@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, ...

🤷

@MindOfJoe @kinetix I quite agree with this - adoption only matters if you need a lot of people to exploit and skim off money, or to commercial software that costs money. It's nice that Signal seems to be currently trustworthy, but E2E is also just that right now: nice to have.

Now, if it becomes crucial, then only the people to whom it becomes crucial need to think about this and use PGP/GPG, and they have no need to care whether anyone besides their group is using it.

In the final analysis, it never actually mattered whether Apple capitulated or not, because most their users are from the first paragraph, they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear, as they say. If you're already doing shit you need to hide from the gov, you deserve to get caught if you trust a corp.

@kinetix @MindOfJoe I absolutely agree that we have collectively been, not just ignoring crucial security and privacy issues, but actively working against our better interests in every respect. The desire to be on the yacht instead of on the polluted shore is a powerful motivator.

But I still think that adoption is a neutral factor, overall, and I think if there were suddenly a mass movement of people learning to use something more handcrafted like this, that would be the final impetus for all oppressive govs to outlaw non-backdoored encryption.

I also think the outlawing of it is inevitable, but the longer it flies under the radar, the longer those who really and truly need it will be able to quietly use it.

@jpaskaruk @MindOfJoe I don't know that I'd agree with that... mostly because governments are already trying to wreck or outlaw encryption here and there. I feel like that's a lost battle for them, for the most part - in that I don't think it's flown under the radar at all for them.

@kinetix @MindOfJoe Ahh, but why don't they seem to care, when techbros are generally refusing to hand over the info?

Answer: Because they can just buy it from the data brokers. They don't need to break encryption as long as people are using big tech, because the phone collects all the important stuff, and it's available at bargain basement prices, compared to the political capital of doing the legal necessaries.

If we form a resistance movement and stop using anything from SV, they will very quickly do the formalities.

@jpaskaruk @MindOfJoe I think we should test that theory!