if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?

e.g. flac for lossless audio because…

(yes you can add new categories)

summary:

  1. photos .jxl
  2. open domain image data .exr
  3. videos .av1
  4. lossless audio .flac
  5. lossy audio .opus
  6. subtitles srt/ass
  7. fonts .otf
  8. container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
  9. plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
  10. documents .odt
  11. archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
  12. configuration files toml
  13. typesetting typst
  14. interchange format .ora
  15. models .gltf / .glb
  16. daw session files .dawproject
  17. otdr measurement results .xml
  • @[email protected]
    2•1 year ago

    Encrypting Email

    Don’t. Email is insecure . Even with PGP, it’s default-plaintext, which means that even if you do everything right, some totally reasonable person you mail, doing totally reasonable things, will invariably CC the quoted plaintext of your encrypted message to someone else

    Okay, provide me with an open standard that is widely-used that provides similar functionality.

    It isn’t there. There are parties who would like to move email users into their own little proprietary walled gardens, but not a replacement for email.

    The guy is literally saying that encrypting email is unacceptable because it hasn’t been built from the ground up to support encryption.

    I mean, the PGP guys added PGP to an existing system because otherwise nobody would use their nifty new system. Hell, it’s hard enough to get people to use PGP as it is. Saying “well, if everyone in the world just adopted a similar-but-new system that is more-amenable to encryption, that would be helpful”, sure, but people aren’t going to do that.

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 year ago

      The message to be taken from here is rather “don’t bother”, if you need secure communication use something else, if you’re just using it so that Google can’t read your mail it might be ok but don’t expect this solution to be secure or anything. It’s security theater for the reasons listed, but the threat model for some people is a powerful adversary who can spend millions on software to find something against you in your communication and controls at least a significant portion of the infrastructure your data travels through. Think about whistleblowers in oppressive regimes, it’s absolutely crucial there that no information at all leaks. There’s just no way to safely rely on mail + PGP for secure communication there, and if you’re fine with your secrets leaking at one point or another, you didn’t really need that felt security in the first place. But then again, you’re just doing what the blog calls LARPing in the first place.