PGP Is 10 Years Old

mod you later writes: "Wired is reporting that PGP is ten years old - and is giving a summary of the growth and political issues that PGP has gone through." Congratulations to Phil Zimmerman for the courage to release it despite opposition from various Official People, too. Has PGP changed your life?

Comments

PGP has absolutely changed my life

[e-gold]

I love it, and wish more folks would use it. If more companies treated PGP use as a potential job-skill, that might happen, but the decentralized trust approach of PGP does not appeal to top-down (pointy-haired) managers, who would prefer to waste money on ANYTHING else, IMO. PGP is strange, in that it's no problem to explain why its needed to people who have lived in the former Communist block, but hard to explain to supposedly-individualist Americans. It has certainly gotten easy enough to use that there's no excuse anymore not to try it. I remember the DOS version, 2.3a -- now THAT was a pain in the ass!
JMR

(Speaking for myself, once again, but at least I'm finally off the topic of e-gold tipjars for musicians!)

I can't resist

[macdaddy]

I just can't resist reminding people that Phil Zimmermann, the author of PGP is a Macintosh user and wrote PGP using a Mac. I just can't resist it. :-) Now I wish there was a very simple, very concise "Idiots" guide to using PGP with an email client. That would make things so much more simple. It is really hard to explain to a newbie how PGP works. Hell I don't even understand it sometimes. If someone knows of a good resource, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks

--

Re:I can't resist

[MikeBabcock]

I maintained one ... years ago. It started when I used PGP in my pre-PPP days of having shell accounts with Elm and Pine.

I had assumed that good E-mail clients supporting PGP natively would emerge. Pronto Secure fit that bill but there was some big anti-Pronto thing in alt.security.pgp so they cancelled the project. Its unfortunate since I loved their IMAP support too.

Re:I can't resist

[ahkitj]

I'm not wanting to be obnoxious, but I don't see newbies bothering without that Idiots book. After all, Microsoft [choke] want people to sign up for something like 30- or 60-day sample certs and think that people will pay for 1-year certs. And S/MIME, too.

S/MIME I don't like so much; I wish Microsoft would incorporate other schemes. Feet in both camps for them, too.

Of course, I figure that politics probably won't ever allow that. :)

Re:I can't resist

[Vintermann]

I believe there was a "PGP for dummies" which is now out of print. Anyway that would have been at the time when there was only the command line interface, by the way I still don't handle key management very well from the command line, but now there's plenty of graphical interface (version 7 even has a very bloated graphical interface) so there's no excuse. :-)

Re:It's a shame . . .

[B. Samedi]

You could argue apathy but I think it's more ignorance of the application then anything. I haven't met very many people who have even heard of it.

Re:It's a shame . . .

[MikeBabcock]

Microsoft went S/MIME, remember?

I know...

[milgram]

I still can't get the info from the password I forgot in 93'

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

[Carlos Laviola]

Version: 2.6.3ia

owEBsQBO/4kAlQMFADseMV0VXi6AwKjLEQEBpFkEAIHu0kmI pD COviajJB8RrKd9
koC0ZBfHGQAr8GCm2ZkkGhJiPktsMvvV8JqPSKy5dQ4VSpFb vA SnXNhEFD/9U5aC
YJsrfZX7tzFxtwCojAJDTJzzJQu0Uk4pTItpH51D3R9gpsTL Ls uZIfLoNA9D7Lui
5F7FtMLKHL3m+51dOvFMrBdiA21zZwAAAABZZXMsIGl0IGhh cy EKCg==
=rf2P
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

Re:A secret message for your 10th birthday...

[dbolger]

"V ybbxrq ng anxrq Angnyvr Cbegzna juvyr cbhevat ubg tevgf qbja zl cnagf, ohg abobql jvyy rire xabj! gunaxf ctc!"

Great quote from the PGP books

[zentex]

with my purchase of 6.5.3, there was a book called "An Introduction to Cryptography". In it, is my favorite quote...

"If all the personal computers in the world-260 million-were put to work on a single PGP-encrypted message, it would still take an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe, on average, to break a single message." -- William Crowell, Deputy Director, Nastional Security Agency, March 20, 1997.

I wonder what this 'guestimation' would be now, considering that personal computers are now in the GHz range...

NO SPORK

25th post: 25=5x5! Hail Eris!

[jerkface]

Hail Eris Squared

--

Weak encryption

[91degrees]

Rot 13 is very insecure by todays standards. I suggest at least double rot-13

PGP MS-DOS

[ahkitj]

Not just a pain in the arse on its own, but also a pain that I couldn't ever find a suitable plugin for .qwk and BlueWave (I think that's what the FidoNet-compatible offline BBS e-mail reader I was using was called). Shelling to the command prompt was never so annoying, unfortunately.

Ah, those were the days. At least PGP in Win32 likes grabbing stuff you've sent to the keyboard as its lowest common denominator if you can't get its plugins to work, no more command prompts. :)

It's a shame . . .

[Pituritus Ani]

. . . that after 10 years, PGP's use hasn't become commonplace. Even sadder is that it's not because of M$, the gubmint, or lack of a standard so much as the apathy of our own people.

Re:It's a shame . . .

[4thAce]

It's true, and I think it's because it would take some kind of headline-grabbing catastrophe to propel it to the top of our collective consciousness. A few of these, and encryption will become institutionalized like the way the use of seatbelts is now drilled into schoolchildren in the U.S.

PDGP

[mikosullivan]

I've always kind of wished he'd called it "PDBG" -- Pretty Damn Good Protection.

Miko O'Sullivan

Re:It's a shame . . . but not a surprise

[junkmell]

Actually they already did. But they quietly included the origional message for backwards compatibility.

A secret message for your 10th birthday...

[Zen Mastuh]

"unccl oveguqnl, ctc!"

To unencrypt, copy & paste your secret message at rot13.com. Oh, and ignore my sig--Phil will explain it to you when you are a little older...