14 ms·

Y'know, you can have all the valid points in the world and still come on a _bit_ too strong. I get the point the author is making re: LARPing, but this kind of

Y'know, you can have all the valid points in the world and still come on a _bit_ too strong. I get the point the author is making re: LARPing, but this kind of attitude and tone is bordering (or, bluntly: is) condescending to anyone who doesn't know as much as you. It's a huge shame because the general discussions surrounding privacy/security are absolutely rampant with paranoid bullshit, and stuff like this just doesn't help. The people you consider to be LARPing might honestly just be new to the idea of security/privacy/encryption/(insert your label here) and would be better served by a tone where you're not talking down to them, especially if you're an established authority. Personally speaking, I use encrypted email for my personal account - but I'm under no big illusions about it, and at this point it's partly out of laziness as I find moving email providers to be a useless exercise in wasting time. My original use case was my wife and I wanting to send documents back and forth easily, have it encrypted and retained somewhere that's (relatively) easily searchable, and isn't one of the bigger email services. Email is a workflow that goes back decades, and I'm not particularly interested in changing that mental mapping in my brain (a feeling I suspect many would echo). It's email. It's not encrypted or 100% private if I email my buddy who's using Gmail/etc. It does jack all for my bills, newsletters, and so on. I'm not worried about the metadata not being encrypted because if I needed that level of security, I'd use Signal or some other tool. You're probably right that it can't be "fixed", but there's also nothing wrong with attempting marginal improvements until an eventual replacement comes along. It remains a convenient "it just fucking works" and until something replaces that, and interoperates with the rest of the way the world actually works, it's probably not changing. My 2c, at least.

