<nettime> A Fish called Hushmail

[Chris Airriess <chris@mail2.adrcomp.com>]

Hi there,

Someone forwarded on your posting re Hushmail to me, and while your
concerns are legitimate ones, based on your level of knowledge, I can
assure you that Hushmail is not some manifstation of Big Brother
collecting data for nefarious purpose. 

I know the founders of Hushmail very well and would vouch anytime for
their lack of either big-business or government affiliation.  Aside for an
interest in making some money, they are about as anti-establishment as you
can get.  The parent company is Hush Communications Corp, AI and their
marketing office is in Austin, TX, USA.  As far as I know the crypto code
is all open sourced and there have been comments and suggestions received
from very high-profile hackers which have been taken into consideration. 

You are right--the html is not great, and neither is the front end.  This
is a Beta version, of course, and a slick look has less priority than
making the crypto side work. 

About Radiant.  They are a big business.  They have clients who are Big
Business.  They have a huge room full of servers ranging from $40k
specials to <$1000 boxes with one thing in common: the owners pay Radiant
a monthly fee for a thin blue umbilical cord (several T3 lines in this
case) to the rest of the world.  They don't have any access whatsoever to
the contents of the Hush servers and even if they had full access they
couldn't decrypt the messages thereon--all securely-sent messages are
encrypted in the sender's browser and decoded at the recipient's... 
period--unreadable by anyone at Hush.  It is my understanding that the
server logs are routinely deleted to avoid later identification of user IP
addresses by any requesting agency. 

Hushmail is a very cool service, with amazing potential, but not a perfect
one (yet). It is up to users of the current Beta to constructively
criticize and help to develop.  If you don't feel safe using it for your
most sensitive messages then don't; I do, and if I was a terrorist, or a
drug lord, or a spy, or even an environmentalist I would too. Absolutely. 

Sincerely,

Chris Airriess, CEO
ADR Computing, Vancouver, Canada
(Supplier of servers to Hush Communications)


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net