[Cryptography] Dark Mail Alliance specs?

[Peter Fairbrother]

On 25/03/14 23:20, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 6:26 PM, Peter Fairbrother
> <zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk> wrote:
>> Does anyone have any more info on DarkMail?
>>
>>
>> On 23/11/13 20:11, Stephan Neuhaus wrote:
>>
>>> In my opinion, massive user-controlled email encryption will not happen.
>>>    Not now, and not in the next ten years.
>>
>>
>> Depends. Some thoughts on what might work in ten years or less:
>
>
> I have a series of Internet Drafts, Code and podcasts that propose a
> mechanism that does pretty much what you suggest building on the
> S/MIME message format and ideas from PGP.
>
> Since neither camp is willing to give in to the other and one has the
> mindshare, the other deployment, the only real way forward is to
> provide a mechanism that is a worthy successor to both.



The moderator refused my last post and I'm trying to rewrite it, but I 
can't help but feel - WTF?  S/MIME vs PGP?


PGP sucks. Sorry, but it sucks in usability terms. What is it supposed
to do? Make encrypted email widely usable?  does it do that?

Is S/MIME any better? Phuleeze. No.


Now that I have offended everybody, perhaps we can start again, with the 
idea that lusers are our target users?

We need good marketing. That's learner users (or lazy users), for a start.


[as an aside, look at what RANK-XEROX did when they developed the WIMP
GUI. They looked at how people actually used the programs. If we don't
do that sort of thing ...]

So the budget should include $2,000,000 or more for marketing. Good
marketing people are expensive, far more so than good people like us...






As to PGP and S/MIME, expunge both from your existence, and you will be 
a much happier man. Neither is actually worth bothering about.

They have already failed to do the job.


>
> 90% of the work that went into the S/MIME message scheme was actually
> all the backwards compatibility with email while supporting MIME
> extensions.
>
>
> Key servers are one approach, and a good one. There are others.

Such as?

ps, giving 14 pages of links isn't really a good idea. One or two 
perhaps, but 14? I for one am not going to look at all of them, and I 
very much doubt that anyone else is going to.


--Peter Fairbrother