tptacek 7y ago
We are condescending† somewhat deliberately. It's time to start shaking proponents of encrypted mail by the shoulders. We need analyses that spell out the concerns starkly and don't equivocate, because the issues themselves are stark, and a nuanced discussion (if one exists) cannot be effectively communicated to ordinary nonspecialist users. In a world where encrypted email was popular and no reasonable alternatives existed, the equation would be different. But modern secure messengers have lapped PGP and S/MIME a practically uncountable number of times. I don't know what large power of ten the multiple is of messages protected by Signal Protocol compared to PGP, but I do know that it's large. The risk is not that people will naturally gravitate towards encrypted email (which is in practice a nightmare to use), but that well-meaning but poorly-informed technologists will try to talk them into doing that and adding encrypted email to the basket of tools ordinary people use. That can't be allowed to happen. I also want the analysis to be somewhat bracing for technologists. I'm not making fun of PGP users when I say they're LARPing. I'm describing reality directly and meaningfully. I don't think proponents of encrypted email have really thought through why they're using PGP and S/MIME, and why they're not terrified of metadata collection and the occasional plaintext reply. Their risk profile is not the risk profile of the public at large; when you're LARPing, it doesn't matter if you get hit on the head with the sword. † Not the term I would choose, but let's stipulate.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  I think a fairer comparison than LARP is martial arts training. As you say it mostly doesn't matter if you get on the head, but people think they are preparing for a situation where it will matter. And in most cases they are wrong.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    If that's what encrypted email was, I'd agree, but it is not; it is more akin to taking a children's martial arts class for a month and then physically resisting an armed mugger.
    - NateEag 7y ago
      You may be missing that most martial arts people practice are for exercise and social display, not for self-defense or killing. If it has katas/forms, if certain moves are proscribed during sparring, or if your teachers have not told you the catch-22 about there being no morally acceptable way to practice genuine kill shots even though they're all that really matters, then you are not preparing for self-defense in a life-and-death struggle. So, martial arts may be the appropriate metaphor. Disclaimer: My knowledge here is limited to a few years of kung fu as a kid, a lot of armchair research in the past five years, and an old friend who used to place at multi-state competitions. I'm not an expert so I could be off here.
    - dTal 7y ago
      That analogy would work if: 1) the mugger was going to attack you anyway, and does so every day 2) the "martial arts" was a vicious form of Krav Maga taught to CIA operatives, that was a state secret until a few decades ago Seems like an unqualified win to me.
- Klonoar 7y ago
  > ...but that well-meaning but poorly-informed technologists will try to talk them into doing it and added encrypted email to the basket of tools ordinary people use. That can't be allowed to happen. This is already happening, which is why I disagree with your messaging: I don't think the way you attack it will fix it, because the people this post will resonate with already (generally) agree with you. But I digress... I view encrypted email as services like PM/Posteo/whatever paranoia induced flavor of the week fits here. I don't know anybody who tries to use encrypted email straight up - I think the era of running your own mailbox is gone so I don't particularly count it for anything. If you do it yourself, it's a shitshow; if you're on one of those services it "just works". You can shake the shoulders all you want, but people use email, and people look for the easy win. "Encrypted email" is easier for the average person to latch on to than the UI/UX most secure tooling has right now (a problem even you've noted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897173). It's very telling that nothing has dethroned it yet. Given that, I welcome these marginal improvements while something better is built. These things shouldn't be around in ten years, they're bridges. Email simply has an annoyingly odd usability bar to clear, and nothing is really close to that right now. If I had to make a dumb analogy, it's like Objective-C and Swift: it's very, very clear that Swift is the future; inherent advantages abound, and much more difficult to shoot yourself in the foot with... but in lieu of Swift, I'd still sooner write Objective-C over straight C, warts and all.
lallysingh 7y ago
He's right and he's right about things people pride themselves about. PGP considered harmful for being a clusterfuck.
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  Not all of PGP is bad though. PGP is really hard to use but it's still useful for signing, file encryption and authentication. Encrypted email has been outclassed in every way by modern messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Signal but currently PGP is the only good way to sign code.
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    The good parts are just enough to be bait, frankly. Code signing is probably the only use case left for it. Edit: nope a quick Google search finds specialized tools. They can't be harder to use or screw up than PGP, so automatically better.
    - lvh 7y ago
      Yep, see signify/minisign and OpenBSD as an example of it being used in practice.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    It is good for literally none of those things. See the link in the post.
  - zelphirkalt 7y ago
    Yeah surely not by Whatsapp / Facebook. It's proprietary code afaik and the possibility of third key exists for that reason. It's not trustworthy at all, especially considering the company owning it, who also told users in the past, that the data of WA and FB would never be merged or used together. WA is laughable in the context.
hermitdev 7y ago
Honest question: What is LARPing in this context? Live action role playing doesn't seem to fit the context...
