STEED - Usable end-to-end encryption

[Robert J. Hansen]

On 10/17/11 5:21 PM, Jerome Baum wrote:
> So enabling _Enigmail_'s "Send 'OpenPGP' header" option is difficult now?

Unquestionably, indubitably, beyond doubt, *yes*.  You are assuming a
level of computer literacy that is beyond 95% of the computing public.
Remember, under 10% of the computing public knows how to use Ctrl-F to
search through a document. [*]

Speaking personally about Enigmail, I routinely get complaints about
Enigmail being broken from people who don't have GnuPG installed,
complaints about Enigmail being too hard to uninstall from people who
have never installed Enigmail (they thought that just by downloading the
.XPI the file was installed automatically), and so forth.  All of us on
the Enigmail user-help team have these stories.  I'll eat my own hat if
the GnuPG devs don't have their own.

Users aren't stupid, not by any stretch of the imagination.  Some of the
worst offenders have been obviously intelligent people who have been
extremely irate about Enigmail, on the grounds that "I'm a freaking
*physician* and I can't understand this, how do you expect regular users
to?!"  To them, all I can say is -- it's not about innate intelligence:
it's about whether you possess the skill of computer literacy.  We live
in an immensely technological society, and very few people are computer
literate.



[*]
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/