The 2-sentence gist of it sounds a lot like Tor. What are people’s concept of how will that would work for email? With Tor it seems like that model works well because connections are pretty transient but something email feels more…static.
History is cyclical I guess? Edit: not that I’d expected to get much in terms of technical details from an article on time.com; it’s likely that this is significantly different in ways that the article didn’t bother to go into.
It just seems totally misguided to me to try and retrofit something, because no matter how many layers get built, you’re either going to be talking to some SMALLNUM other tinfoil paranoids; or you’re interacting with SMTP. In the former case, you’re just signaling that you’re interesting to your adversaries. Ultimately, this is looking for a technical solution to a political problem, and that’s not exactly a fruitful space to be building your hopes in.
Not a lot of detail here, but it seems this will work best with large email providers, ironically. Anybody who can see an email delivered to my server will know exactly who it’s for. “Somebody at gmail” is only obscure for large values of somebody, but then you have the same problem as today: all the email channeled through one point.
Doesn’t someone come along to change email forever once every six months or so?
The 2-sentence gist of it sounds a lot like Tor. What are people’s concept of how will that would work for email? With Tor it seems like that model works well because connections are pretty transient but something email feels more…static.
It actually reminded me more of the anonymous remailer system the Cypherpunks developed in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk_anonymous_remailer
History is cyclical I guess? Edit: not that I’d expected to get much in terms of technical details from an article on time.com; it’s likely that this is significantly different in ways that the article didn’t bother to go into.
It just seems totally misguided to me to try and retrofit something, because no matter how many layers get built, you’re either going to be talking to some SMALLNUM other tinfoil paranoids; or you’re interacting with SMTP. In the former case, you’re just signaling that you’re interesting to your adversaries. Ultimately, this is looking for a technical solution to a political problem, and that’s not exactly a fruitful space to be building your hopes in.
Not a lot of detail here, but it seems this will work best with large email providers, ironically. Anybody who can see an email delivered to my server will know exactly who it’s for. “Somebody at gmail” is only obscure for large values of somebody, but then you have the same problem as today: all the email channeled through one point.