Re: The introduction problem and signatures, was Thinking outside the box

On 18 Mar 2013, at 17:51, John R. Levine wrote:

> Since S/MIME has been around for 15 years, and is implemented in most 
> MUAs including the one you use, why don't we do that?  What would have 
> to change so we do?

People.

Someone has to say it directly: the overwhelming bulk of end users are 
unwilling (and perhaps to a substantial degree unable) to apply the 
necessary sort of rigorous mental effort to use PGP or S/MIME in a 
consistently sound manner.

More direct but probably unfair: end users chronically demonstrate in 
aggregate that they are a mob of idiots who would rather tolerate 
insecurity than think.

A smaller problem is that a small geeky subset of users would need to 
abandon the brittle tactic of gating mailing lists in and out of a 
one-user news server, or else they'd need to start signing their news 
posts in a gateway-stable manner.