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Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

philzimmermann.com

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Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#131

Post by Gradient-Ascent »

cowmix wrote: post #7

I have sooooo many lost emails due to lost pgp configurations. Encrypted blobs in my mail spools.

Today's analogy is bitcoin... Will all Bitcoin just be lost one day, because all keys get lost?

I am aware that "there are solutions", but are they (really) enough? Isn't "breaking in" required at some point?

Another endgame for Bitcoin is that all Bitcoin are stolen through the one tool which helps with ("unbreakable") encryption: Hacking / social engineering.

Besides that we hab substantial discussions about why PGP isn't really cutting it for use with email (to cumbersome, at one point you lose your private key, recipient struggles to decrypt, etc.).

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#132

Post by danielschonfeld »

damagednoob wrote: post #115
danielschonfeld wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am with you. But I think I know what it is, you touched on it and almost had it. It was indeed peace, we almost had it, world peace - feeling utopian and all loving in the 90s. Then came 9/11. It’s the single point in history where just about everything to do with American society can be defined to be before and after. Doesn’t matter what you think about the event and it’s authenticity as described, the fact of the…

> It was indeed peace, we almost had it, world peace - feeling utopian and all loving in the 90s. Think you might need to qualify that. The mid-90s saw the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides.

It won’t be the first time in history, Americans and with them the “western” world turned a blind eye to who’s backs their hedonistic party was carried over.

If you look at what was life like. What people cared about. What songs sang about. What households looked like. War was as far a concept from the average American.

Sure we had the gulf war early 90s. We had Bosnia during Clinton years. But most Americans were more concerned with becoming stock traders from home, saving willy and the earth and how Clinton’s cigars were used.

Americans bombers dropping bombs by the ton to the backdrop of western advancement has almost become an expectation in our campaign of spreading our brand of democracy and its freedoms or else.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#133

Post by danielschonfeld »

danielvaughn wrote: post #116
jeofken wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn’t matter what you think about the event and it’s authenticity as described Interesting small mention. Is it common in America to disbelieve in the mainstream history of 9/11? I’m just getting glimpses from the new world via the internet and have no ear to the ground there

I'm not sure what the original commenter was talking about, but no, it's not. There is vast agreement in the US about what happened.

Not as vast as you think [1]. Also as of late it appears the victims don’t want their president there in their 20th reunion for similar reasons.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_con...

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#134

Post by UncleMeat »

XorNot wrote: post #45
jandrese wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, PGP's weakness is that the Web of Trust is an unworkable solution for the general population for key exchange. It works fine for a you and your circle of crypto nerds, but as a general solution it's impossible. IMHO this is a case where perfect was the enemy of good. Many possible solutions were rejected because there was a possibility that someone could MITM your first contact, even though in the real world this…

Web of Trust is a perfectly fine system but UI-wise a total disaster. There's also the reality that what most people need most of the time is a web of trust that includes government agencies, banks and other major institutions. For the vast majority of useful communications for users, your web of trust ideally goes You -> Government ID Agency fine - that's what people actually need. People get scammed or deceived by…

Web of Trust mixes two kinds of trust.

If my mom gives me her public key, I trust that it is her public key. If my mom signs some other person's public key - I really don't know how much I trust that. Trusting that somebody is who they say they are is not the same as trusting them to properly vouch for another person.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#135

Post by danielschonfeld »

keewee7 wrote: post #107
danielschonfeld wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am with you. But I think I know what it is, you touched on it and almost had it. It was indeed peace, we almost had it, world peace - feeling utopian and all loving in the 90s. Then came 9/11. It’s the single point in history where just about everything to do with American society can be defined to be before and after. Doesn’t matter what you think about the event and it’s authenticity as described, the fact of the…

>Then came 9/11 The rising pessimism and negativity since 2008/09 is a global phenomenon. I think it's wrong and very US-centric to attribute that to 9/11. The 2008 financial crisis and the rise of social media has probably more to do with the rise of millennial pessimism and negativity.

I agree with the poster below me.

While the financial crisis might be more of a root of all problems in Millenial and generations that followed minds it’s not where it all started (I am a Millenial)

Also don’t forget 2008 was the year of the iPhone. The year we started inching towards being an always on society.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#136

Post by fakesheriff »

panta wrote: post #114
keewee7 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then came 9/11 The rising pessimism and negativity since 2008/09 is a global phenomenon. I think it's wrong and very US-centric to attribute that to 9/11. The 2008 financial crisis and the rise of social media has probably more to do with the rise of millennial pessimism and negativity.

