6 ms·
Poor Johnny still won't encrypt
- tomlockwood 11mo agoI thought this title was a reference to this David Bowie/NIN song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT3cERVRoQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT3cERVRoQo
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- erelong 11mo agoIssue 1: Establishing lots of reasons why people should encrypt Issue 2: Making it easy to encrypt Issue 3: Popularizing encryption or getting more people to do it
- FerretFred 11mo agoIssue 3.. most/many governments are taking active steps to discourage this practice or better still (for them), stamp it out completely.
- user205738 11mo agoFor example, you can make it illegal to create ciphers longer than a certain value or not use the magic constants specified in the NSA specification in your algorithm.
- xeonmc 11mo agoIf you want encrypted communication over email, there's DeltaChat.
- rainingmonkey 11mo agoDeltaChat are moving away from "classic email" in favour of the ChatMail protocol. I wish someone would fork DeltaChat so I can keep using it as a client for "classic email".
- 627467 11mo agoTrue, I found out the hard way a couple of months ago as I seem to have lost the ability to recover my previously profile setup from Google workspace email
- lobito25 11mo agoI've been using DC for several years already to communicate with my family and share data between my phone and desktop computer. Also as a todo app. I donate a few $ monthly.
- bradley13 11mo agoIt's weird. Almost all web traffic is now https - even though very little of it is sensitive. Email, on the other hand, is quite often sensitive, and yet...no one cares. Why?
- wmf 11mo agoHTTPS is pervasive because Google encouraged it. Gmail could force S/MIME but they don't care.
- hugo1789 11mo agoI think mandatory S/MIME without user-friendly key management would either be reverted pretty soon or it would kill Gmail.
- wmf 11mo agoGoogle would have to build some kind of Let's Encrypt for S/MIME before they turned on the encouragement.
- ghssds 11mo agowhy did google wanted it?
- ChadNauseam 11mo agoGoogle makes money off search, which requires that users want to visit websites. All websites using HTTP are not secure. Unsecure websites are uninteresting to most users, but most users don't have the know-how to distinguish what sites are using HTTPS and which aren't. So the simplest solution is to get all websits to switch to HTTPS before it becomes a problem
- mmooss 11mo agoAnother possibility is Google is in an industry that makes money by collecting information about users, and by supporting universal HTTPS, they gained a competitive advantage over ISPs and others regarding user data for Google searches and other services.
- laserbeam 11mo agoSomeone needs to design a super dumb and robust system where I can safely store all my keys on all devices I use an account. The fact that whatsapp, signal and other platforms tend to have a primary device for keys is bonkers to me. A primary device that can randomly die, get stolen or fall in a lake. I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I have to be extra diligent about this these days. I don’t even want to think about pgp when I have to manually take care of this problem. Not because of my own skills, but because I could never make it reliable for my family and friends on their side.
- wmf 11mo agoApple/Google passkeys.
- throwaway82931 11mo agoIndeed, passkeys would seem to represent a step forward from single-device to single-account.
- lazide 11mo agoPasskeys are often stored/locked per device?
- ho_schi 11mo agoTwo problems: Apple. And Google.
- UltraSane 11mo agoBut then Apple or Google can control your access to any account that uses those passkeys. We need a protocol where I can store the same passkey on multiple cloud providers
- AnonC 11mo ago> I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I have to be extra diligent about this these days. As per Signal’s diehard proponents, losing chat history is a feature, not a bug (I’m not being facetious when saying this, and you can see comments of this kind in Signal related threads here). Edited to add: I don’t agree with that premise and have long disliked losing chat history.
- zkmon 11mo agoMaybe Johnny doesn't have a need to encrypt. The post card in India was just a card with message written on both sides, fully visible in plain text. It's very common that a postman would read out the letter to recipients sometimes, when they deliver it. Privacy is not an universal need. Poor are those people who are forced to hide their message in encrypted formats,
- dghlsakjg 11mo agoNobody expects privacy when they send a postcard. Most people keep their emails behind a password for a reason...
- zkmon 11mo agoThe point is, why not let people to have freedom of not having to encrypt? And why such freedom is considered as poor? This is like forcing everyone to have a smart phone, car, passport, zillions of IDs, internet profiles and calling their shackled life as rich. The other day someone was shocked to see that I don't have FB and instagram accounts. When did people lose their freedom not have social media accounts?
