Subject: Re: encryption
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Mon Apr 23 2001 - 15:00:28 CDT
leonard> If that were the case, then the user should be using PGP/GPG
leonard> or something similar. There is no reason to provide built-in
leonard> functionality if this is all the user wants as there are MUCH
leonard> better external solutions, especially things like PGPDisk and
leonard> encrypted file systems.
I certainly agree with that at a technical level, but there are two
only-vaguely-technical points that nag to have some level of minimal
integration:
1. Parity-match with other WPs which have a built-in protection
scheme.
2. Ease-of-use for people who want to open a document in an already
running AbiWord session. Sure, you can step aside from AbiWord,
decrypt the file and then open the scratch file in AbiWord, but
that's less convenient than having AbiWord know the file is encrypted,
calling something else to crack it into a scratch file, and
remembering to call the something else to put it back in the encrypted
file on save. To a geek, these are the same, but to a non-geek,
they're a world apart. (Probably also an exponential difference in
the probability of leaving a plaintext copy laying around.)
So, perhaps we are arguing in the same direction, except that I'm
arguing that "minimal integration" is better than "full integration"
and you're arguing that "no integration" is better than "full
integration".
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Apr 23 2001 - 14:59:28 CDT