- aidenn0 7y ago
  It is live action role playing. The implication is that they are just pretending to care about privacy by going through motions that are only vaguely related to actual privacy.
  - gentleman11 7y ago
    As somebody who is friends with some LARPers, I find the usage here to be a little rude. No (sane) larper tries to convince anyone that their world is real, nor do they believe it is real, which is the parallel being drawn
    - yori 7y ago
      Yes, I didn't get the usage of the term "LARP" in this context too. It comes off as rude and condescending to both LARPers and email users. I am not sure the term fits appropriately in this context. All LARPers are aware that they are role playing in a game, not the real world, and they do not pretend otherwise.
      - tptacek 7y ago
        I certainly don't intend any offense to LARPers in general, virtually none of whom use encrypted email. Nor, indeed, email users, among whom I count myself! No, I'm pretty specific about where my criticism is aimed.
      - Freak_NL 7y ago
        To larp as a verb applied to a discussion that is not about actual LARP activities (the primary sense of this word) carries a strong connotation of rudeness. Etymologically it probably emerged in the infamous *chan-culture, and is in active use there in the sense of ‘pretend play’ or ‘on-line role-playing’. It can be used to signal, in a derogatory way, that you feel that the other is spinning a yarn or indulging in a fantasy, without declaring the fictive nature of their comments, in order to provoke responses and bait others into participating. I wouldn't use this word in polite conversation, unless you are actually talking about live action role-playing.
kick 7y ago
Condescension is good in certain cases, especially during public health epidemics. Anti-vaxxers being mocked is good, pointing out that a certain group of people are selling the illusion of faux-privacy in a dangerous way is also good. It's pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes: that they're ridiculous. It may not help someone already too deep to dig themselves out, but it will probably stop at least a few people from getting on the wagon at all; no one wants to look like a fool.
- iso-8859-1 7y ago
  It's interesting that you bring up the emperor's clothes, because shaming people for showing their body is not something that people make convincing arguments for. Observe how countries with advanced civil rights such as Germany have more nudist beaches. Privacy is a human right, but I think it is a step too far once you ridicule people just because they don't value it as much as you do. There is nothing wrong with being "ridiculous". Who are you to judge who counts as a fool?
  - orestarod 7y ago
    Everyone judges everyone, and to judge who is a fool is also something everyone does, a personal judgement that might be shared with the rest. "Who are you to judge" is the wrong phrase. "Who are you for your judgement to be taken into consideration by me" is the real meaning.
  - kick 7y ago
    Do you not know the story The Emperor's New Clothes? It's a classic where I'm from. From the Wikipedia page: "The Emperor's New Clothes" (Danish: Kejserens nye klæder) is a short tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent – while in reality, they make no clothes at all, making everyone believe the clothes are invisible to them. When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new "clothes", no one dares to say that they do not see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as stupid. Finally a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" The tale has been translated into over 100 languages.[1] The point isn't...whatever you're talking about, it's that the people do value it a lot, they're just shooting themselves in the foot.
kcdev 7y ago
We likely need a better globally supported standard. I think Gmail is onto something with the "confidential" send setting, but I don't like that it's tied only to Google. For my services that use automated emails, I only send plaintext emails and use shortlinks. No sense in wasting time trying to make an email look good on every provider and hope it's encrypted or worry about which ones it will be blocked from because they don't support encrypted. It should be used as a notification mechanism nowadays. But we do need a better universal platform - maybe that's webpages...
- riedel 7y ago
  Exactly this is the key point. This why email is still so important because it doesn't lock you into ecosystems. It comes from a time when decentralization was still valued in the internet. I think only regulatory action could be a way out of the messenger mess (which potentially leak even more metadata). I don't want to be forced into closed telecom ecosystems by my (real life) social network. The problem with potential message routing regulation will be that governments mandate weak crypto for law enforcement. So I guess email is a dinosaur worth preserving. Even with security after design. delta.chat comes close to an deal world IMHO if you ignore the problem with metadata. Maybe it could integrate sth like mixes to make email a bit harder to monitor.
- aSplash0fDerp 7y ago
  If we go down the list of compromised protocols, hardware and firmwares/applications in use online (not including the people), how long before those in the know conclude that the Internet is an untrusted medium for secure communications? I don't think we'll see homing pigeons make a comeback, but using autonomous vehicle couriers for analog/digital communications (drones, but more likely sdc's) and sacrificing the convenience of real-time communications for 100% integrity is not beyond the scope of reason or wants. If a message (or payload) is intercepted, it's physically impeded and much easier to track/detect. The number of layers of security to lockdown or destroy the contents is also at the sender/receivers discretion. Depending on how cumbersome they choose to make 8k videos, VR worlds and/or new fangled AI/ML datasets for personal/business use, we're limited to 6720 GB transfers per day over 1GB lines, so data outgrowing the Internets transfer speeds is a plausible scenario that may facilitate a use case for local and long-haul direct autonomous data couriers that will blend in with the other autonomous delivery/pickup traffic.

