On Mon, May 10, 1999 at 02:58:21PM +1200, Steven Jones wrote:
>
> I think the issue of snooping or not is a bit of a non-issue for personal
> use, if your that worried there are some basic encryption packages for
> emails that can self extract with a password. For more serious use the
> new GNU package that allows VPN between linux boxes is cheap and
> effective. Surely if your that worried you wouldnt rely on adsl you would
> install a VPN anyway so not even the ISP can do anything?
>
I, personally, am rather taken with the argument that encryption is the
equivalent of an envelope on a snail mail. That it is better for all
persons to encrypt all material at all times so as not to indicate anything
unusual on the probably rare occaisions that they (or others) may wish to.
For this purpose ADSL is no worse than any other method of implementing a
VPN or any other tunnel arrangement. I just want my public IP to be directly
accesable to my FreeBSD box - not that I am likely to do as I say despite
the fact that unencrypted digital data has got to require the least effort
to automagically check for anything subversive.
>
> >For most people, why bother encrypting. For some, it may be worth it.
> >Only
> >the individual can decide. What's it worth? And remember, although it
> i>s *possible*
> >someone may be looking at what you are typing, it is *unlikely*.
>
>
> Then lets take the consumer market, if anyone should actually want into
> your computer, B&E (breaking and entering) to the average family home
> cant be that hard.
How many people still leave a key under the matt or in the letterbox in case
they lose theirs. Sure most of us have nothing we consider to be of interest
to anyone else sitting on our systems and we're probably correct. However
one of the problems with comuter technology is the ease of use that can be
built into a cracking tool. How many people pick up a copy of the BackOriface
client - it comes as standard in the ports collection of FreeBSD
What i have difficulty with is the occaisions on which people who have opened
a mail message from an unkown source proceed to complain about inadequate
protection.
>
> There, hopefully I have flogged this to death :)
A little more whipping never does too much Harm
--kit
now what was that PGP passphrase?

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Received on Mon May 10 17:03:51 1999