Widespread secure e-mail would certainly have a powerful impact on the internet, but at this point, it might not be enough to sell the average user (particularly one of a younger audience) on the general tradeoffs that encryption involves. Realtime chat, on the other hand, is definitely on the rise in prevalance. Make no mistake, IRC has been around far longer than any Instant Messenger you might have running in your system tray right now, but in all likelyhood, it never projected the sense of critical mass that tends to evoke the brand of paranoia which encryption helps to soothe. Luckily, the distinction might not matter for much longer anyway. If you are reading this, you probably use IRC, and you might have started worrying about the ramifications of large-scale monitoring of your communications. (You probably also know that SSL-IRC protects your IRC session against sniffing , ...