Topic: Lavabit.com and Tormail Email Alternatives... (Read 31109 times)

Okay, I wasn't quite sure. Thank you for the clarification.

No I meant StartPage. Twas a typo my apologies.

Starpage? Do you mean StartPage? If this is something different, can you explain more?

I recently received an email from StarPage and their private email service they claimed to be almost ready to allow beta testers!
I'm excited for this! I haven't received another email since though. 

Hello Beautiful Riseup Users:

Are we still needing funding for the coming year? Yes! We have gotten $55,000 in donations, which is amazing. Thanks all, and please donate to Riseup today, if you can (https://riseup.net/donate).

Since Riseup works to make secure and private communications, let's talk about one of the organizations we are fighting: the extremely well-funded National Security Agency (NSA), aka the shady, secretive United States spying program that Edward Snowden so excellently blew the whistle on.

Did you know the NSA has built a map of the entire world via the communication links of all email, chat, and financial transactions? This map tells a story to them about all of us. It knows who we know. It knows who our activist allies and relationships are.

And, as if that wasn't crappy enough, the NSA is trying to undermine the security of the internet as a whole by putting in back-doors and weakening encryption standards so that they can spy better. They spend $250,000,000 USD per year on this. This makes the entire internet less secure, and makes it easier for people, governments, and corporations to exploit, scam, and spy on each other.

While the NSA claims they are targeting terrorism, they have been targeting foreign politicians and companies, with evidence that this is happening particularly in Brazil and Mexico. This is plain old espionage and corporate spying. Terrorism is merely the justification for astounding encroachments on our civil liberties.

Last, we have to assume this is all the tip of an iceberg. We have to assume there are other spy agencies across the globe doing similar spy work that we don't know about (yet.)

What can we do about this? We can fight it legally, we can provide support for leakers and journalists, and we can invest in infrastructure (like Riseup) that is building alternative tools to fight the spooks.

Thanks, Love, and Rage,

The Riseup Birds
(https://riseup.net/donate)

What about TorChat?

I think everyone should know about and/or use it as email. We need to start a campaign for BitMessage to get it known!

You need 130+ IQ for using PGP? A banana peel could do that if it took its time.

Woah woah there mate, we need at least 160+ IQ no?

I'd guess some cloud service is being utilized to spawn a bunch of clients for some legitimate privacy concern purpose.
Sure, it could be a bot-net, but that would be... wrong.

uh, wtf?
Real attack, or a huge botnet switching to tor maybe?

Ente

Another attack on the Tor network or "just" bots:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-August/029582.html

It have easy solution - don't let the private key to be compromised! Seriously, if encryption secret key is compromised then it is game over.

And since multiple messages are encrypted with the same static key, if the key is ever compromised, all prior communications are compromised.

PGP Web of Trust is for preventing use of "fake" keys. It is unnecessary for end-to-end encryption as long as the key fingerprints are verified offline or some other reasonably safe method.

Basics of GPG is no so difficult to understand. The problem is lack of software that uses it by default. To use it one need to install Thunderbird, configure POP3 access, then install GPG and then Enigmail. And configure all of this and store the e-mails on his own computer's harddrive. This process filters out large portion of users who don't care about maintenance of his computer or only use webmail from random computers.Everything has it's shortcomings. When used properly GPG will protect the contents of the message. The sender and recipient still be known to NSA.

1) You don't have to convince me of that. (Although, actually, that's a great reason that everyone else shouldn't use encryption. More pics for the rest of us.) Still, the social repercussions are relatively rare so far, at least compared to not wearing pants in public.
2) Yes, but that teaching starts now or at most 20 years ago. Don't go around blaming the people that didn't get taught from a young age for not having been taught.
3) Yes, lets! And that advertising starts now. Don't go saying nasty things about the people who haven't gotten the message yet.
4) I disagree. It's a whole new vocabulary. I've been using PGP (or I ought to say I've been making PGP keys for myself; it's only recently that I've had anyone to exchange keys and emails with) for nearly 20 years and I still feel like I'm just barely getting the hang of things like managing circles of trust. Granted, you don't have to learn all that right away just to encrypt a message but there are a lot of ideas that are important that go along with just encrypting messages. And 130+ IQ is what, 3.5% of the population? Depends on what scale you use, but no matter what you are a long way from "most people."

Really. Sit down with a reasonably smart person who wasn't either a math or computer science major and try to show them how PGP works. If they are indeed reasonably smart and don't have some kind of mental block about it they will get it, but it will take some time and effort on both your parts. It will be time and effort well-spent, but don't pretend it's trivial.

My point is only that we have a task of educating others ahead of us. Calling people 'unbelievably ignorant' for not yet having learned about PGP doesn't help.

marcus_of_augustus: to what shortcomings are you referring?

GPG PGP has it's shortcomings also ....

1) Some of them will find it in hard way that encryption is a must. Our president's adviser found it in hard way http://www.dzeltenais.lv/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/rgle.png and this is he most decent picture that was copied from her hacked e-mail.
2. Let's teach our children how to use encryption from very young age. Let us be the last generation of neanderthals who run around without pants!
3. Let's advertise that 4096-bit RSA keys are more sexy than 2048 ones!
4. Using PGP is not harder than squeezing into pants. At least for person with 130+ IQ

I share your frustration with the difficulty in getting people to use PGP. Though I'm nowhere near as frustrated by the fact that average computer users won't use PGP as I am by the fact that getting liberty- and privacy-minded technically savvy and proficient people to use PGP is like pulling teeth.

"Yeah, I've been meaning to get around to it. It's really important, I agree." Wait two weeks, ask again for their key, get same answer. Rinse, lather, repeat.

I'm at the point where I won't talk about PRISM or any of the zillion surveillance scandals with anyone who won't generate a set of PGP keys. If all they want to do is complain and hope someone else does something about it, I've got no time.

Now back to the average user. Your analogy is flawed and unfair.

1) Most everyone around us already wears pants. Anyone who doesn't faces social (and probably legal) repercussions.
2) Most everyone has been taught to wear pants from a very young age. It has become habituated.
3) There are advertisements everywhere making most everyone think that they will be sexually desirable if they wear the right pants.
4) Most everyone already has a pretty good idea how to use pants.

+1