- viraptor 11mo agoBecause if the default is unencrypted, you'll accidentally send secrets in plaintext one day. And if the default is encrypted and works well - why would you ever take time to explicitly disable that? What's the situation where you want to say "just in case someone intercepts this message, I want them to be able to read it"?
- sam_lowry_ 11mo agoEncrypted communication has lots of practical drawbacks. For me email is just fine the way it is. Deliverability could be better and Google/Microsoft duopoly is a problem but that's it. Stop reinventing the wheel.
- pcthrowaway 11mo ago> Proton is a notable exception. Proton doesn't provide public APIs for retrieving the public GPG keys associated with their users' accounts, nor do they provide a way to send encrypted mail to their users' accounts without using their official apps. Ergo, Proton is not really working to further the state of cryptography for email, they're only working to compel users to use their proprietary software (and ultimately their paid services). If services which do automated sending of emails to their subscribers/users have no way to encrypt those emails for its users who are on proton mail, I don't understand how Proton can claim to care about encryption.
- burnt-resistor 11mo agoProton still appears to suffer from Lavabit's pathologies in several ways because it ultimately stores GPG private keys, hasn't had their "zero-access encryption" audited by an independent third-party, it hosts servers in privacy-hostile jurisdictions that can be seized, and they've already handed user data to authorities over 30k times. [0] Proton Mail is a simulacra of privacy as a service that lies to its customers. At present time, the best way to assure privacy is to lease (using cryptocurrency) VPS instances in a neutral, privacy-respecting country and self-host a web-mail stack oneself. There isn't really a practical way around this because powerful nation states are able to demand access to customer data from almost every cloud/VPS provider in their jurisdiction. 0. https://proton.me/legal/transparency https://proton.me/legal/transparency
- pcthrowaway 11mo agoIf you're at the point where your hosting your own mail, you may as well GPG encrypt your own messages (with your locally stored private key), which makes the jurisdiction irrelevant Of course, this still assumes your correspondents will be capable of doing the same.
- e12e 11mo agoEncrypt with your public key, surely?
- sorbusherra 11mo agoI consider e-mails to be digital versions of postcards. Both are obsolete but have some usage scenarios. There is no need to use private communication in obsolete postcard type messaging, so there is no need for encryption. For private communications there are other better(easier) means which people use.
- yardstick 11mo agoI’ve got hundreds of emails from the early 2010s between a couple of coworkers and myself that I can no longer read because they were S/MIME encrypted and I’ve got no idea what happened to my keys or even if my current client supports it anymore. I wish the client stored it decrypted once received.
- mhitza 11mo ago> I wish the client stored it decrypted once received. Me too. I already have my systems with fulldisk encryption, I need the communication to be end encrypted. Email clients (like Thunderbird) keeping emails stored encrypted, just makes it harder for these tools to search, label and automate stuff around content.
- m3047 11mo agoI'm sorry for your loss, but this sounds like an antipattern. Hundreds of emails between co-workers and it was all contemporaneously related to work in progress or cat pictures of your own cats, didn't contain PII or proprietary information of your employer or unaware third parties? And you want it back? From far enough away (that I might as well be in orbit) this seems preferable to an unencrypted drive ending up in somebody's hands for "refurbishment" (cough printers with hard drives). No one is innocent. I refuse to use LE and operate my own CA instead, and as a consequence of scareware browser warnings I publish http: links instead of https: (if anyone cares, you know to add the "s" don't you?). I run my own mailserver which opportunistically encrypts, and at least when it gets to me it's on hardware which I own and somebody needs a search warrant to access.. as opposed to y'all and your gmail accounts. I do have a PGP key, but I don't include it on the first email with every new correspondent because too many times it's been flagged as a "virus" or "malicious". Clearly we live in a world only barely removed from crystals and ouija boards.
- mmooss 11mo ago> Hundreds of emails between co-workers and it was all contemporaneously related to work in progress or cat pictures of your own cats, didn't contain PII or proprietary information of your employer or unaware third parties? You're merely defining away the problem. You have no idea what was in those emails.
