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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> And those pathways are almost never used

I used signal this morning to talk to a team of 100+ people on a big project. I sent an encrypted email to my parents last night. A month ago I used Tor to bypass a hotel's silly DNS block on "Torrentfreak.com". My laptop is running a linux distro that I downloaded as a torrent. These are all everyday non-cryptonerd activities that leverage very powerful security products.

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n=1 and all. I think "almost never used" isn't far off the mark. All of this sounds like hardcore nerd territory to me, with the possible exception of Signal, which still has strong nerdy vibes and is very tiny compared to its competitors. Sending encrypted e-mail from Linux definitely seems to be something that's almost never done, at population scale. If that isn't crypto nerd territory, what is?

If you were looking for everyday things lots of people do that make use of powerful security technology, Whatsapp's e2e encryption or https would be much better examples I guess; people actually use these en masse and can do so all by themselves, without support or nagging by experienced hardcore nerds.

I had the same sort of attitude to the parent comment until I remembered that maybe you and I don't live in the same culture that the parent does. I mean culture here as group of networked individuals with overlapping interested. Maybe there's a significant portion of people out there that do use those tools on the regular, and you and I just haven't been exposed to them. The earth is huge, and it's very possible that while we think his n=1, from his perspective n->100%.

Sending encrypted email and using Tor to bypass WiFi is restrictions are very, very crypto-nerd things to do, and running Linux is non-mainstream at best.

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