| Pronouns | she/her |
| Website | https://www.emilymstark.com |
| @estark37 |
In my last blog post, I discussed why people often view the web as a uniquely unsuited platform for implementing end-to-end encryption (E2EE). This view is that the web doesn’t offer a long-term trustable notion of what the application is. In that earlier post, I explored the idea of treating the application as untrustworthy and isolating sensitive data from it. In this post, I’m going to pontificate on whether web applications are truly less trustworthy than native applications, especially in an E2EE setting, and if so, how we should bridge the gap. The gap is narrower than it appears at first glance, especially with desktop applications. To close it, though, the devil is in the (UX- and deployment-related) details.
This article is validating, both of my belief that my career trajectory would be dramatically worse if (partially) remote work hadn't become an option in the last few years, and of my feeling of being quietly judged whenever I try to explain why that's the case. It's really hard to explain how much working from home helps me function without making it sound like I spend all day shirking work to do childcare and housework.
"In fields... which welcomed remote work from 2009 to 2019, working mothers’ employment rates increased. There was an almost one-to-one correlation: When remote work rose 2 percent, there was a 2 percent rise in mothers’ employment... While some working women, particularly mothers, might gain from being remote, women tend to see greater penalties when they do so... both men and women were more likely to suspect women than men of shirking work."
In the year 2023, an Egyptian politician had malware delivered to his phone via MITM when he visited a website that was not using HTTPS.
This is why we must finish encrypting the goddamn web.
With the publication of Messaging Layer Security (MLS) as an RFC, I’ve been pulled into some recent discussion about bringing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to the web. This is a topic that comes up every so often and has weirdly haunted me throughout my career. (I spent my undergrad and graduate research years working on cryptography implementations in Javascript and how to use them in applications.)
Drew Schuster
Adrian Taylor
evacide
serena 🌙