- tptacek 11mo agoYeah, at some point people are going to work out that the problem isn't Johnny, it's email. Email is distinctively hostile to secure messaging. No matter what software Johnny uses, "secure" email will always be inferior to alternative options. https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted-email/ https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypte...
- bgwalter 11mo ago"The most popular modern secure messaging tool is Signal" As Mike Waltz had found out. And Snowden used gpg and I haven't heard of a single message of his having been decrypted.
- MrDresden 11mo agoBoth PGP and Signal will leak if you use them incorrectly, so that comparison doesn't really hold up. I say this as someone who uses both.
- akerl_ 11mo agoOne key difference is that Signal intentionally makes design choices to make it harder to use incorrectly, and PGP is comically easy to use incorrectly.
- mmooss 11mo agoPGP email doesn't match Signal security: * PGP doesn't encrypt email metadata, so the attacker gets a record of every senders, receiver, time, date, and subject line, for free, with PGP actually working at its best. * Email usually isn't usable without storing it server-side (for multi-client access), and without being able to search it. That requires your email to be in clear text on the server. That's solved with an on-prem mail server, but not many people have that - very few end users can operate one. * Email endpoints generally aren't secure, so even if you somehow secure your personal mail store, possibly nothing is secure except your draft messages. Every email is sent to or received from other people, so your messages are subject to their security practices.
- hulitu 11mo ago> Poor Johnny still won't encrypt As long as Google, Apple or Microsoft controls your device, all bets are off. You can "encrypt"mails in Outlook but, Microsoft also has your key.
- _dain_ 11mo ago>Auditors obsess over encryption at rest—from laptop FDE to databases’ security theaterish at-rest encryption—and over encryption in transit, usually meaning TLS. Very hard to parse sentence. The monospace font means the em-dash isnt emmy enough, so I couldn't tell it apart from the hyphen on first, second, and third attempt. I wish people would put spaces around it, and to hell with what the style guide says.
- jmclnx 11mo ago>In 2025, it’s pretty much the same. In some respects, it’s worse: Well not quite, if you use mutt, it is easy to encrypt emails with gpg. The setup could be a bit hard for new people, but if they have good reading comprehension it is easy. Thunderbird has its own gpg-like based internal encryption. I really do not like it, I wish they built it on gnupg like the old plugin did. All you need to do is get your key to the people you want to send encrypted email to and you need to get theirs. There are key servers or you can mail the public key to them. To me, if on Cell Phones, all bets are off. I would never use email on Cell Phones.
- mhitza 11mo agoThere is also Mailvelope, a browser plugin, that simplifies PGP encryption across web email clients.
- xyzsparetimexyz 11mo agoIt's email. 90% of the emails I get are marketing spam or GitHub notifications. Nobody I know uses email to chat with friends
- mid-kid 11mo agoOf course not, but unlike chat services, everyone has an email address or phone number, so if I need to reach out to them for something other than a casual chat, e.g. an invitation, a birthday felicitation, or a document that they should review later, email is a method through which I can reach all of them. Similarly, reaching out to companies for support also often happens over email.
- user205738 11mo agoand also recovery keys, or login + password in a message from various forums. Or payment receipts, either 2FA, or archives, documents)
- StellarScience 11mo agoThe US federal government issues its employees smart cards (Common Access Cards) that contain digital certs. Government employees can use these to send and receive S/MIME encrypted emails. That's a couple million users! Our small company has been encrypting all emails by default with S/MIME for 15-20 years. A company can generate its own certs for free from a company root cert, use a provider like Sectigo for $20/year, or get US Government ECA certs for about $100/year. You can read encrypted emails on company-managed mobile devices that have Knox chips to secure access to the certificate. We're careful to back up all our old keys so we can always read old emails. Some drawbacks are: - Email "search" features only see the subjects, not the contents, of encrypted emails. - You can't read encrypted emails via web email. - Few others have S/MIME certs. Most major government contractors seem confused when we ask about encrypting emails with them... Johnny may not encrypt, but every business really can.
- steve1977 11mo ago"To encrypt email in 1998 you’d run GnuPG from a terminal" In 1998, you'd probably run PGP. While GnuPG saw it's first 0.x releases from the end of 1997, 1.0 was only released in 1999 and commercial PGP was still very popular IIRC.