Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

silentcircle.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 217 posts

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

#61

Post by tg3 »

chadillac83 wrote: post #58
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 think the "Dark" in "Dark Mail Alliance" is meant more in the sense that it's "off the grid" of NSA spying capabilities, not that it's meant to be used for nefarious purposes.

I would agree, but the word means what people think that it means, and the most likely interpretation will be "nefarious purposes". Especially when the powers that be will likely oppose this, the more braindead you can make your image, the better.

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

#63

Post by chris_mahan »

chadillac83 wrote: post #58
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 think the "Dark" in "Dark Mail Alliance" is meant more in the sense that it's "off the grid" of NSA spying capabilities, not that it's meant to be used for nefarious purposes.

Plus it's impossible to be sure that whatever you're doing electronically is not being spied on by the NSA.

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

#64

Post by twelvechairs »

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.

why not just 'private mail'. tell them what it is on the tin

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

#65

Post by Xylakant »

redblacktree wrote: post #30
conroy wrote: 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.

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 collected data of one german politician (sorry, german only but fairly easy to understand) http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten

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

#66

Post by alextingle »

erikb wrote: post #16

I am definitely no security expert, but from my feeling it seems as if unsecure protocol + secure messaging layer is much more successful in practical applications than purely secure protocols. Therefore my believe would be that improving existing secure messaging layers would help the world much more than creating another secure protocol which nobody will use because it would require to replace the whole infrastruct…

The problem with e-mail is that gathering the meta-data is almost as valuable as looking inside at the message contents. Secure messaging layers aren't going to help you there - unless everyone starts using something like Tor.

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

#67

Post by smoorman1024 »

fulafel wrote: post #40
chiph wrote: post #28

Not sure I understand. Both SilentCircle and Lavabit have ceased offering their services. Are they now combined in an advocacy group to design a new email protocol and get it adopted by the IETF?

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?

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

#69

Post by devx »

chadillac83 wrote: post #58
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 think the "Dark" in "Dark Mail Alliance" is meant more in the sense that it's "off the grid" of NSA spying capabilities, not that it's meant to be used for nefarious purposes.

I'm sure their intention was not to be used for nefarious purposes, but that doesn't mean NSA/FBI/Congress won't try to portray it as such.

But anyway, I'm starting to get the feeling this issue is taking too much attention from the protocol itself, which is the big news here. If they want to change it, great, if not that's fine, too. They just need to make sure the protocol is great, and can get other big e-mail providers to support it, or at least a ton of smaller ones.

Post reply on HN