Let PGP die

I agree with the message but we need something in place before letting it die.

"How good end-to-end encryption must look like today, Apple demonstrated with iMessage: millions of iPhone owners do not even know that they encrypt their short messages."

No. This is not good. Because who in his sane mind would trust a company like Apple not to sucumb to pressions from powerful governments, or his own people, to have backdoors and look at your data. Who in his sane mid would trust a company like Apple (or Gemalto or any other), to never hire spies, and to always ensure 100% secrecy of cryptographic or communication systems?

Basically, the problem is that you need to trust a lot of elements to ensure secure and private communication channels, starting from your hardware.

It would be possible that hardware is compromised (and it's a certainty in the case of smartphone, since no smartphone contains 100% open hardware, but always have a core of privative chips around the communication module (which is why Gemalto hack is not such a big deal anyway: GSM is wicked from the start)), but even with clean hardware, there would be no point in using cryptographic system if you use privative operating system (even if those privative operating systems are derived from free and open operating systems). iOS may contain some parts BSD software, that doesn't prevent Apple to include secret backdoors. And even while Android OS is free and open source, until its 18 _gigabytes_ of sources are audited, we cannot really trust them, much less in their Google or Samsung and other binary forms.

Basically, even http://www.blackphone.ch/ cannot really be trusted for this reason: it's not open and free software.

PGP is good, because it's a distributed public key system, into which some trust can be put, for the precise reason that people have to understand it to use it. Also because you would normally use it on open and free operating systems that you can trust, and hopefully, on open hardware that you can trust too (no privative firmware, chips preferably fab'ed in your own country, components assembled by yourself or somebody you trust not to be a CIA or MSI agent, etc).

Brazilian and German politicians may be unhappy about the USA spying their phones, and may initiate the building of their own phones and phone operating systems, but while those are not open software running on open hardware, only THEY can trust their phones. I would trust a brazilian phone just as much as a korean one or an USian one: ie. I would be 100% sure in both case that my communications are spied, by brazilians, koreans or USians spies.

So, how good end-to-end encryption must look? It must look like being implemented on open and free software running on open hardware, of which the USER can audit the sources (and therefore that must have a very controlled complexity), and of which the USER may modify and compile the programs at will.

Ie. all the contrary, from the user point of view, of what a smartphone or tablet is nowadays.