Is using Everything more energy efficient than email systems that are currently in use?
Hesham
On Sun, Apr 9, 2023, 2:59 PM Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I agree with the sentiments but not the conclusions here.Yes, HTML in email is a dog's breakfast. And whose fault is that? Who is responsible for email messaging standards? Well SMTP is IETF and HTML is W3C and HTML for email was allowed to fall through the cracks.The structural problem here is that the HTML that is appropriate for email is HTML/2.0 which is structured markup. HTML ceased being that when HTML/3.0 landed and it lacks the features required for email messaging which include the ability to mark sections of text as quoted. The handling of fonts etc. is idiosyncratic at best. But whose responsibility is that?Yes, Github does have some features that can be used to support collaboration. But it is a collaboration flow engine wrapped around a source code management system and it is really not built for what we need for our work. So while it has some advantages, you have to be using Github *in a collaborative setting* pretty much every day to remember how it all works. The notion of forking a repository so I can submit a pull request in order to comment on something is obscurantism at best.I do use git every hour of every day but only because I wrote some shell scripts several years ago and they run via crontabs to make sure my work is safe if the house burns down. I could not tell anyone what any of the commands are without looking at a manual. There was a day when I could write 6502 assembler code from memory in my head, those days are gone and so is my memory of git's stupid command structure. Expecting me to be familiar with git because I use it is unreasonable.So what do we do instead? Well, there is a reason I have been building a security platform for the past five years, the end goal is to support this:Why does an instant message have to have a different format to a post to a chat forum or a microblogging site?Why isn't an email message, a blog post or an article just a superset of the paragraph post format?Why isn't a book or a report just a superset of the message format?We could bikeshed ETML endlessly but the core concept there is that ETML is one markup that only describes document structure which comes in three different levels with Level 1 being directed at chat, Level 2 articles, Level 3 reports.Everything in my world is end to end encrypted. To start a discussion, Alice loads up a document to the server, it is of course encrypted. Then Alice decides who she wants on her team. She adds Bob and Carol to the review team and they get decryption access through Mesh Threshold secret sharing. Since this is a classified project, there is also a global encryption key contribution that is shared separately via Kyber.Bob reads the document, he notices some spelling issues and adds annotations on his copy. He also notices some broader issues that affect multiple parts of the document. All these annotations are tagged with the appropriate lightweight semantic and appends to the DARE sequence accompanying the document.Carol edits the document to correct the spelling errors, Alice opens up a separate document to discuss some of the issues, etc. etc. One of the issues is legal and so Doug, the external counsel is brought into the loop.OK so why don't we use tools like this? A large part of the reason is the lack of the necessary security infrastructure to make it secure. But another part is the lack of open interoperable standards. For this sort of system to work, Doug has to be able to plug into this conversation and get the information he needs using a tool that he already has on his machine, it cant be a proprietary thing he has to buy and install just for one client.If someone wants to bend the ears of some VC folk, we could build this for real for less than 8 figures. If not, I have other plans which will get there eventually.PHB
