* Dave Crocker wrote: >On 12/31/2013 10:26 AM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: >> What makes the new email system different from other new communication >> media with hundreds of millions of users and why is it necessary for it >> to have those properties? Looking at Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook, Bit- >> Torrent, and many others, it seems simple to achieve mass adoption. > >Wow. > >Please consider that things always look easy if one only studies successes.
My bicycle is protected by a combination lock. Breaking it without any special equipment is simple, you just try different combinations until it opens. But it is not easy because there are so many combinations to try and you have limited time until you get exhausted or caught. >In the case of new messaging systems, you need to look at the long and >varied history of the very many failures to gain adoption. Early >Arpanet efforts at multi-media and then X.400 offer early examples of >failures. Facebook and Google had major projects that more offer recent >examples. Perhaps incremental changes to the deployed email systems to improve cryptographic properties have not succeeded because taken alone they offer too little benefit. If the goal is to have a messaging system with those cryptographic properties, then starting from scratch might be the only way to succeed? It goes without saying that designing and deploying a new planetary messaging system is not easy, but I do not want to be stuck with the limitations of the deployed email system forever, and I do not want end up stuck with a proprietary replacement instead. A useful response to my question would be to say, for instance, most of the recently successful communication media are proprietary single vendor systems, but a new email system necessarily must be federated. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[email protected] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ _______________________________________________ perpass mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/perpass
