On: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an I...

[minitech]

> The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful

> Email, IRC, HTML, FTP

These protocols are anything but simple. “Be liberal in what you accept” was a huge mistake we’re still paying for. E-mail effectively can’t be made private. There’s lots of room for improvement in open protocols. (Start by not making them text-based, please.)

[walshemj → minitech]

Text has a lot of advantages - I know as I had to debug OSI binary protocols - You had to dump it out to a textual representation.

unless you had spent years and could read the protocol in its binary form

[minitech → walshemj]

That’s

- one advantage, not “a lot”

- very slight, because the tool to convert to and from text gets made

- vastly outweighed by the disadvantages

[walshemj → minitech]

Ever had to debug an osi stack using a printed out x.409 decode ?

[u801e → minitech]

> E-mail effectively can’t be made private.

It definitely can be both in transit and when stored.

[minitech → u801e]

If you run your own mail server and everyone who sends you mail makes a direct encrypted connection to it, sure. That’s not a solution for most people.