Whoever wins the White House, this year's big loser is email | Hacker News Reader

Whoever wins the White House, this year's big loser is email

nytimes.com

15 pointsdredmorbius14 comments

Every problem in this article is solved by things people simply don't know about or don't want to use (PGP etc). Hopefully this may mark the start of a slow turning point in the public consciousness...

Yes, PGP is around. Has been for decades.

1. It's not supported by default on any major email application.

2. It plays very poorly with the dominant email platform of the day: Webmail.

3. Inputting passwords / passphrases on mobile devices is beyond cumbersome.

4. There's a chicken-egg problem: people won't use it because others aren't using it.

5. There remain problems with systems that break PGP -- either encrypted or signed messages.

6. PGP doesn't address the metadata problem -- you can still see who's emailling whom, when, and message subjects.

Email has some very big problems.

(I've been using PGP/GPG for two decades myself.)

The worst part is the article didn't even attempt to bring that sort of material up or evangelize encryption or other security techniques. It's just more FUD from the Times

Very true. They present the problem and say "doesn't that suck", leaving it at that.

I don't understand why this is on the front page. The article has a catchy headline, but none of the points it makes actually substantiate its claim that email is doomed. It is possible to make email secure (eg with PGP), so we don't have to abandon for security. What's more, everybody uses email. Does the author really think that many people will just abandon it? A Slack account could have been hacked just as well as a Gmail account. And if the admins were so professional that they would have configured Slack to "forget" messages, then they might as well have implemented better security for email. What's more, who says that Slack actually deletes messages?

Catchy but lacking in real substance.

I really don't see what's the author's conclusion has anything to do with the White House. Obviously the guy wants to end email, like 1000 people try during the last decade, and doesn't realize it's not gona happen. Email is a resilient distributed widely supported and used open standard. Nothing is closed to it for communications, the closed farms such as slacks and whatsapp are handy, but they are centralized, non standard, company controlled tools requiring much more resources to dispatch messages and tend to lead to information overload.

They key advantage to email over other systems - one which HRC's email problem made plainly apparent, yet the article seemed to ignore - is that it's decentralized. Sure, plenty of people use Gmail or some other provider, but plenty of others (myself included) run their own.

The article also seems to entirely miss the historical context by suggesting things like Signal as "what HRC should've used in the first place" - never mind that even its predecessor only came about 6 years ago, while email has been used for half a century.

Slightly different issue, but it seems that we're too dependent on technology in general. In the event of a major conflict with a great power, our technology infrastructure is likely the first thing to go. As things stand now, that would be a death blow. I could see the military being prepared to chug along, but it seems unlikely that much else would.

Centralization is about control. For executive administrations, this is probably a good thing for them internally, but for most of my own communication I want my own control.

This article makes me sad because I think there is a great defense for protocols like IRC / XMPP / Email where the resulting messages are fully distributed.

News companies know how to kill themselves, advertising communication apps for free, locking users far away from their websites. They should investir heavily in open protocol and investigate more tech monopolies.

Hit piece on fact gathering tools with meme drops.

Nice one NYT. Flagged.

It's a report from the real world showing some quite salient real-world consequences of deeply grounded faults within email.

It emphasises the impacts rather than the mechanisms, but for a mass-circulation general-interest publication, that's an appropriate pitch.

You might care to consider that The New York Times seems to be souring on email.

Personally, I think we are better off with the DNC's emails and any other communications from the peoples' leaders.

>You might care to consider that The New York Times seems to be souring on email.

You might be able to infer that I already have from my characterization of the article as a hit piece.

I'd like to see an inverse relationship between power and privacy -- the more power you have (political, financial, commercial, religious, cultural), the lower your degree of privacy protection. Also loss for gross antisocial actions (e.g., crime).

But that would be mediated, regulated, and uniform, not capriciously applied at the will and/or luck of hackers trying to break into services.

Which is what this story is about. It's not that it's Clinton's campaign, specifically, that's been hacked. It's that this can happen to any of us, at any time.

Data are liability.

"An exceptionally peculiar aspect of digital data is that, while it may remain in the boxes and cages provided for it, it's got a notable tendency to find itself liberated. Often without warning, and not detected for days, weeks, months, or longer, afterward (as in this case). In the real world we've got friction, especially associated with data processing and transfer. In digital form, far less so. Sometimes friction is good."

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hn4r5/on_the_...

Dan Kaminsky's response to the Fappening, an earlier incident, was absolutely dead spot on:

http://dankaminsky.com/2014/09/03/not-safe-for-not-working-o...

You Don’t Necessarily Know When You’ve Been Hit, Let Alone What’s Gone: A hugely underappreciated aspect. Paul Vixie's had similar comments along these lines, see "Internet Security Marketing: Buyer Beware":

http://www.circleid.com/posts/20150420_internet_security_mar...

The problem with email is that far too much data exist in far too many places with far too little protections, and for which every single last email (and how many are sent a year?) becomes a potential ticking time bomb. That is why email really needs to be buried.

I'll miss it. It's been quite a good and long-term friend. But it's dead.

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