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Comment by PuffinBlue | Hacker News Reader

I'm beginning to wonder if this is an artificially created theme. In every discussion about GnuPG this type of thread begins and has this type of sentiment.

Maybe it is obsolete, maybe it isn't, maybe my tin foil hat is firmly in place. But it just seems like a thing people like to say to almost make sure other people don't bother trying it or using it.

Maybe that's because it's difficult to use, maybe it's because it works and does do things securely and some people don't want that.

There's so many sophisticated TLA's out there influencing 'the conversation' that who knows what to think anymore.

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I keep on seeing this sentiment of "TLAs/short-sellers/Russian content-bots/pick-a-boogeyman could possibly have an interest in this topic, so they're probably manipulating the conversation (conveniently against me and never in my favor). Who knows what to believe?, so I'm just going to continue believing what I believed before."

And it's increasingly odd to me. It makes sense to an extent, it lines up with a lot of what we already know about aligned interests, what happens when you challenge someone, etc. But at the same time, it's like the possibility of 'false flag'/Sybil/conversational manipulation is letting people double down on prior beliefs (which could in itself be the goal of the same level of "maybe everyone who disagrees with me is being manipulated").

It is odd, I agree. But on this specific topic I saw a) this weird tone shift seemingly overnight - while I really don't want to make this personal, a prominent individual adopting a quite different communication style to what they'd used before. And it came coupled with b) these inconsistent arguments that just don't make sense. Signal pushers smear those who disagree as "crypto nerds" and yet perfect forward secrecy, the one advantage their system has and the thing they use to argue for all the compromises they made in every other area, is the ultimate "crypto nerd" property: it's elegant and theoretically exciting but practically almost useless (I don't think I've ever seen a threat model where it actually makes sense).

We know the intelligence agencies have had an interest in this particular topic for a long time, and that they use a variety of means to discourage the use of encryption.

Whether this is one of those means is unclear, but you're still probably better off using some form of free software for your encryption, and any encryption is still better than none.

Do you know what helps? Trying it out yourself and trusting your own judgement. To too many people nowadays, this is the first thing they abandon, while it should always be the last thing to be abandoned.

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