TELL HN: Release user friendly, encrypted communication and cloud tools now | Hacker News Reader

TELL HN: Release user friendly, encrypted communication and cloud tools now

2 pointsFrojoS3 comments

This should be obvious. There is now and will be an increased demand for user friendly software and services which protect us from NSA and co.<p>Personally I would like to replace:<p>- Gmail - Google Calendar - Google Docs - Dropbox<p>I've used Thunderbird+PGP, Trucrpyt+FTP etc. before but I'm likely not in the largest group of potential clients. Regardless, me and, many others would pay hard money for something that is convenient.

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I'd be interested to know how large the market for that actually is. It's clear within the HN world that some people are upset about the NSA and other organizations being able to easily access their data, but how large is the market for people who are willing to pay to not have that happen? I'm concerned that it's actually pretty small.

There's also a bit of a catch-22: if you start a company that provides secure email (for example) then I'm not going to pay you for it because I don't believe that you can provide me with secure email. The only way for that to happen is if I use GPG or similar myself and take total control.

So, I'd be concerned that the very people who might worry about this stuff are the very people who aren't going to pay you for the service.

There is something called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing that is 100% secure

> I'd be interested to know how large the market for that actually is.

Sure, I don't know. But I bet its bigger than ever. For instance the very popular (rank 2), mainstream German online new page SPON has a DIY Tor router article on the front page today http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre... (How about selling those in a way that they work out-of-the-box with a nice housing?)

If someone really wanted to find out, a little marketing study (questionnaire) might be quite revealing. E.g. "Would you pay $100 a year for /a encrypted eMail service/?"

Its true, that you can easily get into a catch-22 with the requirements of security (e.g. open source). But I'm sure the current state could be improved by someone clever. If it was trivial, there would be no startup opportunity.

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