• 1 Post
  • 9 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Fax isn’t encrypted. What keeps it alive is just inertia.

    As for why your insurance company won’t take emailed photo, that probably has more to do with whatever system your insurance is using for their backend.

    Email content can be end to end encrypted by GPG and S/MIME as well as through a few other standards. Email in transit can be (but not always is) encrypted via TLS.

    The reason encryption is not default is because (I think) of backwards compatibility. E-mail originated at a time when almost nothing electronic was ever encrypted, including the username and password you used to log into a system with. Most of the encryption we use of today has simply been “bolted on” to standards that were already in place at the time and it did take a few tries to get it right.

    When the internet was first getting started, few people, if anyone, thought it would become as invasive (possibly the wrong word) as it has become. Everyone on the net knew each other. They were friends, why would they ever need to hide anything from each other. /s

    That and the early systems couldn’t really spare the processing power for encrypting and decrypting things.



  • Not familiar with the site, but it sounds like some one uploaded something directly related either to WMDs or the manufacture of drugs. Otherwise I suspect they would have used the provisions related to copyright infringement.

    Knowledge related to both are publicly available, and the tech is simple enough that even a southern high schooler could build something truely nasty, but if it is too directly related…. Well, the people that do the day to day work of the government aren’t completely stupid. The best they can do, though, is try to keep the knowledge out of sight, out of mind.