thinks of “e-mail” when you mention Snapchat, Facebook messages, Twitter… That would be different if these services had names like Snapmail, Facemail, Tweetmail, or Darkmail.

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

#108

Post by ChuckMcM »

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 agree with the barrier. I wonder if the NSA has made surmounting that barrier possible. If the friction to getting a 'secure' email experience is low enough, people will put up with having two for a while.

As for connecting them. I could handle just being able to communicate with my security conscious friends on this platform. That might make it a niche play early on but so was email.

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

#109

Post by r00fus »

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…

> GMail at least accepts 3.0, if only to unencrypt it on their servers.

This. I assume Google will be very eager to adopt "3.0" simply to absorb the data and make it available to the Android/AI bots that really run the place (Larry, Sergey and other googlers are clearly just physical manifestations).

Google doesn't seem to me to be the kind of organization to fear adoption of external ideas - they just co-opt them.

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

#110

Post by lucastx »

Xylakant wrote: post #65
redblacktree wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think this is one of the fundamental misunderstandings: Metadata includes such interesting things as "who has been sending messages to whom at what time" and potentially also from where (ip address). This is an avenue to reconstruct social networks and behavioral patterns, especially if you can crosslink the data with other public sources. I recommend this visualization of the movement profile only derived from the…

English version: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/
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