Quote from: OROBTC on July 10, 2015, 06:42:04 PM

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TPTB and friends

15 years ago I was able to use all kinds of fun and interesting software that was either FREE or cheap. And easy-to-use (important to those of us who are not tekkies).

One program was Zimmerman's PGP. It was free and easy to use. But, none of my friends (none of my friends are programmers or otherwise tech-savvy) so I was never able to USE PGP.

I took a quick look around via Google to see if there was free & easy-to-use encryption software for email, but was not able to find any obvious candidates.

You guys have any suggestions re email encryption software? Especially easy-to-use...

I2P's Bote is better than PGP because it encrypts the headers too, except for the destination address. But all your recipients need to be using I2P-Bote too.

Realize that any email encryption won't hide whom is writing to whom. It only hides with encryption the content in the email. But this is no good! If the officials can prove whom you were communicating with, they can try to attack your machine with back doors and spyware, or that fails they could potentially rubberhose you to force you to reveal what was communicated.

Bitmessage encrypts everything and sends every encrypted message to every recipient in your stream. Thus in theory it can't be proven whom is talking to whom. But Bitmessage has unaudited code and security model, as well it is often subject to spam which may to cause real traffic to move to more streams, thus diluting the anonymity sets. Also Bitmessage is very poorly programmed, has lots of usability quirks, and often doesn't work on some user's connection.

Someone really needs to make something better.

As for encrypting standard email the easiest way, Google can help you with that, such as PGP plugins for open source email clients. Your recipients will need to use PGP too and I believe there are easier plugins now. It is still a pita though. As I said, someone needs to fix the internet! I am working on it! But I am only one person (or perhaps a small team of devs).

Quote from: OROBTC on July 10, 2015, 06:42:04 PM

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I also miss the cheap (or free) AND easy-to-use data analysis programs (SPSS: now $2000 or so, and an "OLAP" program to analyze database data that cost me just $100, now it would cost MUCH MORE).

Also, I bought Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 (w/ another OLAP program included in it) for just $100 or so back then. SQL Server 2000 will not work on modern Windows versions...

Frustrating that the software in 2000 was better, cheaper and more available than in 2015!

Install Linux, such as Mint Linux is very easy. Abundant software often for free.

Ditch Windows. That is your problem.