Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by defend 980 days ago
It's only impractical if you actually require end users to understand and apply all of these technologies. It's a lot more tractable if they're abstracted away.

The fact is that developers very (very) rarely have to interface directly with TLS or the Signal protocol, yet billions of non-technical users implicitly use them in our browsers and via Signal or WhatsApp.

In my view, the challenge in the adoption of secure/private-by-design tech is the simplicity and usability of the interfaces and the capabilities these tools provide.

We need secure tools to compete on capability in order to garner mass usage. Without (significant) feature superiority there's little reason for users to make the switch. I'm actively trying to solve some of these problems at Backbone [0]; aiming to build a usable, secure experience for end users and a simple, robust end-to-end-encryption interface for developers.

[0] https://backbone.dev/

1 comments

> Without (significant) feature superiority

Problem is – if you can't trust any server, end-to-end encryption naturally often leads to feature inferiority in the context of multi-device usage.