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Perhaps that sort of error is not a problem in this particular context. Adding slashes or dots makes the zero or oh look like an eight. This issue affected the design of the FE-Schrift font:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift#Development


SMS is inherently plain text. I think a user would have to click on a link for an attack to work.

They have developed zero click exploits before

Link previews would do the trick, and let me confirm that the Google Messages app for SMS does show link previews with no way to disable them.

"Expressive animations" are yet another vector because their rendering can be exploited.

As for MMS, it is a known prominent risk.


Always blame the user...

No downside if you are wrong. The people who actually run complex systems have no political power. If you get away with it then you might be able to avoid expensive changes.


In particular, encrypted email provides privacy but not anonymity. You need some sort of onion routing system for that. Back in the day people would set up such routing systems for email.

It turns out that most people don't really need anonymity. That is why most systems these days don't bother the user with all the associated hassle. Briar and Session come to mind as contemporary examples of such things.


The implementations are owned by the implementers. Who owns the actual standard, the implementers or the users?


I think trying to own a web standard is like trying to own a prayer. You can believe all you want, but it's up to the gods to listen or not...


As for any standard, the implementers ultimately own it. Users don't spend resources on implementing standards, so they only get a marginal say. Do you expect to contribute to the 6G standards, or USB-C, too?


Own is not really the right word for an open source project. In practice it is controlled by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla.


There has been some recent research on this sort of thing. It ends up being whatever you are used to. Everyone used to think serif was better for reading but then everyone started reading a lot of sans on computer screens. So now people think sans is somehow inherently better.

It's the same for mono vs proportional spacing. You are better at reading that which you have the most practice with. Most people are not used to reading monospaced prose even if they have seen a lot of monospaced code.


> Most people are not used to reading monospaced prose even if they have seen a lot of monospaced code.

I've noticed that too - I read code all day, but there's something very odd about having conversations (prose) with Claude Code via a terminal window.


Progress to date at using quantum effects to break cryptography has been zero.


The experimental science behind this revolution in understanding the cognition of reading is pretty interesting. One of the things that is done is to switch the text on the screen while the subject is moving their eyes to see how badly it messes up the reading process. Here is an article that talks about this research in relation to the long accepted, but now discredited, idea that word shape is important in reading.

* https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/typography/develop/word-re...

BTW, this in turn suggests that the long accepted idea that lower case is easer to read than upper case is also wrong.


> the long accepted idea that lower case is easer to read than upper case

uh.. that sounds to me about as accepted as "cursive is easier to read than print".

Upper case is the canonical form of our alphabet (as written in Latin) while lower case is a newer addition (adapted from many greek letter shapes) that may be easier to write in rapid succession, but as such that also makes it one step towards cursive.

When I was a child in elementary school I was taught that "you all have to learn cursive because when you grow up that's what adults use, they don't use print any more". I remember thinking about that while driving with my parents, and asking them "if adults use cursive exclusively like my teacher says then why are all the road signs in print"?

I can levy that same query to your statement: if it is a long accepted idea that lower case is easier to read, then why are all of the road signs (which famously prioritize ease of reading) always written in all caps?


People keep trying to use DMARC as some sort of sender authorization scheme. It continues to be a server reputation scheme.

An unsigned email is still anonymous, no matter what DKIM and SPF say. It should be treated as such. No one should ever think: This email passed through a Google email server at one point. It must be legit.


Yet another reason to prevent emails from downloading stuff from remote servers...

It appears that you can't do these sorts of things with with CID embedded images...


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