To clarify, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who isn't dumb, and isn't being intentionally obtuse, that Gmail does not provide the level of security I'm suggesting.

So I guess the question is, which are you? An idiot, or an asshole?

Who said those were the things that I wanted?

I'm not sure whether this is what you mean, but I think you may be missing the point with your talk about "real encryption". It is not necessary that no third parties can decrypt your data or messages in order to have encryption be useful. Security is not about absolutes. In almost all real-life security scenarios, there are requirements that you allow certain vulnerabilities, and that you trust some people.

For example, you can say, "With GPG, I don't have to trust anyone. I encrypt a message, and then the only person who can read it is the recipient."

But that's not strictly true. First, you're still trusting the recipient. That recipient could decrypt your message and make it public. Technology doesn't help you there. Additionally, you're trusting the recipient's security. If that recipient has malware that snoops on communications or grabs their private keys, the message can be decrypted. If that recipient has an untrustworthy spouse with access to the recipient's computers and passwords, then your information isn't completely safe.

Beyond that, you're trusting the makers of GPG. You're trusting that they know what they're doing-- that when they say their encryption can't be broken, they're right about that. You're also trusting that those people are not malicious themselves, and haven't left any backdoors available. You might argue that people can audit the code, but then you're just trusting the auditors. Even if you audit the code yourself, you're trusting your own understanding, which relies on the accuracy of your education on the topic.

So I'm getting kind of picky here, but the point is, if you understand security, then you understand that there is no situation without trust and vulnerability. The trick is to understand your vulnerabilities, and to be careful in choosing who to trust.

So if, in order to protect yourself from the data loss that would result in losing your keys, you choose to trust some other third party, that is not necessarily bad security. The trick would be in making sure you understood the vulnerabilities it exposed, and to choose the right people to trust. I'd rather trust Google to secure my email then I would trust the internet in general not to read my unsecured email.

Except that a lot of people really like the flat look. That's why Google, Apple, and Microsoft have all adopted it. They're not ignoring customer feedback, they're chasing after it.

Don't assume that just because you think something is ugly, everyone else agrees.

I just want to interject an opposing point of view here. It's very easy to think that icons don't matter, and that the only thing that matters is some kind of 'objective functionality'. Like, "Windows boots up, it runs the things I want, it has the features I want, therefore icons are irrelevant." I can think of few reasons, off the top of my head, why we shouldn't be so dismissive of design.

First, design matters for the sake of clarity. In the example of icons, you want to make sure that it's clear which image is an icon, and which is some other design element. Which images are clickable? What does that image represent? Those questions are important for UI design. Further, it's important that icons are distinguishable from each other.

As much as possible, you want icons to provide a cue to the user as to what will happen when you click on that icon. If you're going to have one icon for a folder that contains music, and another for a folder that contains images, you don't want them to look close enough that they can be confused. Going further down the line of thinking, if you're going to use the "folder" metaphor, then you probably want to make all 'folders' have folder icons, and have no applications have icons that look like folders. Consistency is also very important in making a UI intuitive and usable.

But all of that is still a bit in the realm of 'practical' and 'functional', and I'd want to make an additional argument that it matters whether a UI is 'pretty'. In short, you have people sitting in a chair looking at these images for 8-12 hours per day, and design aspects of the interface have to have a psychological impact on a person. It would be subtle, in that I would bet small changes have essentially no effect, but still important, in that I would bet that a drastic change in UI 'prettiness' could have a major impact on a person's mood and even productivity over time.

What I meant by that last point is something that I imagine will be pretty controversial: I think that if you'd like to see encryption be more widespread, we not only need very easy software that supports it by default, but some key-management services that guarantees that you access to your keys across platforms, at all times, and that your keys are safe and backed up. Even if it means trusting your private keys to a 3rd party like Lastpass or Google or Microsoft, and they could theoretically decrypt all of your files and communication, most people simply cannot be trusted to secure their own keys. And most people will need support in making sure their keys are set up right, backed up, and revoked in case of a problem.

There are a lot of different ways that this could be handled, but a lot of people who favor GPG seem to like the fact that they can encrypt everything end-to-end, keep hold on their own keys, etc. The idea of trusting a 3rd party to safeguard your key might seem antithetical to the whole idea. However, most people are not so thorough or patient. Most people don't even want to think about keys. They would like encryption, but they want it to be complete transparent, so that everything is encrypted without them noticing, and without danger of data loss. Systems that are not set up that way will not succeed with the general public.

