[Cryptography] What ever happened to end-to-end email encryption?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 12:38 PM Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> wrote:

<re-ordered>

> Of course if PHB's Mesh takes off this might all become academic - but I'm
> not holding my breath.  It's not that it *couldn't* succeed.  Look at how
> quickly Wireguard took off and gained support by all the common OS's and
> many of the larger VPN services, despite a huge established base for
> TLS-based VPN's.  (Which in turn displaced IPSec-based VPN's, but those had
> all kinds of issues.)  Getting an understanding of why Wireguard succeeded
> would be important to understanding how any new protocol/approach can
> succeed in the current environment.  Most new ideas never gain traction.
>

I worked with Tim Berners-Lee in the earliest days of the Web. The Mesh
follows the same strategy minus some of the things we tried that didn't
work.


Email isn’t a big money-maker for anyone other than Microsoft, and
> businesses that use Exchange seem to feel the security it provides is good
> enough for even quite sensitive discussions - certainly within one company,
> but typically even between companies.
>

OK, so my larger deployment strategy.

Yes, I am putting all the IP for the Mesh out under MIT license and the
callsign registry will be run as a not-for-profit. But as Barzini said in
the Godfather, I am not a Communist.

The reason I spent time and effort going after the Clinton-Gore Online
campaign and then the WhiteHouse was that I had seen the effect IBM had on
the microcomputer market when it legitimized the micro with its IBM PC. The
WH was my IBM PC.

What really put the Web in everyone's hands was when Microsoft adopted it,
something Robert Caillau spent a lot of time on when we were at CERN.
Microsoft stole nothing, we campaigned for them to take our work.


So yes, I have a Microsoft play and one that I have shared with MSFT
employees several times:

I will be creating a for-profit company to market plug-ins for Office and
Exchange to provide seamless integration with the apps. This is going to
require quite a few bodies, but I already have enterprises interested in
paying. In fact they are only interested if they can pay for it.

When I start on the VC round for that startup, I will be going to all the
big tech play VC arms and my exit strategy will be really simple,
'Microsoft will pay at least $1 billion to buy us out because adding the
Mesh to Office will mean a new set of file formats. And a new set of file
formats means a new round of product upgrade sales on a product worth $30
billion a year to MSFT.'


Or they could just take my idea now and make the Mesh a global
infrastructure for me like they made the Web into the destroyer of
Interactive TV. I will just sit back, build my cottage on Cape Cod and see
which of the tech giants is willing to sign me to an endorsement deal.

Or they could pass completely and maybe a Google or someone else sees an
opportunity to make it into the Office market.
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