Re: [therightkey] DNSNMC Subject line is stupid

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

Part of my trouble with this thread is that the original proposal was
presented in the way it was.

It might well be that there is a better way to do PKI than the approach
Kohnfelder described in his master's thesis. But I don't think that the
person who comes up with it will be describing the existing system as
'deprecated' before a single line of code is deployed.


I am currently working on podcasts to describe my new approach to a general
audience because getting any PKI deployed depends on buy in from people
that are far outside this group and the IETF and even the techie community.

We are not going to get change until we have real people appearing in Apple
Stores and Microsoft stores asking how they can get usable secure email to
protect them from [The russian mafia/ GRU/ Iran/ China/ NSA]. If Google had
physical stores in malls, I would include them in that list.


But we are not going to get people hassling for deployment until there is a
scheme that is really right and not just 'good enough' for a group of
highly motivated ideologues like ourselves.

Part of the problem with PGP and S/MIME is that people just want it to work
so much that they blind themselves to the obvious defects let alone the
less obvious ones. The result looks like a Palm Treo, not an iPhone. You
could use the Palm to surf the Web and send email and it kinda worked
without crashing more than six times a day. But people at Palm never did
understand why that was so much of a problem and they never made much of an
effort to make the phone really right because web on your phone is so cool
it doesn't really need to be perfect... right?

When someone is so infatuated by their own idea that they describe it as
'deprecating' the existing system before they have even tried it in the
real world then I don't think it is going to get very far.


Anyway, I am thinking we should have international cryptography day
sometime in early summer. Give some time to get code wrote.