
Whoever wins the White House, this year's big loser is email - dredmorbius
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/technology/whoever-wins-the-white-house-this-years-big-loser-is-email.html?ref=business
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hood_syntax
Every problem in this article is solved by things people simply don't know
about or don't want to use (PGP etc). Hopefully this may mark the start of a
slow turning point in the public consciousness...

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yolesaber
The worst part is the article didn't even attempt to bring that sort of
material up or evangelize encryption or other security techniques. It's just
more FUD from the Times

~~~
hood_syntax
Very true. They present the problem and say "doesn't that suck", leaving it at
that.

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mherrmann
I don't understand why this is on the front page. The article has a catchy
headline, but none of the points it makes actually substantiate its claim that
email is doomed. It is possible to make email secure (eg with PGP), so we
don't have to abandon for security. What's more, everybody uses email. Does
the author really think that many people will just abandon it? A Slack account
could have been hacked just as well as a Gmail account. And if the admins were
so professional that they would have configured Slack to "forget" messages,
then they might as well have implemented better security for email. What's
more, who says that Slack actually deletes messages?

Catchy but lacking in real substance.

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sametmax
I really don't see what's the author's conclusion has anything to do with the
White House. Obviously the guy wants to end email, like 1000 people try during
the last decade, and doesn't realize it's not gona happen. Email is a
resilient distributed widely supported and used open standard. Nothing is
closed to it for communications, the closed farms such as slacks and whatsapp
are handy, but they are centralized, non standard, company controlled tools
requiring much more resources to dispatch messages and tend to lead to
information overload.

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yellowapple
They key advantage to email over other systems - one which HRC's email problem
made plainly apparent, yet the article seemed to ignore - is that it's
decentralized. Sure, plenty of people use Gmail or some other provider, but
plenty of others (myself included) run their own.

The article also seems to entirely miss the historical context by suggesting
things like Signal as "what HRC should've used in the first place" \- never
mind that even its predecessor only came about 6 years ago, while email has
been used for half a century.

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marcoperaza
Slightly different issue, but it seems that we're too dependent on technology
in general. In the event of a major conflict with a great power, our
technology infrastructure is likely the first thing to go. As things stand
now, that would be a death blow. I could see the military being prepared to
chug along, but it seems unlikely that much else would.

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codemac
Centralization is about control. For executive administrations, this is
probably a good thing for them internally, but for most of my own
communication I want my own control.

This article makes me sad because I think there is a great defense for
protocols like IRC / XMPP / Email where the resulting messages are fully
distributed.

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meira
News companies know how to kill themselves, advertising communication apps for
free, locking users far away from their websites. They should investir heavily
in open protocol and investigate more tech monopolies.

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jsprogrammer
Hit piece on fact gathering tools with meme drops.

Nice one NYT. Flagged.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's a report from the real world showing some quite salient real-world
consequences of deeply grounded faults within email.

It emphasises the impacts rather than the mechanisms, but for a mass-
circulation general-interest publication, that's an appropriate pitch.

You might care to consider that _The New York Times_ seems to be souring on
email.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Personally, I think we are better off with the DNC's emails and any other
communications from the peoples' leaders.

>You might care to consider that The New York Times seems to be souring on
email.

You might be able to infer that I already have from my characterization of the
article as a hit piece.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'd like to see an inverse relationship between power and privacy -- the more
power you have (political, financial, commercial, religious, cultural), the
lower your degree of privacy protection. Also loss for gross antisocial
actions (e.g., crime).

But that would be mediated, regulated, and uniform, _not_ capriciously applied
at the will and/or luck of hackers trying to break into services.

Which is what this story is about. It's not that it's Clinton's campaign,
specifically, that's been hacked. It's that this can happen to _any_ of us, at
_any_ time.

Data are liability.

"An exceptionally peculiar aspect of digital data is that, while it may remain
in the boxes and cages provided for it, it's got a notable tendency to find
itself liberated. Often without warning, and not detected for days, weeks,
months, or longer, afterward (as in this case). In the real world we've got
friction, especially associated with data processing and transfer. In digital
form, far less so. Sometimes friction is good."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hn4r5/on_the_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hn4r5/on_the_media_asks_what_can_we_learn_from_ashley/)

Dan Kaminsky's response to the Fappening, an earlier incident, was absolutely
dead spot on:

[http://dankaminsky.com/2014/09/03/not-safe-for-not-
working-o...](http://dankaminsky.com/2014/09/03/not-safe-for-not-working-on)

You Don’t Necessarily Know When You’ve Been Hit, Let Alone What’s Gone: A
hugely underappreciated aspect. Paul Vixie's had similar comments along these
lines, see "Internet Security Marketing: Buyer Beware":

[http://www.circleid.com/posts/20150420_internet_security_mar...](http://www.circleid.com/posts/20150420_internet_security_marketing_buyer_beware)

The problem with email is that far too much data exist in far too many places
with far too little protections, and for which every single last email (and
_how many_ are sent a year?) becomes a potential ticking time bomb. _That_ is
why email really needs to be buried.

I'll miss it. It's been quite a good and long-term friend. But it's dead.

