NAI to Sell Off PGP Product Line

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Network Associates announced today that they are ceasing development of most of the PGP product line, including PGPMail and PGP Desktop Encryption software. This was apparently due to disappointing sales of the products. See the FAQ for more information on what's being killed and what's being kept." Another anonymous and unverified submitter says, "The entire PGP Business Unit was axed more or less wholesale. I guess selling encryption doesn't really make money. I worked there up until today and somewhere around 250 of the 300 employees were clipped."

Comments

I didn't trust it anymore, anyway.

[ruebarb]

Ever since Phil Zimmerman left because of of "differences" with NAI, I was extremely reluctant to upgrade to future versions for fear of "backdoors" that might have been included in the product - things that wouldn't have happened under his watch but are now more likely.

So I stopped upgrading the free version at the last version he personally oversaw...7.0.3

Re:Damn, and I was just going to email Will Price

[TWR]

Don't worry; Disk Copy in OS X 10.1 has the ability to create AES-encrypted disk images (128-bit). The key can be stored in your keychain.

Not the strongest encryption in the world, but it'll keep prying eyes away. You might have some issues exchanging disk images with non-OS X users, though.

-jon

Re:No one buys it because

[Chasing Amy]

In 1785, a resolution authorized the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs to open and inspect any mail that related to the safety and interests of the United States. The ensuing 'inspections' caused prominent men, like George Washington, to complain of mail tampering. According to various historians, it led James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to write to each other in code - that is, they encrypted their letters in order to preserve the privacy of their political discussion.

Government has shown time and again that it cannot be trusted not to eavesdrop without warrant and cause, whenever it thinks it can get away with it. The infamous FBI bugging of Martin Luther King and just about everyone else with political clout comes to mind. It was little more than thirty years ago, too, so don't complain my example is outdated. Or how about the recent study which found over 2,000 illegal, unwarranted wiretaps were performed last year? And that's just the ones we found out about after the fact.

The dissemination of information and ideas is one thing. Not leaving people alone long enough to gether information and form ideas, without fear of the Secret Police wondering why we're looking at that particular information and forming those particular ideas that it may not like, is a potential downfall of civilization.

Civilization is only advanced where ideas, even new and very jarring ones, are permitted to flourish. Today Socrates is considered to be the bedrock of all Western philosophy, since his pupil Plato wrote all the founding philosophical explorations. But recall that in his own time his ideas, nearly universal in the West today, were considered dangerous and he was executed for expressing them by the then-most-free society in existence, the birthplace of Democracy, Athens.

Encryption is the only way to express ideas without fear of reprisal by regimes which are not on the cutting edge of human rights, much as the U.S. is not. It is the sole way to protect one's privacy with any certainty from arbitrary invasions. Therefore we would do well to promote encryption, as a way to ensure that our rights are protected and respected. I trust myself to protect my rights with encryption, more than I trust the FBI, ATF, DOJ, etc., to do so with empty platitudes. And on this point I am in the company of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe--I'll take them to John Ashcroft, Janet Reno, the FBI and ATF agents who murdered innocent people at Ruby Ridge, and their ilk, any day.

Re:Causes

[ichimunki]

While it's offered and appears to be integrated, I think you should actually use it on a regular basis before you say it's transparent. I highly doubt that it is anywhere as easy to use as PGP/GnuPG are-- even in conjunction with Outlook.

First, no good security is transparent. At some point you, the user, have to create and share your own keys and verify that the keys you receive are valid (even with a web of trust, you have to correctly verify at least one other key to get into the loop).

I don't see how the certificates issued for Outlook users have any real trust built in. How did the Certificate Authority verify that the person requesting the key was really who they said they were-- and what about people with same or similar names? Even if they somehow verified the name, how do I know I've got the right "George Bush"?

Second, you still have to train people to understand the process and then to use it. If you tell them they have to fill out some long form just to get a certificate, they are likely to say "forget it", unless they have serious security needs-- in which case, they are hopefully not Outlook users in the first place. :)

Third, seriously, if secure email is your priority, why would you stack two or three proprietary, closed-source solutions one atop the other? Especially when there is an open source option available for both. Believe me, once you've generated your key for GnuPG on Linux and checked two simple options on KMail, the only non-transparent part of secure email is typing in your passphrase (and of course, obtaining and verifying other keys).

And then there's the problem of the fact that the Outlook security features did NOT use an existing standard for personal public key encryption-- PGP. Hopefully, Microsoft will buy them. Really. And integrate PGP into their mailer. That way the established crypto-using community and Outlook users can begin to interact in a meaningful way. I realize S/MIME is a "standard", but I've not seen it used at all... and the very limited uses for personal security that I've seen (even Slashdot didn't get it right when they ran interviews with Phil Zimmermann), all involved PGP, or the OpenPGP standard. I mean, the blink tag is/was a standard too, but...