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I'm perfectly fine with there being a by-geeks-for-geeks-only-because-of-required-expertise exclusive internet club. That's how it used to be.

If it were still that way today, most of the startups that this site revolves around wouldn't exist.

So let's have both!

And that would be better, the world could do without a trillion photo apps and dazed kids trying to be businessmen.

> If it were still that way today, most of the startups > that this site revolves around wouldn't exist.

In what way? The startups wouldn't exist because the founders can't handle the tools? Or, are you saying they wouldn't exist because there wouldn't be huge markets of people sharing cats pictures.

The more I think about it, both cases could both be correct, seeing how many people who call themselves developers would find it impossible to write a line of code if they didn't have eclipse....

I knew someone during our senior year of college that couldn't start a new Java class without using the "New Class" menu option in Eclipse. It was painful, to say the least.

> I only have 2 contacts that I can use PGP to communicate with. Usability is the issue.

This is why Bitmessage is so promising. Everything is encrypted and anonymous by default. The PGP/GPG setup is a huge barrier. With Bitmessage you just need to install it and it just works.

Bitmessage is a bad idea, read the white paper. Every message is retained forever by every BM client.

But it's encrypted.

And encryption schemes never become outdated.

The greater risk is from having your key compromised. Forward secrecy would have protected your past messages.

But it's better than what we have at the moment, IMO. I'd be happier using Bitmessage now (and hoping it improved with time) rather than regular email while waiting for the perfect solution to appear someday.

> Every message is retained forever by every BM client.

That is not true.

From the white paper [0] under section 6:

> We propose that nodes store all objects for two days and then delete them.

It's also on the FAQ[1]:

> Yes. However, if you go offline then they must come back online within 2 days of the message being sent. Nodes delete data, and do not accept data, older than 2 days.

The sender will not delete the message until it's received an acknowledge from the receiver. It instead will recompute the proof of work and resend in an exponential growing interval. This is also in section 6 of [0].

> If a node is offline for more than two days, the sending node will notice that it never received an acknowledgement and rebroadcasts the message after an additional two days. It will continue to rebroadcast the message, with exponential backoff, forever.

[0] https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf

[1] https://bitmessage.org/wiki/FAQ#Can_I_send_a_message_to_some...

The proposal in section 6 is somewhat redundant given section 5:

> ...all users receive all messages...

It would be trivial to modify the BM client to archive/save all messages it receives.

You could also bounce all email that you receive which isn't encrypted with your public key. If you think requiring all your contacts to set up GPG is too hard - what makes you think they'll adopt bitmessage?

(I know bitmessage has some different security properties than gpg+email -- but I think we'll all agree that if everyone and everything switched to email+gpg we'd be in a much better place from a security/privacy standpoint than we are now).

Gnunet isn't a new tool but a very old one. AFAIK it still provides the best P2P filesharing experience, which is good for mass adoption. And by participating in that users fuel the rest of the network, which exists and gives you the upsides of something like freenet at the same time.

You're right that the UI is dated. But the code is good, with a clean, well-documented library interface. It's probably the best starting point available to build a friendly-looking layer on top of.

> We don't need more tools, we need tools that non-geeks can use.

Why? Suppose someone comes up with these tools for the non tech-savvy, and the internet is "fixed". Now the evil government would no longer be able to spy on innocent citizens and obtain private information for its nefarious purposes, whatever those may be. Would people stop being so easily manipulated by private corporations' campaigns and will no longer surrender their private information so willingly? After all, much more information is yielded voluntarily due to deceitful corporate propaganda than due to clandestine government surveillance. How are tools going to help with that? Will tools educate the public of the ways Google and Facebook use private information to exploit their users?

We don't need more tools. We need politics. We need laws to regulate both government and corporate aggregation and handling of private information.

> [...] We need politics. We need laws to regulate both government and corporate aggregation and handling of private information.

Sure, but I don't think the "why bother when another obstacle stands in the way?" argument is a good one.

We have also seen that secret laws make regulation difficult since public oversight is not possible without government transparency; your final paragraph seems to imply current-situation + politics = trust in government and no need for privacy software.