We had worse crises before that didn’t change societies so deeply. With 9/11 we started renouncing to the concept of freedom that we gained with illuminism and the French revolution. Then we started putting “safety” before everything else.

> Then we started putting “safety” before everything else.

One caveat.

It's safety first, unless they decide to go to war to ensure continued access to cheap commodities (Iraq) or to play weird sociopath power games (Vietnam).

It's going to be kind of rich when they ask people from podunk towns in "flyover country" to go fight their next war, after years of ridiculing them and decimating their local economies.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#137

Post by anyonecancode »

uncomputation wrote: post #27

There’s something… different about how people (techie people are most of my sample) would write before the 00’s. I’m not sure if it has to do with the medium, or the constraints of the time, but reading it always fills me with something I can best describe as peace/nostalgia. The belief that technology honestly can change the world for the better and that the most influential people driving it have good motives inste…

I agree with you, but my hypothesis is straightforward -- it's the money. The internet in particular, but tech more broadly, is now a mainstream industry, generating and attracting a lot of money. In the US, even a poorly paid SWE, for instance, is almost certainly making well above the median income. Decently paid SWEs make a lot more, and well paid SWES... And of course those who actually employ well paid SWEs and are only paying their developers the least they can get away with, while still paying them a lot, are obviously raking it in.

There's good and bad in this, but it does clearly change things. When there's that much money on the line, ironically the stakes become higher and there's less genuine creativity and risk taking. The flip side is of course true -- too little money is a problem (I mean, I'm not about to trade my SWE gig for working in an Amazon warehouse as a means of spurring personal creativity), but given enough money past a certain baseline, things do change. There's a sweet spot at "enough money that people can feel free to be creative and take risks" and "so much money people are scared to take too many risks".

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#138

Post by easton »

jandrese wrote: post #42
breput wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PGP's biggest weakness was that it was too early. There was no normal user accessible software available. No regular person was going to establish the web of trust or use command line utilities. So now we have easy, strong encryption and the keys are controlled by...someone. Definitely not the user, though. Funny story - even Phil Zimmerman can't use PGP: https://twitter.com/josephbonneau/status/638772283713060864 So…

No, PGP's weakness is that the Web of Trust is an unworkable solution for the general population for key exchange. It works fine for a you and your circle of crypto nerds, but as a general solution it's impossible. IMHO this is a case where perfect was the enemy of good. Many possible solutions were rejected because there was a possibility that someone could MITM your first contact, even though in the real world this…

Notably, in recent hosted versions of Exchange that has been resolved since they can use Azure AD to authenticate across tenants, and if you don’t have Office 365 you can make a temp account in their tenant when you click on the link to see the email. It works fine (unless you’re still on-prem for email).

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#139

Post by artursapek »

Gradient-Ascent wrote: post #131
cowmix wrote: post #7

I have sooooo many lost emails due to lost pgp configurations. Encrypted blobs in my mail spools.

Today's analogy is bitcoin... Will all Bitcoin just be lost one day, because all keys get lost? I am aware that "there are solutions", but are they (really) enough? Isn't "breaking in" required at some point? Another endgame for Bitcoin is that all Bitcoin are stolen through the one tool which helps with ("unbreakable") encryption: Hacking / social engineering. Besides that we hab substantial discussions about why PG…

More and more Bitcoin is going to be held by custodians, like crypto exchanges, retail trading apps like Robinhood, and even traditional banks. Handling your own Bitcoin keys will end up being a niche cypherpunk thing, like using command-line PGP. It's actually a perfect analogy, because most popular "E2EE" chat apps are also custodial with your keys.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#140

Post by artursapek »

keewee7 wrote: post #107
danielschonfeld wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am with you. But I think I know what it is, you touched on it and almost had it. It was indeed peace, we almost had it, world peace - feeling utopian and all loving in the 90s. Then came 9/11. It’s the single point in history where just about everything to do with American society can be defined to be before and after. Doesn’t matter what you think about the event and it’s authenticity as described, the fact of the…

>Then came 9/11 The rising pessimism and negativity since 2008/09 is a global phenomenon. I think it's wrong and very US-centric to attribute that to 9/11. The 2008 financial crisis and the rise of social media has probably more to do with the rise of millennial pessimism and negativity.

I agree, I think the difference is that in 1999 when he wrote that piece, there wasn't a clear audience in front of him that could react immediately. Nowadays, everything that gets written is immediately posted into social networks to be given instant gratification.
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