A world without trust is not better – by @dhh
https://world.hey.com/dhh/a-world-without-trust-is-not-better-93d1c7b5
@jsparknz @aral He gives zero support for his thesis. Of course the best case is absence of need for trust. Trust /is/ risk. There's nothing favorable about that. If you must trust, then lots of factors come into play and turn a straight-forward decision into a fuzzy one. It's better for your email payload to be PGP-encrypted so you don't need trust vs hoping the MitMs don't exploit.
See latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19… but if @dhh argument didn’t land, I doubt this will touch you.
Ultimately, technology cannot and will not solve social problems.
@aral @jsparknz @hypolite When you realize the separation of duties, that email is a means to get data from A to B & crypto serves to mitigate disclosure, then of course email /can/ be used to move a payload without disclosure. It doesn't matter that email predates PGP. PGP over email is cumbersome for many novices with some implementations, but there are exceptions, but this is red herring territory.
@hypolite @jsparknz @aral #Hushmail came close enough to solving the social problem. A novice can open a HM acct as easily as a Yahoo acct. An external expert user can do all the key management on hushtools.com. And for me that worked. I was able to get accountants & lawyers to use crypto effectively. Novice-to-novice => HM-to-HM. BTW, the latacora.micro.blog link is dead for me.
@hypolite Indeed, crypto doesn't remove the need for trust in all situations. But it does remove the need for trust in many cases, and that's a *good thing*. Whenever you can remove trust in a systim, it's /beneficial/ to do so. My thesis is the opposite of the authors.
Close, but no cigar, I'd never heard of Hushmail before you mentioned it. I've heard of several other technical solutions to send sensitive data over the Internet, but not this one. This doesn't say anything about it, it probably is great.
That email /can/ be used to moved a payload without disclosure doesn't mean it /should/. Not sure where you were going with the magnetron, there are microwave ovens in all American households, but secure email including PGP has a marginal use.
@hypolite Ah, I've read that article. It came out shortly after an over reaction to a flaw was discovered (and fixed) in a couple particular PGP implementations. It's FUD. The premise is the same as what you mentioned ("this wasn't designed for that"). A lot of innovations are derivatives of other wildly different innovations. You don't say microwaves are bad for cooking food b/c they were meant to be radars.
@hypolite If you don't like the magnetron example, I'll give a super glue example. Super glue was designed to seal off open wounds in the battlefield, to replace stitches. It turns out the toxicity made it bad for what it was designed for. But it was discovered that it was great for gluing housohold items.. a purpose that it wasn't designed for. We don't reject Super Glue simply because it's not being used for what it was designed.
@hypolite The thing you should take away from the analogy is to reject the idea that a use case is somehow inferior when it doesn't match original intent. Original intent is irrelevant. In the case of Super Glue, the derivative use case is actually *better* than the intended design.
@nanook @jsparknz @aral @hypolite Mass surveillance would require #Hushmail to push malicious #javascript to everyone, which would work right up until just one user decides to audit the js code one time. I'd say that's unlikely. Targeting is a risk, so HM is not useful if your threat model includes targeted surveillance.
@hypolite If you look at the 10k foot view of my point, you need not accept PGP email. That example muddied the waters. I could have more simply stated: we don't discard encryption in favor of trusting those who see the payload. It's better to use encrytion because it removes some componts of needed trust. I see no case for increasing the need for trust.