Re: Seahorse re: 2.4 Proposed Modules

[Jacob Perkins <jap1 users sourceforge net>]

On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 11:58, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I had some faint memory of research showing that PGP was largely
> useless in the real world due to UI issues; google turned it up:
> 
> http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sec99/whitten.html
> 

The main problem seems to be that if a user who knows nothing about
crypto tries to use it, they will probably fail or worse. However, the
same could be said about a lot of things.

> What would be awesome (and a first for any OS) would be to integrate
> GPG in such a way that it just happens whenever it makes sense, and
> your stuff is all secure by default.

It seems to me that transparent crypto is something that would have to
be done on the filesystem or mua level. For example, evo could check if
there are gpg keys for the intended recipients, and if so encrypt
appropriately. Doing it transparently would remove the possibility of
user failures due to ignorance.  But for those that want to manage their
(gpg) crypto setup, seahorse can make it easier.
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