On Mon, 06 Nov 2000 14:54:38 -0500 Omri Schwarz ocschwar@MIT.EDU wrote:
The motivation I have behind asking (which can quickly drift off-topic for this list) is that the main reason behind the failure of widespread email encryption is human factors.
True. More simply, given that most email is of a casual nature, there is little to no return on invested effort for casual users. They fail so see any benefit from crypting or signing their "Funny joke" messages.
Therefore, the right amount of social engineering will be the driving force in getting people to encrypt email.
You first need to create an awareness with them of the problem you wish to solve with encryption. Nobody, and that encludes me, is going to go thru the bother of genning keys, getting them signed, auditing and tracking them, and generally attempting to be responsible here unless I've got some jolly good reason to, unless I've got some problem that going thru all that hassle solves.
If a mailing list exploder like what I described is available, people will learn not to 1. share TMI type information on any other kind of mailing list, or 2. share proprietary discussions on any other kind of mailing list.
Uhh, yeah.
So, a list like this will 1. have no Web archiving, 2. no news gatewaying, and 3. rapidly expiring mailing list keypairs, Just In Case (TM).
This depends on what you are attempting to protect and why. In the case of trade secret protections, web archiving may be a significant plus if you can also audit and control access to those archives (S/Key etc).
There is no one model fits all.
I'm asking this on the Mailman forum because Mailman would be easier to GPG-enable than Majordomo (just as eating ice cream is more pleasant than root canal..), and because apart from that, I am not picky on how this should be done, hence would be willing to fork Mailman to warp it for this end.
I'd argue that the crypted list problem is actually orthogonal to the MLM software used. The MLM never needs to be involved. You can involve it if you really want to, but there's not much benefit to doing so.
-- J C Lawrence Home: claw@kanga.nu ---------(*) Other: coder@kanga.nu http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Keys etc: finger claw@kanga.nu --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--