Notices by Emacsen (emacsen@emacsen.net)

Hi all!

I'm looking for someone to help design a logo.

Last time I made a call-out on the Fediverse for an artist, and I found a great one.

Now I'm looking specifically for a logo, which has a bunch of constraints (size, complexity, memorability).

If you're a logo designer, ping me! Boosts welcome.

Hey folks,

As I'm working with a non-FLOSS person, I'm realizing something about our community that I think is often missing from our discussions... We're all driven by ethics.

We disagree on which ethics, and how they should be applied, but we're all part of a community, maybe even a family of like-thinking people who value the discussion of ethics themselves.

I love you people. I mean it.

My wife got a new computer...

Microsoft: "You don't need to do this... we can make it work..."

@cjd

This.

I also read some stuff on Reddit about why Protonmail should shut down rather than comply.

The Lavabit strategy is commendable but I think the damage it would do generally would be tremendous if it happened.

I personally believe Proton is striking the best balance they can in this circumstance.

@kravietz @cjd

I must have missed that part. Where did they lie?

@sh @drwho @freakazoid @codewiz

I'm going to keep my response short.

> I don't care about people.

If you don't care about people then you misunderstand the deeper need we have for these technologies.

Encryption must always exist in a sea of encrypted data or else the only ones who use it will be suspect and marginalized.

Only by normalizing the use of these technologies do we gain the protections of being in the crowd and having the support of the public.

An ivory tower is vulnerable.

@freakazoid @drwho

3. Purists are a real problem. Look at this comment on Hacker News in response to my mobile OS review:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299734

This commenter would prefer to tell people *not to use mobile phones* than let them use FLOSS OSes with binary drivers.

These attitudes put people in harm's way.

4. People believe that security = complexity. There's a paper on OCAP as implemented in HP that talks about this issue. It's a serious problem, and PGP absolutely fit into that mindset.

@drwho

Why?

@freakazoid @drwho

I've thought a lot about this over the last 4 years or so, and here are my thoughts in a nutshell (maybe I should write this up):

1. PGP would be simple if it weren't for things like WoT. Without WoT we don't need to worry about signed keys and chains and any of that.

2. We should have just accepted some defaults ala P3P such as approve new keys automatically and made that tunable for extra security by others.

...