[Cryptography] Explaining PK to grandma

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 3:02 PM, Wendy M. Grossman <
wendyg at pelicancrossing.net> wrote:

> On 11/27/2013 15:03, Ralf Senderek wrote:
> >
> Well, it seems to me Grandpa has bigger problems (because Granny uses
> real email to communicate with the family while organizing summer
> outings to ballet for 20):
>
> 1) For email, Grandpa uses Webmail. The service he uses doesn't offer an
> easy way to plug in crypto.
>

That is a bit harder but not insurmountable provided that they are
sufficiently S/MIME aware to present the encrypted message as an attachment
so that the browser can pop up a reader for an encrypted message.

It will take work on the part of Webmail providers to make this possible.
But it is rather more possible than most people imagine.

I 'invented' WebMail back in 1993, to the extent that it needed to be
invented. It was one of my test applications for HTTP forms and it was how
I discovered that POST was broken. So I would really like to support
WebMail to the greatest extent we can.


End-to-end secure WebMail requires extensions to WebCrypto plus a suitable
editor widget. But it is quite possible.



> 2) But for most of his personal messaging Grandpa uses Facebook because
> he finds that his grandkids regard email as something you only use if
> forced.
>

You are showing your age by mentioning Facebook. The young people are
already walking away from it as uncool. It is uncool because Grandpa uses
it.

Facebook is a band, not a label. The Rolling Stones were big once but they
were not the last band in history.




-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/
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