[defanor]

This OpenPGP and GnuPG criticism is brought up regularly here, but the proposed alternatives come with their own downsides: some of those are proprietary, some are centralized systems or depend on such. In addition to all the inconvenience, when such centralized systems are blocked, casual users switch to explicitly backdoored options. The advertised IMs are tied to phone numbers, introducing both privacy and availability issues. Almost nothing of that is available from Linux distributions' system repositories. Integration with other software and infrastructures is lacking. Dealing with multiple specialized tools is more of a headache even for expert users, especially when their added benefits do not make much sense given one's threat model. OpenPGP/GnuPG is more resilient and versatile than those, still usable where those are not.

I think such an article would seem more convincing, at least to me, if more sensible alternatives were proposed. Ideally without the advice to not encrypt email, without assumptions of continued availability of all the online services, of trust to certain third parties, and so on. Or it could be just a plain criticism without suggestions, which would still be somewhat informative.

Edit: there is another list of alternatives in a sibling comment, advising against (well, actually being quite hostile towards, and generally impolite) usage of what I had in mind as one of the possible more sensible alternatives: XMPP with OMEMO. Though upon skimming the criticism of that, I have not found it particularly convincing, either, and it just looks like some authors try to be particularly provocative/edgy.

[jeltz]

What is your issue with Sequoia PGP? It is not proprietary, it is not centralized and it is much better than GunPG from what I can tell.

[defanor]

I have no issues with it, and actually happy to see alternative implementations. Possibly because I did not use it much, but it does look fine to me. Not as a complete GPG replacement yet, since some software still depends on GPG, but a viable one, and a suitable one for most of the manual CLI usage (ignoring that its version on slightly older systems has a different interface, adding a bit of confusion; hopefully it is stable now). It was not listed among suggested alternatives in the linked article though, and from what I gather, the author would not be happy with it, either.

[woodruffw]

One of the premises of modern cryptographic engineering is security under a hostile setting: it shouldn’t matter to a chat protocol that a server is proprietary or a network is centralized if the design itself is provably end-to-end encrypted. The server could be run by Satan and it wouldn’t matter.

(Centralization itself is a red herring. One may as well claim that PGP is centralized, given that there’s only one prominent keyserver still limping around the Internet.)

But even this jumps ahead, given that the alternatives are not in fact proprietary. The list of open source tool alternatives has been the same for close to a decade now:

* For messaging/secure communication, use Signal. It’s open source.

* For file encryption, use age. It’s open source and has multiple mature implementations by well-regarded cryptographic engineers.

* For signing, use minisign, or Sigstore, or even ssh signing. All are open source.

[defanor]

> security under a hostile setting

Yes, but security usually includes availability, and I mentioned a setting with service blocking above. Like that by a government.

> (Centralization itself is a red herring. One may as well claim that PGP is centralized, given that there’s only one prominent keyserver still limping around the Internet.)

How is it a red herring?

> For messaging/secure communication, use Signal. It’s open source.

From my point of view, it is complicated by Signal being blocked here (and it being centralized helped to establish such blocking easily), likely the phone number verification won't work here, it is not available without a phone, and it is not available from F-Droid repositories on top of that. Currently money transfers are also complicated, so finding some foreign service that would help to circumvent phone number verification is also complicated, and not something I would normally do even without that. All this Internet blocking is a new development here, but such availability issues due to centralization were anticipated for a long time, and are a major motivation behind federated or distributed systems. Some mail servers are also being blocked, but generally mail still works, and less of a pain to use.

> For file encryption, use age. It’s open source and has multiple mature implementations by well-regarded cryptographic engineers.

> For signing, use minisign, or Sigstore, or even ssh signing. All are open source.

These I find to be okay. Having to install them in addition to GnuPG that is usually already available, but that is to be expected; they are available at least from Debian repositories, so not something to complain about when considering alternatives. Likewise with the key sharing: not getting to reuse OpenPGP's PKI, and will have to replace that somehow, but it is not like it is used widely and consistently anyway, so perhaps not much of a loss in practice. Likewise with familiarity of the users: I would expect a little more friction with such tools, compared to GnuPG, but not much more. And I don't see actual usage downsides apart from those. Though the benefits also seem a bit uncertain, but generally that sounds like a switch that makes sense to consider.

[athrowaway3z]

I have no clue how you reached the conclusion of calling it a red herring.

It matters - because Satan can disconnect the centralized nodes.

[Valodim]

> given that there’s only one prominent keyserver still limping around the Internet

Hey, I take issue with that. keys.openpgp.org is just about the only thing running smoothly in the openpgp ecosystem :P