tptacek 7y ago

We are condescending† somewhat deliberately. It's time to start shaking proponents of encrypted mail by the shoulders. We need analyses that spell out the concerns starkly and don't equivocate, because the issues themselves are stark, and a nuanced discussion (if one exists) cannot be effectively communicated to ordinary nonspecialist users. In a world where encrypted email was popular and no reasonable alternatives existed, the equation would be different. But modern secure messengers have lapped PGP and S/MIME a practically uncountable number of times. I don't know what large power of ten the multiple is of messages protected by Signal Protocol compared to PGP, but I do know that it's large. The risk is not that people will naturally gravitate towards encrypted email (which is in practice a nightmare to use), but that well-meaning but poorly-informed technologists will try to talk them into doing that and adding encrypted email to the basket of tools ordinary people use. That can't be allowed to happen. I also want the analysis to be somewhat bracing for technologists. I'm not making fun of PGP users when I say they're LARPing. I'm describing reality directly and meaningfully. I don't think proponents of encrypted email have really thought through why they're using PGP and S/MIME, and why they're not terrified of metadata collection and the occasional plaintext reply. Their risk profile is not the risk profile of the public at large; when you're LARPing, it doesn't matter if you get hit on the head with the sword. † Not the term I would choose, but let's stipulate.

im3w1l 7y ago
I think a fairer comparison than LARP is martial arts training. As you say it mostly doesn't matter if you get on the head, but people think they are preparing for a situation where it will matter. And in most cases they are wrong.
- tptacek 7y ago
  If that's what encrypted email was, I'd agree, but it is not; it is more akin to taking a children's martial arts class for a month and then physically resisting an armed mugger.
  - NateEag 7y ago
    You may be missing that most martial arts people practice are for exercise and social display, not for self-defense or killing. If it has katas/forms, if certain moves are proscribed during sparring, or if your teachers have not told you the catch-22 about there being no morally acceptable way to practice genuine kill shots even though they're all that really matters, then you are not preparing for self-defense in a life-and-death struggle. So, martial arts may be the appropriate metaphor. Disclaimer: My knowledge here is limited to a few years of kung fu as a kid, a lot of armchair research in the past five years, and an old friend who used to place at multi-state competitions. I'm not an expert so I could be off here.
  - dTal 7y ago
    That analogy would work if: 1) the mugger was going to attack you anyway, and does so every day 2) the "martial arts" was a vicious form of Krav Maga taught to CIA operatives, that was a state secret until a few decades ago Seems like an unqualified win to me.
Klonoar 7y ago
> ...but that well-meaning but poorly-informed technologists will try to talk them into doing it and added encrypted email to the basket of tools ordinary people use. That can't be allowed to happen. This is already happening, which is why I disagree with your messaging: I don't think the way you attack it will fix it, because the people this post will resonate with already (generally) agree with you. But I digress... I view encrypted email as services like PM/Posteo/whatever paranoia induced flavor of the week fits here. I don't know anybody who tries to use encrypted email straight up - I think the era of running your own mailbox is gone so I don't particularly count it for anything. If you do it yourself, it's a shitshow; if you're on one of those services it "just works". You can shake the shoulders all you want, but people use email, and people look for the easy win. "Encrypted email" is easier for the average person to latch on to than the UI/UX most secure tooling has right now (a problem even you've noted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897173). It's very telling that nothing has dethroned it yet. Given that, I welcome these marginal improvements while something better is built. These things shouldn't be around in ten years, they're bridges. Email simply has an annoyingly odd usability bar to clear, and nothing is really close to that right now. If I had to make a dumb analogy, it's like Objective-C and Swift: it's very, very clear that Swift is the future; inherent advantages abound, and much more difficult to shoot yourself in the foot with... but in lieu of Swift, I'd still sooner write Objective-C over straight C, warts and all.

lallysingh 7y ago

He's right and he's right about things people pride themselves about. PGP considered harmful for being a clusterfuck.

matheusmoreira 7y ago
Not all of PGP is bad though. PGP is really hard to use but it's still useful for signing, file encryption and authentication. Encrypted email has been outclassed in every way by modern messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Signal but currently PGP is the only good way to sign code.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  The good parts are just enough to be bait, frankly. Code signing is probably the only use case left for it. Edit: nope a quick Google search finds specialized tools. They can't be harder to use or screw up than PGP, so automatically better.
  - lvh 7y ago
    Yep, see signify/minisign and OpenBSD as an example of it being used in practice.
- tptacek 7y ago
  It is good for literally none of those things. See the link in the post.
- zelphirkalt 7y ago
  Yeah surely not by Whatsapp / Facebook. It's proprietary code afaik and the possibility of third key exists for that reason. It's not trustworthy at all, especially considering the company owning it, who also told users in the past, that the data of WA and FB would never be merged or used together. WA is laughable in the context.

hermitdev 7y ago

Honest question: What is LARPing in this context? Live action role playing doesn't seem to fit the context...

