Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: vision: purposeful online community for all human beings

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:7/10/2000; 3:15:07 PM
Topic:vision: purposeful online community for all human beings...
Msg #:18451 (In response to 18450)
Prev/Next:18450 / 18452

Dennis Peterson: Several good points about how keypair generation might be automated removed for brevity

I think another reason people don't accept encryption is not that they think it's insecure, but that they've heard a lot of propaganda about how it's scary terrorist technology, and they feel it's paranoid overkill to use it. A little button that says "enable envelopes and signatures" could go a long way.

That's definitely one more piece of psychology to overcome. A corollary to this might be that, in the final analysis, the majority of e-mail is, let's face it, pretty trivial. Why on earth should my friends encrypt and digitally sign the latest bad joke to make the rounds through e-mail? As long as the only conversation that occurs about crypto is ensuring the privacy of your e-mail, this particular propaganda piece/bit of psychology will be very hard to overcome indeed. This is why my posts on the subject tend to talk about things like idea futures markets; there are very big ideas out there that rely implicitly on the deployment of strong cryptography and digital signatures.

In any event, it seems to me you've identified some further issues regarding crypto acceptance, and I appreciate the dialogue!

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