Hey Charlie et all, I always wanted to respond to this mail from April this year, since I thought it contains some interesting thoughts.
> However ... "spreading the word" has been really frustrating! > > Although once in a while someone sees the necessity and wisdom of encryption > right away, they're a rarity. Most people say, "I don't have anything to > hide, so why should I bother with something I don't need anyway?" I've never > learned how to change such people's viewpoint. If anyone on the list has > ideas on this, please send 'em along. > > The other block is the complexity of use. (Not GPGMail, however ... it's a > sweet implementation!) But to ask someone who has interfaced to a computer > only with a GUI to work on a UNIX command line ... as trivial as it is for > GPG ... is an exercise in futility. I'd love to gather more thoughts on this. I'm thinking about adding this to our introduction (linked on the entry page). If someone considers it useful it might also be an idea to setup a wiki page to collect arguments. Feel free to proceed :) I'm thinking of something like: Objection: I have nothing to hide. Reply: You think? Think again. Maybe you do... bla bla bla. Problem with this is that it isn't easy to find one sentence answers on those objections. It's like you'd have to explain all what's been happening in technology for the last 20 years and all the security issues and failures from that time and after you've done that you can slowly come back to the question "Why again was it, that it might be important to encrypt your communication?". One big issue is raising general awareness to security related issues. I'm not sure how to achieve this, but have the feeling that this is slowly arriving in the mainstream media. The Sony, Nintendo, ... hacks have show how fragile security is and that there are often way around a thought of secure system. That's no news for us but it's news for the general public. And people start realizing e.g. it might be a bad idea using 12345 as a passphrase on each and every of your log-ins. :P That was hard to explain some years ago - now it's not. All I'm saying is, that I'd love for mail encryption to get out of it's niche and reach a somewhat critical mass so that the "no one else is using it" argument simply does not apply anymore. Wouldn't that be great? 05.04.2011 19:49 Chris Rexinger wrote: > I too run into the same issue when trying to get friends to use encryption. I > have not been able to get 1 person to use it save myself. Peoples eyes seem > to gloss over and they say "ok, sure, whatever". No one gets it. So if we agree that there is some form of misunderstanding or a lack of knowledge - let's gather arguments facts to determine what's going wrong in such conversations. It seems the majority of people really isn't interested in a lot. Maybe I'm wrong, actually I hope I'm wrong. But maybe that's a fact we'd have to accept. I have made the experience, that if you really talk to someone honestly and get into a conversation often some things stick and sometimes after several weeks people approach me to ask again about what we talked earlier (you can't discuss such fundamental complex topics in one minute in the hall-way, or if you can pls contribute to the wiki and teach us who cant :P). > I have always said that a big roadblock to large scale adoption by the > "non-programmer" masses (of which I am a part) has been the fragmentation of > resources needed to get GPG running on a mac. The new GPGTools project is a > huge step in the right direction and I am glad to see it happen. This is why we have the GPGTools Installer. And it's worked out great so far for many users. > I only wish I could do more to help out, but I dont program and such.. No problem. Just participate, and consider working on said wiki-page (not existing yet) or help us improve documentation if you want. Many options available to contribute. Back to what Charlie wrote: > But I keep trying. My German wife smilingly tells me I'm a "Weltverbesserer" > ... someone who's always trying to make the world a better place. I guess > she's right. That's funny, because I get to hear that a lot. And what's even more funny, is the fact that this term is connotated with negative attributes. Now that's strange. Someone who wants to make the world a better place is negative? I guess it's the fact that many people are afraid of changes no matter in which direction those changes lead. And that's also an important factor in society. You simply can't change the whole system every year or so. It's a fine line between stabilization and blockading change. It's not for me to decide which is which. So, yeah let's go ahead and be a Weltverbesserer. cheers, steve
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Description: Signierter Teil der Nachricht
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