Would you be comfortable explaining to relatives, aquantainces, and the elderly in a casual conversation:
How to install, use, and maintain linux. How to install, use, and maintain their own mail server and spam filters. How PGP works. How to setup and use thunderbird+enigimail or mutt.
Compared to visiting a URI, would doing so be more technically demanding or less technically demanding for users who have not specialized in computing? Is the proportion of society which inevitably chooses not to specialize in a computing inherently more deserving or inherently less deserving of the benefits of encryption and privacy?
I think the gap in our perspective is most likely attributable to A) how widespread we wish to see encryption used by the general public in the future, or B) our expectations of the of the technical stamina of the general public when confronted with unfamiliar tasks, rather than generational effects.
The code needs to be open source, versioned, vetted, and only obtained via a trusted repository
http://www.procmail.org http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ http://www.mutt.org/
The user is no longer instantly able to access the latest version of the application by simply typing in a URI.
Yes, that actually bothers me a lot. Can you imagine the crazy effort that I go through every time I update my mail-client?
It takes the better part of 5 minutes every time (I'm not exaggerating here) and last year I had to do it twice!