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>I wonder what kinds of mails like these they've received in the past to prompt this disclaimer? I believe he is being a bit tongue-in-cheek. Moxie has previou

by sigmar 11y ago

>I wonder what kinds of mails like these they've received in the past to prompt this disclaimer? I believe he is being a bit tongue-in-cheek. Moxie has previously mentioned his dislike of the typical emails he gets from the type of people that use GPG (http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/gpg-and-me/)

scintill76 11y ago
And a more recent statement: "Was reflecting on how the quality of my email inbox had become less awful lately, then remembered I added a rule to drop pgp encrypted mail." https://twitter.com/moxie/status/709492776635752448 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/709492776635752448
- Freak_NL 11y ago
  Reading that, and the blog post linked to by sigmar, his stance comes across as rather belligerent; perhaps even childish. I would expect that if you wanted to communicate with someone who is privacy-conscious, and provides a public e-mail address linked to a GPG-identity, encrypting and signing your message to him or her is only civil and is to be expected. I understand Moxie's criticism of existing crypto-tools, GnuPG in particular, and he makes some valid points, but dismissing anyone who mails you and uses GPG (because you have published your GPG public key) as nutjobs seems overly antagonistic. That to me seems at odds with the greater goal of facilitating easily attainable privacy and digital freedom for all.
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  It sounds like he's talking about encrypted mail from people he doesn't know. I can't speak for others, but the proportion of email I get from strangers that ranks high on a content-quality scale is approximately zero. Encryption status, encoding and MIME types don't seem to have much to do with it.
tP5n 11y ago
Dislike is an understatement, I believe he's being disingenuous in that blog post. I don't want to speculate on his motives, your guess is as good as mine. Even though GPG has been around for almost 20 years, there are only ~50,000 keys in the “strong set,” and less than 4 million keys have ever been published to the SKS keyserver pool ever. By today’s standards, that’s a shockingly small user base for a month of activity, much less 20 years. Published keys are not a representative for gpgs userbase, a great amount of 'powerusers' (whatever you want to call those who need encrypted messaging to work) will not publish their keys for numerous reasons, only some of them technical. Cryptopartys started like this and political activists still do this: you exchange keys in person, you'd never ever publish them on the net, you would not be part of moxie's 'shockingly small user base'.

by sigmar 11y ago

scintill76 11y ago

And a more recent statement: "Was reflecting on how the quality of my email inbox had become less awful lately, then remembered I added a rule to drop pgp encrypted mail." https://twitter.com/moxie/status/709492776635752448 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/709492776635752448

Freak_NL 11y ago
Reading that, and the blog post linked to by sigmar, his stance comes across as rather belligerent; perhaps even childish. I would expect that if you wanted to communicate with someone who is privacy-conscious, and provides a public e-mail address linked to a GPG-identity, encrypting and signing your message to him or her is only civil and is to be expected. I understand Moxie's criticism of existing crypto-tools, GnuPG in particular, and he makes some valid points, but dismissing anyone who mails you and uses GPG (because you have published your GPG public key) as nutjobs seems overly antagonistic. That to me seems at odds with the greater goal of facilitating easily attainable privacy and digital freedom for all.
throwaway7767 11y ago
It sounds like he's talking about encrypted mail from people he doesn't know. I can't speak for others, but the proportion of email I get from strangers that ranks high on a content-quality scale is approximately zero. Encryption status, encoding and MIME types don't seem to have much to do with it.

tP5n 11y ago

Dislike is an understatement, I believe he's being disingenuous in that blog post. I don't want to speculate on his motives, your guess is as good as mine. Even though GPG has been around for almost 20 years, there are only ~50,000 keys in the “strong set,” and less than 4 million keys have ever been published to the SKS keyserver pool ever. By today’s standards, that’s a shockingly small user base for a month of activity, much less 20 years. Published keys are not a representative for gpgs userbase, a great amount of 'powerusers' (whatever you want to call those who need encrypted messaging to work) will not publish their keys for numerous reasons, only some of them technical. Cryptopartys started like this and political activists still do this: you exchange keys in person, you'd never ever publish them on the net, you would not be part of moxie's 'shockingly small user base'.