We have email with autocrypt to rally to.
Abandon the smart phone crap and anything with a large organization attached to it.
Abandon the smart phone crap and anything with a large organization attached to it.
For those unfamiliar:
There are plans to add support for it to Tutanota[0], although ironically that blog post was written over a year ago and their FAQ still says that they don't even support interoperable PGP.[1]
When ProtonMail were asked two years ago about supporting Autocrypt, their response was quite negative but also vague[2], and there doesn't seem to have been much progress since.[3]
[0] https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/email-encryption/
[1] https://tutanota.com/faq/#pgp
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/8dqk5n/protonma...
Could you explain why Signal users are more careful than email users? Aren't all Signal users also email users?
I suppose the reverse isn't true, and there are machines that send people transactional emails (e.g. receipts for online purchases) which it would be nice to secure with PGP.
The real problem with securing email, from my perspective, is the difficulty of creating a UX which accurately and intuitively conveys to the user whether the message they are sending is secure (and what "secure" means). By using a separate app which never sends plaintext, that's basically a non-problem.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that phones are typically seen as more secure, and phones are the go-to operating systems that people use now, and are (usually) permanently switched on, so have to be secure since they are constantly exposed to the public Internet. (Yes, Windows can be seen as secure too, but IMHO phones are more secure. Windows is getting better over the years and have mitigated and patched a lot of the common vulns you do see).
> Aren't all Signal users also email users?
No. Email is often reached from many different OSes and environments. It is common and expected to see people logging into their Gmail from potentially compromised systems at work, or at Internet cafes. They just assume that whenever they login, the are 'secure' when in some cases the Internet cafe is logging everything or their employer has setup 'monitoring' software to ensure they are actually working and not dossing.
Signal: not so much. They have a single secure device that they use to communicate with, and since Signal is tied to a SIM: migrating your old Signal 'account' to a new SIM is impossible.
Like most popular ideas in technology this is absolutely ridiculous and I actually laughed out loud when I read it. Most consumer phones (especially outside the US) ship with malware installed. Often worse than consumer PCs especially since even someone with little skill can install completely free OSes.
Also: Almost every popular OS has FDE as an option (often the default one) which was the main feature (other than sand boxing, which browsers do well enough) that supposedly made phones secure.
This is what I mean by "failure" to get into political consciousness and politicians heads... If you want to be free you need the freedom of others. Hiding in technical bastions is like praying in secret. Freedom of religion it isn't, even if it's better than nothing.
Repairable smartphones, with various choices for operating systems from brands which doesn't seem to exhibit hypocrisy when it comes their values -
https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
https://www.shiftphones.com/en/
But when the parent said,
> Abandon the smart phone crap
It may not just be about open hardware/OS/Apps for smartphone but the hold the carrier has on the customer and therein privacy issues. This is a hard problem to solve because cellular services are oligopolies or even monopolies and amplified by lack of open modem/radio hardware.
So ditching smartphones for a portable computer might be even a good option[1].
This is a strong accusation. Which of those brands are recommended by the FSF [0]? Which of them are actually trying to change the industry with their investments (promoting freedom/privacy) [1]? Which of them are fighting against planned obsolescence by providing lifetime updates [2]? Given all that I am not sure who is a hypocrite.
> So ditching smartphones for a portable computer might be even a good option
Librem 5 is a portable computer [3].
[0] https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/
[2] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
Apart from that I stand by what I said.
There's been an insane degree of improvement in the software over the past 6 months.