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For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

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40hz:
Interesting article by Jordan Pearson who argues that the time may have arrived where we need to seriously consider abandoning e-mail in favor of a 'designed to be secure from the ground up' chat paradigm. Food for thought. Even if chat isn't the answer, something seriously needs to be done about our present e-mail technology. Simply bolting encryption on after the fact is a stopgap "solution" at best.


The Biggest Lesson from the Sony Hack? We Need to Replace Email

by Jordan Pearson Contributor, Canada
December 19, 2014 // 03:50 PM EST

The most striking discovery of the Sony hack wasn’t that studio head Amy Pascal had an intensely personal meltdown or that the feds were collaborating with the company on the ending of The Interview—it was that all of these things existed together in one, utterly defenseless spot, just waiting to be hacked and leaked.

We use email for everything now: newsletters, professional collaboration, and jokes to grandma. But email wasn’t designed for the age of hackers that can—apparently, god help us—bend skittish corporations to their will.

It might be time to consider a world with less email, where secure chat apps that can send messages to each other rule online communication. Unless you want to leave a paper trail, that is. <more>
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 8)

Deozaan:
Bonus side effect: No spam!(?)

Renegade:
Yes. Email is broken. It was always broken. It was designed with small networks in mind, and not what we have now.

I used to rant about email being broken for many years, then gave up. But it's nice to see that some people are noticing just how broken it is.

Only something entirely new will work.

For something interesting to look at, check out Bitmessage.

ewemoa:
Email addresses and email being used as the SOLE link for authentication -- no good.  An appropriate (devil is in the details) alternative would be welcome -- one that does not require the use of email for starters.

Innuendo:
Well, email could be reasonably secure if everyone would take up the time to set up secure authentication in their email clients and use things like GPG to encrypt and digitally sign all correspondence.

However, we are a species who, generally speaking, didn't care we had flashing clocks on our VCRs for *years* so...none of what I just said is probably going to happen. :)

As for the replacement of email, though, text messaging has all but done that.

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