Thunderbird is not dead at all, it's just been relegated to community maintenance mode (like SeaMonkey has always been). There was a lot of press blather about how that amounted to the "death" of Thunderbird, meanwhile its users are happily downloading security updates with the occasional new feature, and continuing to use a relatively stable program. Considering what they're doing to Firefox, I think this is a good thing.

Both of these are surely compromised by the NSA by now. Certainly SSL is.

That is a really good point. The move to closed systems is a disease that is killing the internet.

This argument hasn't changed in twenty years, in spite of massive improvements in ease of use. Apparently, it's impossible to make it "easy enough" for the average user. I think this means ease of use actually has very little to do with the problem. The problem is with the average user's priorities. People value convenience more highly than privacy, and as long as people don't change those values, encryption will never take on. Typically people will only change their priorities under threat of dire and immediate consequences for them personally. Everyone will lock their door so they don't get burglarised. But email privacy is too abstract and invisible still. It's going to take some huge cases of identity theft, with real monetary loss, to get people to change â" and then people will probably sooner abandon email than use email encryption. Finally, the kind of convenience that you propose necessarily will render the whole thing insecure. Letting strangers (like Google) manage your private keys defeats the whole purpose.

How does this utter shit get modded up to +4? Heartbleed is an OpenSSL bug. It's got jack to do with Linux (or any other OS). That is just the worst in the parent message. Everything else is misleading as well.

Much like Digg did. How sad.

Another good reason I found on a relevant mailing list thread is that testing on a large variety of architectures often exposes bugs that remain under the radar otherwise (but may still come to bite users as security holes). That large variety is only available by supporting legacy architectures.

Yup, that's 2005 alright. Or even 2004 and 2003.

Hardly inspires confidence that they haven't updated the description in nearly a decade.

Adobe Reader and Flash for Linux are GTK-based.

I would argue the opposite is more likely to happen. Most parents are not qualified to properly interpret these data, and over-monitoring can cause excessive anxiety and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

David A. Wheeler addresses this question in his dissertation.

Spam in email is a solved problem because spam filters have become convenient and more than good enough.

Cryptographic signing solved the header forgery problem a long time ago, and the major providers all add signatures to the headers.

What? There is no TCP/IP monoculture. There are many different TCP/IP implementations. All of them interoperate without problems because there is a well-defined standard. That is not monoculture, that is standardization. They are fundamentally different things.

You're wrong. When I posted his last post was hours old and he had posted an update thanking people for the great AMA and ending it.

How typical of Slashdot that some AC gets upvoted to +5 for blatantly lying.

This is bad news. Another step on the way to browser monoculture, with all the problems that can bring. Next thing Firefox will switch to Webkit and we'll have only Webkit browsers and IE left.

Slashdot is late to the game. Don't bother posting there. Gates is long done answering questions.