Facebook and PGP

But I could certainly see some benefits both for FB and for world at large from this. One of the big problems with PGP is how to bootstrap web of trust. "Does this key really belong to this particular person?" But what if the otherwise loathed real name policy could be turned to service this particular need? Prominently visible personalities can attach their PGP keys to their pages and make the first association harder to forge.

Secondly, I have little doubt that the keyservers are monitored. An increase of searches and/or downloads to known activist lawyers' or journalists' keys could have relation to uncomfortable whistles being blown in near future. But what if FB made the keys they have signed available via their own keyserver, and made that reachable over Tor? Downloading a high-profile PGP key is likely to be a fairly big red flag.

And lastly, there may be some positive effects further down the line. I've been using PGP (and later GPG) since 2.3i became available and I know just how horrid the usability is. If FB can iterate over UI and UX issues, then others can learn from those efforts, and eventually we might have something that even a regular person could at least learn to use.

And of course - adding more encrypted noise to global email flow is not a bad thing at all.

I have no doubt that FB sees many non-altruistic avenues if this service catches wind. Wonder is there is anything to relationship graphs with some extremely strong edges...

Any manager worth their salt will know that maintaining code is 10x more expensive than building it in the first place, and if it's user-facing code you're even adding an implicit promise that the feature isn't going to be removed again. I strongly doubt the "oh but it would be so hard to build that" argument counts for much.

That said, I've no idea about what kind of place Facebook really is.

Just look at all the shit that comes out of Google, not as part of some grand overarching scheme, but because someone thought it would be fun, and more often than not forgotten about a year later.

1. They tell you to trust webpages which claim that their code does not send passwords or private keys to the server – something which would be extremely hard to verify now and even were you to do so now, could silently change in the future:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/teikzwftimeu8nc/Screenshot%202015-...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1xlvpd8drhix0tj/Screenshot%202015-...

2. They encourage blindly copying and pasting complex commands into a shell:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5rv7p4mks0qdr7f/Screenshot%202015-...

I have no reason to believe they're doing any of this in malice but it's not good because it encourages people to believe claims which could be made by any phisher and encourages practices which put you at risk if Keybase is ever compromised.

The answer to this, of course, would be a browser-managed crypto API which could provide unspoofable UI indicating that e.g. a private key will never leave the client but in the absence of such an API it feels irresponsible to make similar claims which aren't actually possible.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/174124 https://support.google.com/a/answer/2466580

If you click that verification link, you'll receive a web notification that it's enabled should start receiving encrypted notifications.

Check your spam folder in case your mail provider's or client's spam filter is mislabeling it.

If you don't see it, try unchecking and rechecking the opt-in box, which should trigger a new verification email. (We've had a feature request for a "Resend" button".)

I wonder if MS has made GPG support any easier in Outlook. Last I looked into it a year or two ago, it was hard to integrate unless you paid for the official PGP plug-in.