aidenn0 7y ago
It is live action role playing. The implication is that they are just pretending to care about privacy by going through motions that are only vaguely related to actual privacy.
- gentleman11 7y ago
  As somebody who is friends with some LARPers, I find the usage here to be a little rude. No (sane) larper tries to convince anyone that their world is real, nor do they believe it is real, which is the parallel being drawn
  - yori 7y ago
    Yes, I didn't get the usage of the term "LARP" in this context too. It comes off as rude and condescending to both LARPers and email users. I am not sure the term fits appropriately in this context. All LARPers are aware that they are role playing in a game, not the real world, and they do not pretend otherwise.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      I certainly don't intend any offense to LARPers in general, virtually none of whom use encrypted email. Nor, indeed, email users, among whom I count myself! No, I'm pretty specific about where my criticism is aimed.
    - Freak_NL 7y ago
      To larp as a verb applied to a discussion that is not about actual LARP activities (the primary sense of this word) carries a strong connotation of rudeness. Etymologically it probably emerged in the infamous *chan-culture, and is in active use there in the sense of ‘pretend play’ or ‘on-line role-playing’. It can be used to signal, in a derogatory way, that you feel that the other is spinning a yarn or indulging in a fantasy, without declaring the fictive nature of their comments, in order to provoke responses and bait others into participating. I wouldn't use this word in polite conversation, unless you are actually talking about live action role-playing.

kick 7y ago

Condescension is good in certain cases, especially during public health epidemics. Anti-vaxxers being mocked is good, pointing out that a certain group of people are selling the illusion of faux-privacy in a dangerous way is also good. It's pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes: that they're ridiculous. It may not help someone already too deep to dig themselves out, but it will probably stop at least a few people from getting on the wagon at all; no one wants to look like a fool.

iso-8859-1 7y ago
It's interesting that you bring up the emperor's clothes, because shaming people for showing their body is not something that people make convincing arguments for. Observe how countries with advanced civil rights such as Germany have more nudist beaches. Privacy is a human right, but I think it is a step too far once you ridicule people just because they don't value it as much as you do. There is nothing wrong with being "ridiculous". Who are you to judge who counts as a fool?
- orestarod 7y ago
  Everyone judges everyone, and to judge who is a fool is also something everyone does, a personal judgement that might be shared with the rest. "Who are you to judge" is the wrong phrase. "Who are you for your judgement to be taken into consideration by me" is the real meaning.
- kick 7y ago
  Do you not know the story The Emperor's New Clothes? It's a classic where I'm from. From the Wikipedia page: "The Emperor's New Clothes" (Danish: Kejserens nye klæder) is a short tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent – while in reality, they make no clothes at all, making everyone believe the clothes are invisible to them. When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new "clothes", no one dares to say that they do not see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as stupid. Finally a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" The tale has been translated into over 100 languages.[1] The point isn't...whatever you're talking about, it's that the people do value it a lot, they're just shooting themselves in the foot.

kcdev 7y ago

We likely need a better globally supported standard. I think Gmail is onto something with the "confidential" send setting, but I don't like that it's tied only to Google. For my services that use automated emails, I only send plaintext emails and use shortlinks. No sense in wasting time trying to make an email look good on every provider and hope it's encrypted or worry about which ones it will be blocked from because they don't support encrypted. It should be used as a notification mechanism nowadays. But we do need a better universal platform - maybe that's webpages...

riedel 7y ago
Exactly this is the key point. This why email is still so important because it doesn't lock you into ecosystems. It comes from a time when decentralization was still valued in the internet. I think only regulatory action could be a way out of the messenger mess (which potentially leak even more metadata). I don't want to be forced into closed telecom ecosystems by my (real life) social network. The problem with potential message routing regulation will be that governments mandate weak crypto for law enforcement. So I guess email is a dinosaur worth preserving. Even with security after design. delta.chat comes close to an deal world IMHO if you ignore the problem with metadata. Maybe it could integrate sth like mixes to make email a bit harder to monitor.
aSplash0fDerp 7y ago
If we go down the list of compromised protocols, hardware and firmwares/applications in use online (not including the people), how long before those in the know conclude that the Internet is an untrusted medium for secure communications? I don't think we'll see homing pigeons make a comeback, but using autonomous vehicle couriers for analog/digital communications (drones, but more likely sdc's) and sacrificing the convenience of real-time communications for 100% integrity is not beyond the scope of reason or wants. If a message (or payload) is intercepted, it's physically impeded and much easier to track/detect. The number of layers of security to lockdown or destroy the contents is also at the sender/receivers discretion. Depending on how cumbersome they choose to make 8k videos, VR worlds and/or new fangled AI/ML datasets for personal/business use, we're limited to 6720 GB transfers per day over 1GB lines, so data outgrowing the Internets transfer speeds is a plausible scenario that may facilitate a use case for local and long-haul direct autonomous data couriers that will blend in with the other autonomous delivery/pickup traffic.