I agree that this is roughly the problem. I don't use GPG to encrypt my email, for example, because nobody I know has anything installed capable of decrypting is or even verifying the signature.

I could tell them to download/install things, and even if they were somewhat willing to give it a try, there's a big problem.

So I'll admit that I haven't bothered with it in years, but I suspect that it hasn't improved dramatically because (and this is part of the problem) usability for these kinds of things never seem to improve. So what I'm going to say may not be 100% accurate, based on past experience, here's a general overview of the sort of thing that happens:

Sorry, I rambled on a bit there, but the point is, there's no real support or infrastructure for this kind of encryption. There's no friendly GUI. It's not built into the applications that people already use, so they have to get multiple plugins, and then other supporting files for those plugins. It's just a mess before you even get to key management, and there's not really a good, iron-clad key management system.

I didn't read it, but I would also guess that part of his reason for calling out programmers might be in order to refute the whole concept of "STEM" as a coherent subject. Like, "I learned to program, so that must mean that I understand particle physics," or "I'm an engineer, so I understand all science in general."

It's funny. On the one hand, you have people screaming bloody murder because Obama is acting like a dictator, giving people healthcare that they don't want, and obviously, as an elected official, the President should follow the will of the people.

On the other hand, he's a spineless pandering lame-duck who is unable to make unpopular choices.

I don't know what to make of it. Ah, except maybe this little statement that you quoted is actually relevant here: "The first time that an attack takes place in which it turns out that we had a lead and we couldn't follow up on it, the public's going to demand answers." So what he's pointing out is that, with all the people demanding privacy and encryption and whatever else, those very same people will be looking for his head on a platter the first time encryption works against them. What he's pointing out here is that people are fickle and inconsistent, and it's foolish to run around satisfying today's whims without considering tomorrows reality.

Turns out he understands the nature of this "making hard choices" than you do.

The whole point of due process is to ensure that yes, this is indeed the guilty party to be punished. Historically, the witch hunt was one popular alternative.

I'm going to echo what others are saying and say that I think your examples are bad. I wouldn't necessarily expect a developer to understand public key encryption unless they had a background of working with public key encryption. You don't necessarily need to understand that sort of thing to make web applications or iOS apps, so it really depends on the kind of development you're doing.

Regarding file encryption, I find the question to be reasonable. If you want to send an encrypted Excel file to someone, it's probably smarter to just use the built-in password protection and encryption. If you can trust that someone has Excel enough to send them an Excel file, then you can assume they have Excel enough to open a password protected file. I would not, however, trust that someone has GPG installed.

Getting back to your question, I generally estimate that roughly 80% of people are bad at their jobs, whatever they do. This is based on a couple decades of anecdotal evidence in the professional world, but it's borne out with the new experience I continue to have, and other people seem to share the experience.

I'm not saying that I don't understand the filesystem. I'm used to it, and I often forget how random and silly it is. My point is that if you try to look at it with fresh eyes, it is a bit silly.

And people tend to do what you've just done, which is to make up an order and arrangement that almost makes sense. But the truth is, the whole thing evolved over time, and almost none of those things were the original intention. As someone pointed out, /usr started out as the place for user home/profile directories, but people kept putting things in there that didn't belong, which lead to the creation of /home and the abandonment of /usr to "another place we put binaries, for some reason."

AFAIK, /var started out as a place for specifically variable-sized files. The idea was that if you had a set of files which might grow very quickly, you might want those on their own drive or partition so they wouldn't overrun the rest of the system. Now, when you get down to it, it's because sort of like the /home directory that doesn't belong to any particular user. Sort of like Windows "ProgramData" folder. And /etc was named that because it was a bit of a catch-all for anything else, but really now it's pretty much a dedicated "system configuration file" location.

But those are just the names, and my point wasn't just "Oh, I don't particularly care for the names". My point was, this is a structure that's grown organically over decades, and it is not really "clean". Do we really need /lib, /var/lib, and /usr/lib? Do we really need /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, and /usr/sbin? My impression is that some of this repetition was created as a bit of a kludgey way to solve some particular problem, and then left in place for compatibility/legacy reasons, and maybe just "we're not sure whether this will break anything, so let's leave it alone." And then, after sitting around that way for a decade, everyone was so used to it that it just seems like "the way it's supposed to be."

And fine, whatever. It works. People are used to it. Why change for the sake of change? But don't pretend like it was an elegant planned organization.