[liberationtech] FW: The security and ethics

[Ian Young]

On 2/9/11 3:25 PM, Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
>
> Yes, of course. However, when I learned to ride a motorcycle, I was
> taught about the T-CLOCK safety procedures:
> http://micapeak.com/info/T-CLOCK.html
>
> It's the bare minimum knowledge you *should* have if you hope to be safe
> when inspecting a motorcycle before riding.
>

Do guides roughly equivalent to TCLOCK exist for digital 
security/crypto? I know there's interest and research in security 
usability, but I'm curious if anyone has made an attempt to thoroughly 
explain, in layman's terms, the fundamentals of good security. "This is 
how PKI works." "This is the difference between signed and encrypted 
(and why encrypted !=> signed)." "This is how OTR works (and how it 
offers different guarantees than PGP)." "Here are some common ways your 
private key could be compromised." And so on.

Certainly various tools offer documentation that cover parts of these 
concepts as it relates to themselves, but it seems that an 
authoritative, nontechnical voice that empowers people to consider many 
different tools without reading a textbook would be a hugely valuable 
resource.

Ian Young