Scrambling the email pathways.

Email providers are now locking down and securing our emails from prying eyes.  Google’s Gmail is taking the lead, Today much of the email mail traffic is sent using secure encryption between servers. The problem is that the emails stored on the servers and on the end users computers themselves is not encrypted.

In an analysis released this week, Google said 65 percent of the messages sent by Gmail users are encrypted when delivered, meaning the recipient’s provider also supports the encryption needed to establish a secure connection for transmission of the message. (Establishing a secure communication channel requires both e-mail providers to exchange encryption keys beforehand. Even if an e-mail provider tries to encrypt messages by default, messages will be sent in the clear to providers that do not support encryption.) Gmail has more than 425 million accounts worldwide and was an early adopter of e-mail encryption.

Only 50 percent of incoming messages are encrypted, Google says, but that’s up from 27 percent on December 11, 2013. And the numbers could get even better as more providers offer encryption by default to their customers. Charlie Davis, a Comcast spokesman, says the Internet service provider is working on it and plans to “gradually ramp up encryption with Gmail in the coming weeks.”

The question one might ask is who are the providers encrypting from? These transfers could not be observed by the typical hacker, The data on the transmitting or receiving servers themselves isn’t encrypted (yet ), and would make an easier target.  The only reason for intercepting these communication is for a very broad sweep of information such as in the NSA/Snowden exposé, and the only people that they are hiding the info from is the US government.

Google is moving ahead with its end-to-end program which will support encryption GPG type services as  a Chrome extension  from the browser.I suppose its better than nothing, but using Javvascript and storing keyes in memory won’t make thisthe most secure system.  I use Thunderbird and open GPG tools.

This is my public key.if anyone is interested.

 

About Liberty

Blogging is something I do for myself. I've been blogging since Sept. 2003, mostly about politics, guns, and observations about the word around me.
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