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PGP 8.0 Beta Released
James Evans writes "With a release date seemingly scheduled in December, the new PGP Corporation has today released PGP 8.0 Beta. It features Smart Card functionality, Unicode support, Novell Groupwise support, among other things. A Mac OS X Beta is out as well, also with a robust feature set. One word of caution however: On Friday, December 6th, 2002, the beta will expire, at which time access to encrypted data will be prevented."
I've never used PGP, only GPG. What's good in PGP that GPG doesn't have?
{{.sig}}
Isn't focing users to pay for products totally against what we stand for here at Slashdot? How is making someone pay to protect themselves any different from forcing them to pay for music downloads or mafia "protection"?
Whatever happend to PGPhone?
For those of you that dont remember it... it was a secure voice communcations system.
With the improvements in sound encoders, standarized crypto libs (OpenSSL) and the huge amounts of processing powering that the avg desktop has it would seem to be much easier then it was in the early 90s.
Are there projects out there?
-M
I'm on some mailing lists where people like to GPG (GNU's PGP clone) sign email, and our LUG have had a couple of GPG keysignings.
;)
So, being a OSS supporting Windows user, I thought I'd try this out.
My normal mail client is Outlook Express (don't complain, when used by someone with a clue there's no more security risk than with any other mailer), and the method that PGP plugs into Outlook Express is digusting. There's a GPG Outlook Express plugin that suffers from the same problem. Basically, when a message windows is loaded, the decoder automatically copies all the text from the window into a buffer, runs the text through PGP, and then pastes the results back into the window. In the case of the version of PGP I tried, in 8pt font.
This also doesn't help when you have a Windows mailer that doesn't support MIME types correctly (Evolution especially likes to send mail with the PGP block as an 'attachment', which basically means your message appears blank in OE with two attachments). No PGP verification there.
I hear Outlook isn't much better; Outlook's IMAP support isn't as polished as OE's, and I guess they don't really want to make it better at the expense of Exchange licenses.
What's the answer? Enigmail. You have to use Mozilla Mail, of course, but that's something that can be adjusted to (and if it's too hard to adjust, it can be customized in XUL of course.) But it seems to be the only way to get correct behaivour for PGP email verification in Windows. And it's all OSS, too.
That said, it didn't handle decryption at all. But I was running a beta on a nightly with a 2 day old GPG build, etc. You get what you pay for.
What would I like to see happen? Outlook Express to become a bit more modular, with actual support for PGP (even the free PGP Home edition would be better than nothing). Or Mozilla Mail evolve a little bit more so I can tolerate using it as my mail client
It's the best Windows mail client.
http://www.ritlabs.com/the_bat/
From its wep page:
"
The Bat! is a powerful, highly configurable, yet easy to use email client. We've designed it especially to help you deal with your growing volume of email as quickly and efficiently as possible, saving much of your precious time. Use all its powerful features at home or at the office to handle your email naturally - the way you want and how you want, simply and directly.
* Support for an unlimited number of accounts and users
* Fully customizable message templates that save hours of typing
* Powerful filtering for automated message handling
* Support for S/MIME and PGP versions from 2.6x through 6.5
* Mail Dispatcher for managing email on remote servers
* Simultaneous mail processing in the background for all accounts
* Familiar Explorer-style folders for organizing messages
* Easily configurable user interface with message preview option
* Built-in HTML email viewer and message editor with spell-as-you-go
* Sophisticated address book for storing all personal information
* Unique Mail Ticker(TM) for email notification
* Multi-lingual interface supporting 15 languages on the fly
* Import message bases from all major email clients
* Many more features for managing email quickly and easily...
"
What Are Your Plans for Linux?
Our current products will not run on Linux. However, we realize the installed base for Linux is growing and our future product plans will include Linux support.
I didn't realize this would be open source (or have I not been paying attention, and it has always been OSS??)
From The CTO Letter:
First of all continuity - you will be glad to hear that we will publish source code. This is very important to us. It's very important to our investors, too. They understand that one of the main reasons people trust PGP is that its source is available. Our forthcoming source release will be for PGP 8.
What the PGP community really needs is a fast, reliable, and comprehensive public key directory. All the ones I've tried to use in the past have been really slow.