[OTR-users] OTR file transfers (again)

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 11:55 PM, Paul Wouters <paul at cypherpunks.ca> wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jun 2010, Lance W. Haverkamp wrote:
>
>> Forgive me for pointing-out the obvious but, "There's an app for that":
>> http://gnupg.org
>>
>> Just in case we have new people on the list, the easy way to securely
>> transfer (or transport) is to use a free Open PGP application like
>> gnupg.  I realize most of us already use it daily.
>
> OTR is meant for endusers, and is meant to be as transparent as possible for
> them. Gnupg is a disaster with its options nad key distribution issues for
> those without a CS degree.

Absolutely.  If all crypto is PGP then only crypto-fetishists will
make use of encryption.

I have only two regular contacts that I know could receive PGP
encrypted messages from me and wouldn't be annoyed by it, and one of
them is the woman I live with.  ... and it's inconvenient enough that
I don't use it even where I know I could.

By contrast, in the past 20 days I've communicated many times with 28
people via IM. 100% of these conversations have used OTR. Only a few
of my IM contacts don't use OTR.  Few of these people are personally
interested in cryptography, though many have macs.

One of the funny things about privacy is that we tend to undervalue it
greatly until it's too late. We also under value other people's
privacy, which means that even though _I_ want crypto it's hard to
choose to use it because the other people I talk to often don't care
much.

OTR delivers on the dream of cryptography being available to people in
an impactful way that PGP never could.

Now we just need to bring OTR's benefits to more people and cover
other realtime communications modes (chats, file transfers)... expand
them to provide some resistance to traffic analysis... lots of
interesting and important work to do, hard work but work that provides
a real benefit especially to those who will never realize the benefit
that they are receiving.