On Wed, 6 Oct 2021, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
It would be good if we can get something like this set up; and a learning
experience, too, for those of us who don't use encryption for our emails.
It's also an additional barrier for anyone attempting to join the list.
And this list is the main help channel for TDE, so it behooves us to
keep it as barrier-free as possible.
E. Liddell
On this point, I am of two minds.
True enough, we ought to keep the mailing list free of barriers to newbies,
and a few years ago I would have been among those excluded; on the other
hand, it seems inevitable that most email providers, or corporate emails, or
mailing lists, or private individuals, will *all* have to make similar
changes sometime in the near future.
The premise, or hope, is that the government will not block encrypted
e-mail as well. A while ago when I moved to the United States I was told
by my bank in my home country that they would have to block e-banking on
my account because the US does not allow certain encryption protocols.
Hopefully not, but we may end up at the mercy of big tech companies for
our communication. Some people at work have started using Slack, which
promises to "improve your productivity", but then they make you pay for
every single extra feature, not really cheap and they are not upfront
about it either.
Gianluca
I don't mean that we ought to force members of the list to use encryption;
it's not one of those "if you plan to live another 10 years" arguments. But
either email* will be transformed into some kind of total-encryption rule, or
people will find other, more secure and private, ways to communicate.
Now that the cat is out of the bag (about surveillance, blocking, censorship,
etc.), people have started to demand more protections, respect for their
privacy, and so on. If the public were still ignorant of the degree of
snooping by governments and corporations, then maybe things could continue as
they were; but either everything becomes encrypted, or people will just stop
playing along and pretending that it's okay.
If nothing else, we ought to consider taking intermediate steps (but then,
there is no "sort-of encryption"!), or formulate some kind of plan, to get
from here to there. Otherwise, consider the alternative: that we are always
at the mercy of corporations or governments who may not have our best
interests in mind.
There are providers (such as ProtonMail?) where encryption is automatic, and
end-to-end, and the users only need to set it up, but after that they just
send and receive emails as usual. That would be ideal, since it wouldn't be
too daunting for inexperienced users.
Not so long ago, I considered buying my own server. (There is some brand by
name of Helm that sounded good.) That way I could be my own host, and not
have to worry about keeping logs and all that other stuff, and if anybody
interfered, I could just say no. But it seemed like too much work for myself
alone. I also considered setting up some kind of group, so that we might
share costs and maintenance and admin duties, but again this would require
more use of email in order to justify the expense and work.
So while these two extremes (no encryption or total encryption) may look
irreconcilable, I believe that we will all eventually move into a
totally-encrypted future, because DUH, everybody knows why.
Bill
P.S. *and probably the whole Internet, and any other kind of digital
activities, including "smart" devices in the home, etc.
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-----------------------------------------------------
Gianluca Interlandi, PhD gianluca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
+1 (206) 685 4435
http://gianluca.today/
Department of Bioengineering
University of Washington, Seattle WA U.S.A.
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