
Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity - mapmeldo
https://github.com/mapmeld/profanity65#profanity65
======
exabrial
I could see the US Navy be interested in this technology.

You would be unable to tell an encrypted message from normal discourse with a
sailor.

~~~
sebie
Gah, true. But would that mean that you would be allowed to swear at someone
higher up in the hierarchy, if you were a sailor?

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nielsbjerg
A possible side effect to this, could be avoiding ads in Gmail[1], even though
I fear it to be an urban legend..

1: [http://lifehacker.com/5330642/massacre-gmail-ads-with-
these-...](http://lifehacker.com/5330642/massacre-gmail-ads-with-these-two-
sentences-and-some-tragic-words)

~~~
wcummings
You could also use a paid provider that doesn't show ads

~~~
joering2
Alternatively setup your own free mailserver.

Its always been a puzzle to me why so many people just don't own their own
mailserver, just like you "own" your mail box at your property.

You can use spamassasin which is as good as they come. Problem solved.

~~~
davidgerard
For me, it's because GMail is hands-down the best email client I have EVER
used.

For comparison, I have used at length on a daily basis Pine, Elm, Agent, Mutt,
Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes and GMail. GMail is so
stupidly better I can hardly believe nobody's done a decent fat-client
imitation.

~~~
jordigh
You mean something like mailpile?

[https://www.mailpile.is/](https://www.mailpile.is/)

~~~
dingaling
> You mean something like mailpile?

Looks good as a client but they have some issues with / absence of STARTTLS
support ( for both IMAP and SMTP ) at the beta stage, so I would advise people
against using it outside a controlled or test environment right now

[https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/issues/1092](https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/issues/1092)
[https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/issues/868](https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/issues/868)

And here are the beta notes:

[https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/Release-
Notes-2014...](https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/Release-
Notes-201409-Beta)

"Does not yet recognize whether messages are "new" or already read"

So not quite ready as a drop-in replacement.

------
comboy
Would be fun to switch from profanities to things like "tor NSA bitcoin PRISM
GCHQ Snowden"

~~~
Karunamon
Basically a _M-x spook_ version of the same thing.

Now that's ironic. Using code words supposedly designed to attract automated
monitoring system attention which are actually themselves a form of code to an
encrypted message.

------
timtadh
Despite the banality of this project. I think the idea itself could be
interesting: That is, mapping your encrypted email into authentic looking
text. Sending the text. Then your receiver would need to know that the text is
encrypted (don't tell them in the email). This /might/ be a temporarily
effective dodge against bulk storage of PGP encrypted emails.

~~~
marbu
That is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure that it's actually doable. How
would you do implement it? Moreover it seems to me that it would be likely not
worth the work, because training some ML algorithm to detect this kind of
messages would be always much easier than to design and implement this kind of
mapping in the first place.

~~~
spiritplumber
This would play merry hell with spam filters, so it may not work for email
services that do server side spam blocking (and may get your source email
address tagged as likely spambotted).

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ninguem2
I was amused by the use of git as profanity on github.

~~~
hrasyid
I never heard that used as profanity, is it a regional or an obsolete thing?

~~~
mapmeldo
It's offensive (calling someone an idiot) in British English

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meowface
As far as I can tell, this is mapping each base64 character of the encrypted
blob to one full word? This will obviously multiply the message size a great
deal.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Mapping each base64 char to one word seems rather inefficient. If you have a
longer list of N swears (say 256 because it's the size of a byte, making
encoding easier), you could produce a more efficient base-N encoding, e.g.:

    
    
      var bytes = atob(base64msg),
          swearsMsg = '';
      for (var i = 0; i < bytes.length; i++) {
          newMsg += swears[bytes[i].charAt(0)] + ' ';
      }
    

Of course, it's still less efficient than base64, but it's an improvement. :)

~~~
mapmeldo
yes, originally I was thinking 256. Unfortunately it's difficult to reach 256
without adding hate/vitrol/racist language

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Ah, I see the problem. An awful lot of profanities are ethnic/racial/other
minority slurs.

Perhaps some foreign-language and more obscure (dialectal?) English swear
words could be used? With crowd-sourcing I'm sure we could reach 256.

~~~
mapmeldo
as it was, I needed to make a call for swears and look up some different
dictionaries to fill up this project

People are somewhat reluctant to share their profanity on GitHub

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Make that call here and now on Hacker News, while this still has attention and
is on the front page, and I'm sure you'll get contributions!

I suggest putting at the top-level of this comments section, so it gets more
attention.

------
gavkearney
A nice simple alternative to the pain of setting up and running your own mail
server (and yes, this is painful to monitor, patch, maintain, protect) is to
use a simple email encryption product like Jumble email encryption
([https://jumble.io](https://jumble.io)) which integrates on top of the Gmail
UI providing end to end encryption

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Can a normal PGP client read the email, or do you need Profanity65? As it's
far more fun if the former.

~~~
mapmeldo
for now it is just profanity65 on the command line

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Aw, that's a shame.

Is there no way to produce it in a format a normal GPG client could read?

------
barnaby
Could this work with Mailvelope? Because I prefer to send my PGP mails right
from the google webmail.

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joliv
I must be out of the loop..."dongle" is profane?

~~~
MBlume
I assume it's a reference to "donglegate"

------
barnaby
+1 for using Santorum as one of the dirty words.

------
aluhut
Father Jack Hackett invented that 1995.

