Once upon a time, there was some article with an interview with Robert Morris (former NSA and Bell Labs d00d, author of UNIX crypt among other things, also: the guy who fathered Robert Tappan Morris, of Morris worm infamy) where he said something like: "email can never be secured" alas, I can't remember the quote verbatim and trying to search for anything in 2026 is a fool's errand because A"I" bros broke web crawling with slop.

Similarly, I remember the feelings of cringe I had in Berlin circa 2014 where they had key signing parties, and seemed oblivious that Phil Zimmermann gave up on PGP (also used to be easier to cite, no longer).

There were the "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" (2005, PDF: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Why_Johnny_Cant_Encrypt/OReilly.pdf) and "Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt" (2011, PDF: https://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2006/posters/sheng-poster_abstract.pdf) papers.

There were the private, HILARIOUS conversations I had with coworkers at iSEC Partners circa 2011 particularly after we got acquired by NCC Group (which used PGP Keyserver, which AMAZINGLY sometimes would only function to decrypt messages after I ... sigh "did things" to reuse old keys, because as their IT Admin: I needed to make things function more than I needed to pretend that their overpaid bullshit was anything more than bullshit).

Alas, that kind of humor, is reserved for a very limited audience. Such lulz though!

Anyway, folks still need reminders I guess!

I wouldn't mention Signal in such reminders, it is its own can of worms and not in good standing.

That said, I miss the days when the S in SMTP was acknowledged as Simple.

The oligopoly of spam havens (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.), keeps fucking things up and over-complicating it. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. are just making it worse (if you want an eyeful: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/today-in-google-broke-email-2/#comments)