On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 6:54 AM, Michael Rogers <[email protected]> wrote: > Your unstated asssumptions are that if logging is disabled by default, > (a) users will be surprised, (b) users will be annoyed, and (c) > existing OTR users will stop using OTR rather than enabling logging. > I think all three assumptions are false.
I am absolutely sure they are true for some users, myself included— having experienced an OTR update turning off my logging in pidgin and causing me an expensive snafu. So I can speak with absolute certainty here. I reiterate: The greatest risk to people's security is people simply _not using_ encryption/authentication because it is inconvenient and the pain of using it is certain and in the present while the risks are uncertainty, distant, and often misunderstood. My position is that small changes in the most common risks matter more than big changes in the smallest ones, and that frustrating logging is one of these things. There is a reason PGP is so rarely used, even between high risk individuals. > Anyone who chooses OTR does OTR should be integrated and on by default in software and opportunistically enabled without request— and it _is_. Without this I wouldn't be able to use OTR in all my chat conversations because it would be too hard to nag all the remote parties to install and enable it, and so the annoyance/benefit tradeoff would make it only get used rarely with potentially regrettable consequences. Continuing to provide cleartext chat on the internet is socially irresponsible, cleartext enables widespread dragnet surveillance and long term archive. [snip] > If an existing OTR user wants to log an OTR conversation, despite > knowing that they're undermining the benefits of OTR by doing so, OTR provides many properties, logging only undermines a part of one of them. For some users this is very important, for some users it is unimportant— if you capture an unencrypted disk from many users they are thoroughly hosed, including unlogged chat text ending up in swap. Calling it "undermining the benefits" is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I agree that there are real concerns about logging but there are still not universally applicable and at the same time there are user experience implications which also effect security. _______________________________________________ OTR-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cypherpunks.ca/mailman/listinfo/otr-dev
