Re: Fwd: Re: [Cryptography] Encryption opinion

i mean, even with the good Cap apps that have shipped, i might hope
that they really did do a good job, but we just don't know until
enough random users have used them.

> So there have been millions of
> person-years of work applied towards making them as user-friendly as
> possible, and training users to accept the remaining shortcomings as just
> being "how things work".

personally i strongly believe it is mostly the latter rather than the
former. anybody who takes a step back from computer technology and
doesn't see it as one mostly giant car wreck is not to be trusted.

no matter how much even good people try to fix it, they are just using
a spoon on a mountain of poo.

> But also, we can't just say, "Our model is much cleaner so it has *got* to
> be better than that awful mess over there." No matter how much we (me
> included!) may believe it.

there's no such thing as "intuitiveness" [1]. there's familiarity,
there's habit, there's brainwashing, there's dominant paradigms.

so it is an uphill battle. maybe it is best that it first gets good
footholds in the code behind the scenes, and then can maybe some day
moves into the user facing ui. i mean, other than in cool / research
projects.

[1] was it Alan Cooper? was it Jef Raskin at his house while showing
off his Humane Interface? can't recall. probably many good usability
people have made the observation :-)