I would guess that at least 99.9% of all leaked private information is given voluntarily to corporations. Privacy software is a solution to the remaining 0.1% (probably far less than that). That's neither a solution nor a step in the right direction. In fact, I would say that it's a step in the wrong direction, as it calls attention to a far smaller threat while hiding the far bigger one. This is yet another misdirection, that only serves to give a false sense of security.

Privacy software will be needed when criminal electronic surveillance becomes prevalent (as it will, some day soon). But the way it's presented now plays into the hands of those who wish to use the NSA fiasco (which, to be sure, it is) to hide a much more serious problem. It's not a solution — it's a diversion.

I'm sorry, but there is no way to quantify that. Consider, for example, a recent Ars article:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/08/no-this-isnt-a-scene...

What about the MAC addresses that Google gathered when driving around for street view? What about data that software gathers on your PC or mobile devices without your knowing, or location data that is made available to mobile carriers and law enforcement simply by the act of communicating with a cell phone tower? What of spyware/maleware, etc?

Even so, the "leaked private information [...] given voluntarily to corporations" is very different than dragnet surveillance. There is no way to know as of yet exactly how much information has been gathered through such programs, but recent revelations suggest startling amounts of data that are far more invasive and vast than anything that could ever be leaked: more information than the NSA is capable of processing, as mentioned in the Guardian's XKeyscore revelation article.

So, no; not 0.1%.

> But the way it's presented now plays into the hands of those who wish to use the NSA fiasco (which, to be sure, it is) to hide a much more serious problem.

I don't see how suggesting software to help limit the scope of surveillance does anything to hide the underlying problem. If anything, it brings action upon it and suggests that users will not stand for being surveilled in this manner.

> What about the MAC addresses that Google gathered when driving around for street view? What about data that software gathers on your PC or mobile devices without your knowing, or location data that is made available to mobile carriers and law enforcement simply by the act of communicating with a cell phone tower? What of spyware/maleware, etc?

Great, so we can say that far more information flows to corporations, voluntarily or involuntarily, than to the government. And privacy software won't help with most of the cases you mentioned.

> There is no way to know as of yet exactly how much information has been gathered through such programs, but recent revelations suggest startling amounts of data that are far more invasive and vast than anything that could ever be leaked: more information than the NSA is capable of processing, as mentioned in the Guardian's XKeyscore revelation article.

I would still venture to say that Google analyses (if not collects) far more private information than the NSA, and unlike the NSA, Google uses that information all the time.

> I don't see how suggesting software to help limit the scope of surveillance does anything to hide the underlying problem. If anything, it brings action upon it and suggests that users will not stand for being surveilled in this manner.

Because, it's like having an awareness campaign after a horrible home-invasion that encourages people to dig moats in their back yards, and all the while their kids are letting strangers in through the front door. It's saying, there's a privacy issue, and here it is, while it's somewhere else completely. A classic diversion.

I'm a lot less worried about targeted advertisements and their trackers (which are easily blocked) than I am about a police state. Internet filtering is already a serious problem. And it's not unreasonable to think they could start cracking down on piracy much more in the future. Also intercepted emails and private messages and stuff will be around forever.

First, I think you're underestimating the effects of targeted advertising on the soul :) Second, targeted advertising proves that the information is analyzed constantly and being used constantly — all day, every day; it's far more prevalent than people being arrested for downloading Iron Man 3. Third, Google says it's collecting information for targeted advertising, just like the government says it's collecting information for counter-terrorism. Even if Google is to be believed, that doesn't mean they won't be using that information for something else tomorrow.

I agree, but it's a lot easier to block or just avoid that kind of spying. That's a lot different than the NSA putting backdoors into your computer, or reading all your private texts, emails, and phone calls.

And the same tools can be used to fight both. Tor for example, allows you to hide your IP, and various browsers and tools prevent you from accidentally leaking private information to identify you to these websites. Secure operating systems and programs protect you from private hackers and adware just as much as they do from government hackers.

> We need politics. We need laws to regulate both government and corporate aggregation and handling of private information.

Really? Look around and tell me how that's been working out for you lately.

The top priorities of any human organization, regardless of nature or origin, are: (1) survival, (2) growth, and (3) expansion of influence.

