Phil Zimmerman and PGP at CNN.com

rick_campbell writes "CNN is carrying an article about Phil Zimmerman and the fact that Network Associates is dropping support for the commercial version of Pretty Good Privacy. The article includes a little bit of Phil's take on the situation, a little history and some discussion of why this happened and what alternatives exist."

Comments

Re:As someone who should know better,

[cduffy]

That would be an issue with the IPsec adapter included with NAI's product. It's a separate and disablable component -- and GnuPG has nothing like it, so you need not fear any problems stemming from use of the latter product.

Plugins exist for Outlook integration, FYI.

Re:No privacy at all

[jayant_techguy]

Do you know the biggest problem is the end user just doesn't care about E-mail security or won't know how to handle it.
If you are really concerned, there still exist free s/w while do pretty decent job with RSA encryption algorithm. Though mind you they might not integrate into Outlook etc. as PGP did.
The crux is it'll be a long while before encrypted E-mail is the norm of every human. I have to handle mails from 100 different people professionally daily, some containing sensitive information of the sender, but they don't care to encrypt it using PGP or any other tool, and send me their sensitive info. like anything.

Re:The End User Still Doesn't Care

[-tji]

No, the problem is that it is still too difficult to use secure e-mail.

If they select a check box to "Secure E-Mail" when sending e-mail to someone, and the details of how it happened were hidden, people would do it.

But, if it requires you to exchange keys with someone & manually manage the process, only the techies will do it.

It's a tough nut to crack.. To do it right, you need a trusted authority to manage identities & keys. I don't see any sign of this happening.