Consumer education is indeed a difficult and frustrating process. My hope would be to focus on the first part of the excerpted comment from Bret: "So I see a real need to get apps in the hands of users that can handle security in an easy, transparent way..." Sometimes this is a better approach, perhaps involving consumers at the "front end," than creating something in isolation, then expecting consumers to learn how to "properly" use it. -----Original Message----- From: John L [mailto:johnl@iecc.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2007 9:23 AM To: Bret Fausett Cc: Brendler, Beau; NA Discuss Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] Conversation with Dave Piscitello
So I see a real need to get apps in the hands of users that can handle security in an easy, transparent way and then to educate users about what the technology is, what it means to them, and how to use it.
I agree, but this has been a problem for at least a decade; S/MIME has been around that long, most but as you note not all mail clients handle it, and how many people use it? Not many. This is particularly discouraging since S/MIME has been supported for many years in popular programs including Outlook, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird, and the support is good, once you're configured, it's at most one click to sign or validate a message. If after all this time Blackberry doesn't find S/MIME work handling, it shows how little mindshare it's got. Given the long and discouraging history of efforts to get people to use computers more securely, before the ALAC jumps down this rathole I would want to understand why we think we could succeed where so many have failed in the past. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. *** Scanned