Instead of dark scariness emphasise safety, security, protection, freedom, etc.
that's because they think email is already private. They don't understand that it's the electronic equivalent of printing their conversations on billboards and hope nobody will actually look at them. As soon as you demonstrate with a simple sniffer, they are outraged.
We just need "Firesheep for email" and then demand for privacy will explode.
What's interesting is that it's only liberty minded tech people working on the problem. The next email system will be tailored to protect the user because that's what the designers care about, rather than the interests of other organizations, for example serving legal papers electronically.
> PFS for message objects, as the description above suggests, is far more difficult, and contrary to the nature of email.
It recommends just rotating public keys every few days with a paranoid mode. A much better solution is to implement the Axolotl Ratchet pioneered by Open Whisper Systems for TechSecure:
https://www.whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/
https://github.com/trevp/axolotl/wiki
With Axolotl Ratchet, you get:
* forward secrecy - disclosure of private keys doesn't let an attacker in the future go back and read encrypted communication
* future secrecy - disclosure of ephemeral private keys doesn't disclose (much) future content
I also get the feeling from a glance reading the spec that way too much trust is being placed on service providers. That there is even such a category as "trustful" where the server has access to your private keys is a huge red flag and that was exactly the problem with lavabit: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/lavabit-critique/
EDIT: Nanjing prices? Seriously Google autocorrect?
But can we please change name from 'dark' to something like 'secure, encrypted etc'? Dark inherently sounds negative, at least in my part of the world.
No reason not to use the same tactics the government uses. Patriot Act? Ha. This frames any attempts to thwart the security by the government as anti-freedom. The "liberty mail" recommendation in here was good too :D
And please, don't even try using the silly X.0 naming, as some tech-ignorant journalists started doing over a decade ago.
Besides the naming thing, I wish them the best, as I hope that this will spread and become a new standard, even with the masses.
I've only glanced over less than half of the spec so far, but I'm not convinced of the design just yet. For starters, I'm not sure I fully understand the trust model, or even the baseline limitations on things like one-to-many emails, key exchange, PFS. Before jumping straight into packet formats and field layouts, I want to read more about the basic operational model.
While in the consumer arena Gmail and other ad / user profile supported business' will never adopt this as it limits their access to valuable user data.
Name it after Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Locke or similar.
Interestingly, a previous HN discussion also suggested a name change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157922
(The abbreviation DIME, Dark Internet Mail Environment, sometimes mentioned is also terrible. Hiding 'dark' with an abbreviation isn't enough)
The chances of this project succeeding or failing has nothing to do with the name. There are much bigger barriers which they need to overcome.
I do like putting names on the front page though.
