That’s the reason we have to still use fax machines right?
I know there are ways to do encryption like PGP on your message directly or I think email sent over TLS? But that isn’t the default right and that’s why I can’t send a picture of my license to the insurance company directly over email?
Generally, fax is still considered more secure. It’s a direct connection. It can’t be intercepted without physical access to the phone line. Encryption can be broken and not just brute force, which is always possible given enough time. The more common issue is poor implementation and insecure storage of keys. And the way email works, there’s no opportunity to exchange keys like with SSL/TLS. So you have to find a way to get your public key to the recipient in a way that they can trust it before you send the message and they have to store it securely so it doesn’t get tampered with. Email just isn’t designed to support that kind of thing.
It’s kind of true. But so many places are replacing physical fax lines with VOIP or even just automatically sending the fax to email via a copier, it’s hardly more secure in my experience
A lot of VOIP is local. So a phone line carries the signal to the office building, and a modem converts it to be emailed or whatever. At least in secure places like in healthcare or finance. On the consumer side, VOIP that you get from say a cable company, also doesn’t travel over the internet. It travels on the same local lines to the cable company, but from there it takes a different route. True the middle might still be digital, but it’s not using internet infrastructure. That would be a waste because there’s no need to be able to send that signal to any given device on the internet. There are a lot fewer landline phone numbers than internet connected devices.
Not if you live on the other side of the world. Sure tapping a phone line is easy. But physical presence it required. It would be pretty suspicious if 10,000 people were digging in your yard, but not so hard to imagine 10,000 people targeting an email account that is likely to have lucrative secrets.
PGP is the solution, but the problem is, that noone likes to use it. Or it’s “too complicated”, because it’s another password they need to remember. Or, whatever. It would literally solve nearly all of the problems we currently have with emai 🤷 No more spam, because you could filter out all unsigned or untrusted mails, no problems when your email account is hacked, because the mails are encrypted on the server. No Mailserver admin spying on your mails…
Let’s be honest, PGP has major usability issues. I mean, a standard that just tells you to “figure it out” with regards to key exchange? And while I’m sure there’s plenty of people who’ve tried to make central services to handle the key exchange part, none have actually gotten any significant usage or seemingly even agreement.
I don’t think it would much reduce spam, though. If you use email in a closed environment of sorts, you already can reject email from people you don’t know. If they use trusted email providers and you require SPF and DKIM (as most modern webmail does), spoofing isn’t really a concern, at least not if you have an allowlist of senders. And if you’re not in a closed environment, presumably you’d have to share your public key very widely, making it accessible to spammers too.
Anything we want to add to the e-mail system has to be a backwards-compatible with the older system. Otherwise, few people will actually use it.
I’m sure there is a much more sophisticated explanation from the lawyers’ end, but more fundamentally, I’m pretty sure that encryption is not part of the basic protocol. Privacy is not actually a basic feature of the internet, so something as basic as email does not include it. Anything that uses email to do private coms would have to be referred to as ________ over email.
PGP/GPG has been around as an option since the 90s, but it’s rather clunky to implement and you need to know how to keep your private key safe. So, the problem has long been functionally “solved” for the competent, and there we stay; you and anyone you want to talk to privately will always be free (possibly not legal, but free) to generate a key pair each, share your public keys, and then talk privately using those keys for as long as you can keep your private keys safe.
And really, I personally find the idea fairly silly, that some company is going to keep my key for me and respect my privacy. No, if someone wants to keep your private key for you, they want to know your business, all of it. You don’t ask to hold anyone’s keys anymore than you ask to hold their johnson for them when they piss. I do use some corporate encryptions, signal for things I don’t want the DEA to know about mainly. Oh also FUCK THE DEA
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