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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

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ekianjo·

How do your friends read it then?

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How do your friends read it then?

Isn't the point of a diary that nobody can read it but you? That's why they have locks on them.

If you want a diary that other people can read, that's called a blog.

This has been solved for a very long time already. It's called PGP.

PGP and friends are, in practice, mutually exclusive.

if you want to let friends know what is going on you just simply send email/IM/SMS

Good luck convincing non technical users.

Yes, the message is encrypted with a key, you only get access to this key by decrypting it with your private key. Everyone on the email has the key for the message encrypted with their public key. Hence the privacy is not perfect but pretty good.

To paraphrase jwz: "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use PGP.' Now they have two problems."

More seriously, PGP is really hard. I think it has some potential for signing emails from your bank, Amazon, etc. but other than that ... it's just a pain. I'm not a crypto expert but a reasonably skilled IT professional, and even I struggle with it.

Encrypt it with a symmetric key, and then encrypt the symmetric key separately with each of your friends' public keys.

But then if just one of your friend's private key is stolen, you lose control of everything you wrote, past or present.

Well, yeah. That's what sharing the things you've written with them is.

Well, there are algorithms that support perfect forward security.... but nah

This is a good argument for not rolling your own.

By giving them the key?

Right. Have you tried doing that?

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