The only way to solve the politics problem is to solve the people problem. In the US we have generations of fat & happy sheep, living off the short-term benefits of inflated currency and credit bubbles, blissfully and willfully ignorant of what goes on around them, so long as they don't miss an episode of American Idol.

So excuse my cynicism, but good luck with that.

> Really? Look around and tell me how that's been working out for you lately.

Well, it's far from perfect, but you've got clean water, highways, research grants, gay marriage in some states, a national healthcare plan that's a good start — all in all, it's pretty good. I don't see why regulation over private data aggregation would be any harder than healthcare. Sure, Google's lobbyists would work hard against it, and would probably succeed in watering down, and I don't have high hopes for breaking-up Google just yet, but it would do to raise awareness.

> In the US we have generations of fat & happy sheep, living off the short-term benefits of inflated currency and credit bubbles, blissfully and willfully ignorant of what goes on around them, so long as they don't miss an episode of American Idol.

All the more reason to try and educate people on how they're being exploited by corporations.

>>> Even the engineers still failed to use it regularly.

I used to work at a very large, publicly held company. When I got my new laptop, I realized the PGP whole disc encryption was blocking one of my video cards so I could only run one monitor with my laptop.

After asking around, I soon realized exactly none of the engineers had PGP installed on their PC's. I was pretty surprised when I was told they simply asked for a clean install with nothing on their laptops and the IT people gave them what they wanted - a completely unsecured laptop with which they could customize to their own specifications.

As shocking as it seemed, I was told by several of the team members that the IT support staff allowed it because they "trusted" the software engineers not to install sketchy stuff and thought they could keep their stuff more secure than say a PM.

I think back now and wonder why they would take such a huge security risk.

Why wonder, you answered your own question already. Its just convenience... Hard to measure security against the productivity of dual displays.

> It's too bad Mozilla dropped support for Thunderbird.

Enigmail seems to work well. At least as far as I can tell, I haven't had much of a chance to use it as I don't know anybody that uses PGP either.

Enigmail is just an add-ons for Thunderbird, which Mozilla has basically end-of-lifed. My point was for a PGP client to take off, it's going to need some major backing. This is unlikely to come from Mozilla, since they've announced they're no longer dedicating resources to Thunderbird.

Well, Thunderbird has the add-on called "Enigmail" which makes it easy. AFAIK there's no key directory integrated, but then again, is a key directory really a good idea? It adds another attack vector.

And then of course, this only "solves" the email problem, unlike darknet solutions.

Yes, it is, but the alternative is what we have now. Practically no one using PGP. You have a better idea to fix usability of PGP?

No Sir.

Integrate it in an e-mail service that is very popular like Gmail, lead everyone through an initial set-up to create their public keys, and then tie that key to their profile. Then you won't have to know anyone's public key anymore, and everyone would be using PGP by default.

The only issue is that Google would have to ensure you're creating the private key as "locally" and securely as possible, without them being able to copy that key to their servers when they're creating them. That might be very tricky, while still remaining convenient, and they may have to allow for independent audits so we can make sure they aren't transmitting the data.

You can ask enigmail to look at three or four different key directories if you don't have someone's key saved locally.

On my current contract, we go to great trouble to install whole-disk, multiuser encryption on all laptops. And then we use a trivial default password, as in one of the first few you would try if you were guessing passwords. Tech-savvy people for sure, but lazy, I guess.

I believe, passwords, if required to be set to some default value, should be "changeme" or similar variants.

But people don't change them unless forced to. Another place I worked, half the passwords were qwerty123 because the tech set them up in the expectation they would be changed. Another place, the passwords were usually "password". I once set up a bunch of accounts for a new domain with strong passwords which I printed on a credit card-sized laminated card, which people could keep in a wallet or purse. Mostly, this worked well, but still some people blu-tacked the cards to their desks or keyboards. It's unwinnable unless you force people to do the right thing.

We need technology convergence so that systems work collectively rather than in isolation. Once momentum favors the collective, ease-of-use will follow. I too am frustrated by the lack of PGP adoption.

Gnunet appears to be far from ready for the main stream. For anything to be useful it really needs to work on mobile, and after trying for a few hours, I can't even get it to work on my mac.