Sequioa hasn't fixed the attack from the beginning of the talk, the one where they convert between cleartext and full signature formats and inject unsigned bytes into the output because of the confusion.

That's just not true. Nothing in this page is a problem with the standard and everything in this page is the outdated parts of the old standard.

Those people should perhaps ponder if it’s a reasonable thing to insist on using this broken standard/tool in 2025.

The minisign ones are much weaker though? "just" display of data, one of them not even through minisign itself.

Your mail either needs to be encrypted reliably against real adversaries or it doesn't. A private emailing circle doesn't change that. If the idea here is, a private group of friends can just agree never to put anything in their subjects, or to accidentally send unencrypted replies, I'll just say I ran just such a private circle at Matasano, where we used encrypted mail to communicate about security assessment projects, and unencrypted replies happened.

There's like one or two use cases where encrypting email could work. The best case I've come across--Bugzilla has the ability to let the user upload a public key to encrypt emails for updates to non-public bugs. It's not a big use case--pretty much the intersection of "must use email" and "can establish identity out of band," which does not describe most communication that uses email. (As tptacek notes in a sibling comment, you pretty much have to limit this to one-and-done stuff too, not anything that's going to be in an ongoing discussion, because leaks via unencrypted replies are basically guaranteed).

Even my doctor's office and local government agencies support PGP encrypted emails, and refuse to send personal data via unencrypted email, but tech nerds still claim no one can use it?

They are also correct, but that's indeed not what the person you replied to said.

> then why haven't alternatives ^W replacements been produced for decades?

Actually we do have alternatives for it.

For example Git supports S/MIME and could absolutely be used to sign commits and tags. Even just using self-signed certificates wouldn't be far off from what PGP offers. However if people used their digital IDs like many countries offer, mission-critical code could have signatures with verifiable strong identities.

Though there are other approaches as well, both for signing and for encrypting. It's more that people haven't really considered migrating.

But it's not what cpach was writing about, is it?

Also no, the gpg.fail site makes no such claims. Now, tptacek, has said that, but he didn't write the comment you were replying to.