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1997-04-15 - Introducing newbies to encryption (was: Re: anonymous credit)

Header Data

From: Eric Nystrom <enystrom@aurora.nscee.edu>
To: Toto <toto@sk.sympatico.ca>
Message Hash: b13d7b2e28d9f1e0ad8098fac80074f74fc410022ea305dd8360a616271659da
Message ID: <Pine.CVX.3.91.970414185426.5427B-100000@aurora.nscee.edu>
Reply To: <3351CD43.5BB3@sk.sympatico.ca>
UTC Datetime: 1997-04-15 02:51:30 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 19:51:30 -0700 (PDT)

Raw message

From: Eric Nystrom <enystrom@aurora.nscee.edu>
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 19:51:30 -0700 (PDT)
To: Toto <toto@sk.sympatico.ca>
Subject: Introducing newbies to encryption (was: Re: anonymous credit)
In-Reply-To: <3351CD43.5BB3@sk.sympatico.ca>
Message-ID: <Pine.CVX.3.91.970414185426.5427B-100000@aurora.nscee.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>   There isn't a week that goes by without my receiving an email from
> someone who thanks me for the benefit they have gained by my introducing
> them to encryption or anonymous remailers, yet I doubt that many of them

Toto hints at some issues here that I've been wondering about for a while 
now.  What are some effective strategies for securely introducing 
"newbies" to the world of cryptography and anon remailers?  I'm 
currently attending college, which means that my peers all use email very 
regularly -- a ripe environment for use of cryptography in email, I should 
think.  However, nearly everyone's email accounts are on a central Unix 
machine, which brings up many issues about the (lack of) security of 
private keys on multiuser machines.

My question is this -- is it better for the crypto community in the long 
run to have more people using encryption, but perhaps insecurely, or 
to have fewer users whose communications are more cryptographically secure?

-Eric

--
Thus the time may have come to abandon the cool, measured language of
technical reports -- all that talk of "perturbations" and "surprises" and
"unanticipated events" -- and simply blurt out: "Holy shit!  Ten thousand
years!  That's incredible!"
			-- Kai Erikson, _A_New_Species_of_Trouble_, 1994.

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