> My guess is that PGP went off the track when it tried to get PGP > "integrated" into various platforms and applications. Things were a lot > easier when PGP simply took a text file and did things to it. The > processed text file could be from a text editor or the "clipboard" (on > various platforms) and could then be pasted into or cut out of a mail > app, a word processor, etc. A few extra steps, but the "orthogonality" > principle was upheld: PGP was just another modification of text, a form > of writing. What the user _did_ with the text was up to him and was not > of any concern to PGP qua PGP.
I disagree with you on this. Getting PGP integrated into mailers was/is critical. No one is going to use encrypted mail routinely if he has to cut and paste and switch to other programs. I use GPG all the time with emacs/mailcrypt. It is a matter of a couple of keystrokes and an extra couple of seconds and that's it. It's also perfectly integrated with Kmail. That's how it should be. You do have two excellent points: First, PGP often works poorly with Eudora or similar things. These are Windows difficulties. It's a shame. Those programs should come with it built-in and then it would be easier. Also, this thing of signatures and web of trust especially is really pointless. Those are useful for a few users but for most users they are confusing and annoying. It should be possible to use these programs without those things getting in the way. Unfortunately the guys who designed PGP and GPG have little understanding of these things. GPG is a wonderful program, but the designer is clueless about many things. For instance, he thinks it would lead to security probelems if it were implemented as a library. D'ohhh! > > GET #1 is voice encryption over phone lines. Three years after > > Starium started, and ten years after c'punks started, you still can't > > buy a digital voice encryption device that has trustable crypto in > > it. This is also excusable because it encounters some of the same > > problems that privacy-enhanced payments encounter, namely overcoming > > network effects and dealing with regulators. > > But you can in fact buy such units. I bought one of the earlier Starium > units, as did several other Cypherpunks. 3DES is pretty trustable, from > all indications. There are other units, too. Yes, you have claimed (and I believe you) that a few Staria were available at some point to some people. However, it is not for sale now, and even when it was for sale, it was only available to a few people. I have been waiting for a couple of years to buy one and I have never seen a link on the Starium site that says, "click here to go to a retailer who sells this thing." I have also talked with their sales person there a few times over the past year or so, and she never mentioned that I could buy one. So some units may have gotten out, but it still isn't for sale. > > GET #2 is disk encryption. Yes, it sounds so simple, but it is a > > Great Tabboo, and this time there are no excuses. None. You don't > > need any network effects. Regulators in the US have little they can > > do about it. There are about half a dozen great Open Source OSes to > > work on. And yet there is nothing. > > Disk encryption is built into several of the disk tools packages. Few > use them, this is true. YES!!!! I just read today that disk encryption will be part of the default installation of Mandrake 8.3 There is quite a lot of interest in this feature in the Slashdot discussion. In fact it was the main feature that people were excited about, in addition to KDE 2.2 and XF86 4.2. Hopefully Redhat will look at that and say, "Oh no! We need that feature too!" And then OpenBSD will look at it and say, "Oh no! Linux has an encryption feature that we don't have!" And then finally we will have a secure, stable OS with disk encryption. After years of waiting. OpenBSD has this thing about "crypto everywhere". It should be "crypto everywhere, except on the disk". > * the war on terrorism, 911, crackdowns on money laundering, the > shifting focus to copyright issues (mainly a _legal_ focus, not anything > technological)...all of these things have helped to suppress interest > and willingness to experiment. The war on terrorism and the DMCA together have done a lot to quash willingness to experiment. They really do have a chilling effect. > Will things revive? Hard to say. Maybe it's a time for reflection and > consolidation, for working on projects. C'punks won't revive. More than half the posts are from two morons (ravage and mattd) and there's not a lot of interesting stuff here. Privacy-enhanced digital payments won't happen until some country decides to operate it in bold defiance of the US, which won't be for a long time. Crypto is here to stay though.
