@MindOfJoe @jpaskaruk I haven't been following, but it seems like autocrypt could be helping with adoption, but... in just a little bit of playing around it looks like support is ... inconsistent amongst clients so far?
@kinetix @jpaskaruk
This adoption business feels like a red herring. If one person wants to protect his or her files, one person adopts it. If two people want to communicate, two people can adopt it.
GnuPG is a free and open source implementation of the standard for over 25+ years -- a genie out of the bottle, available on pretty much every platform. There's no shortage of documentation, implementations, or people who will help.
While things like instant messengers and email /can/ integrate it, it's not required to use it. You can encrypt a message and copy & paste it into your messenger or attach it as an email. It's independence is precisely why it's powerful. Anything that wraps its implementation and integrates it into a communications path is inherently a risk / vulnerability in that it can observe or use your private keys on your behalf. That requires more layers of trust.
Maybe it's like the ham radio stuff: We don't need everyone to join, but if we had one person on each block or neighborhood, ...
🤷
This adoption business feels like a red herring. If one person wants to protect his or her files, one person adopts it. If two people want to communicate, two people can adopt it.
GnuPG is a free and open source implementation of the standard for over 25+ years -- a genie out of the bottle, available on pretty much every platform. There's no shortage of documentation, implementations, or people who will help.
While things like instant messengers and email /can/ integrate it, it's not required to use it. You can encrypt a message and copy & paste it into your messenger or attach it as an email. It's independence is precisely why it's powerful. Anything that wraps its implementation and integrates it into a communications path is inherently a risk / vulnerability in that it can observe or use your private keys on your behalf. That requires more layers of trust.
Maybe it's like the ham radio stuff: We don't need everyone to join, but if we had one person on each block or neighborhood, ...
🤷
@MindOfJoe @jpaskaruk Haha, except that it's not as simple as your first statement, is it? If two people want to adopt it, chances are the first person who suggested it be used then has to educate the second person, find out what platforms and software they use, and help them go through getting everything going.
That's where more adoption would help, and if trustworthy email clients build in the support appropriately, we should have fairly trustworthy systems.
Of course I'm speaking strictly about E-Mail here. For appropriately technical types, validating pgp signed files and whatnot should be fairly common, I would hope.