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| In my opinion the whole open source movement is | way too much focused on features and not on | easy functionality. Even if there was an open-source vers
by pyre 14y ago
| In my opinion the whole open source movement is
| way too much focused on features and not on
| easy functionality.
Even if there was an open-source version of Gmail, it would still mostly be a centralized solution. Even if there were millions of email providers running this OSS Gmail, the government would just knock on their door, point to (e.g.) the PATRIOT Act, and surveillance would begin. All it would do is remove the idea of "one stop shopping," but the government would still get access. It would just be slightly more work.
| Otherwise PGP emails would have become
| a universally adopted standard.
That's a poor example, because security software is the one place where you do want attention to technical detail over user interface. If the UI to PGP was good, but any script kiddie could break the encryption, then what would be the point?
- krichman 14y agoI think it's more like, look at openssl, the crypto Swiss army knife. How is a regular person going to use that? But if someone did just asymmetrical key encryption with one algorithm and then spent time engineering it so that a normal person could use it without taking Dan Boneh's Coursera class, there might be more people using PGP.
- maigret 14y ago| Even if there were millions of email providers running this OSS Gmail, the government would just knock on their door, point to (e.g.) the PATRIOT Act, and surveillance would begin. Having some servers abroad would make that much more complicated.