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Command-Line Crypto From Phil Zimmermann, Again
They aren't paying for a pretty logo. The real reason is that the GUI version of PGP (along with other graphical encryption software, like the GNU Privacy Guard) aren't even in the same market.
Casual computer users have never laid out much money for encryption. The widespread use of PGP in its original incarnation (during the era of Zimmermann's prosecution for allowing it to be exported) can be attributed as much to its zero-dollars price as to a generalized interest in privacy. Home and hobby users are not cut out from buying Veridis's software -- for about a hundred dollars, you can buy a personal use version of the command-line version. The real money isn't in individuals keeping their tax records private, though -- Zimmermann and Veridis, like NAI (whose PGP-based product is called E-Business Server) are really aiming at commercial and governmental datacenters, and for customers willing to accept a much higher pricetag.
Insurance companies, banks, credit card processing centers, state records -- anywhere financial or otherwise confidential records are exchanged or stored en masse -- these all need encryption which works at the command-line. More precisely, they need crypto software which can work without direct human intervention at all. Instead, massive data centers need tools which can be called by scripts and other programs, so servers, or server farms, can spend their time crunching numbers rather than drawing pictures.
The name is familiar ... The commercial competition FileCrypt faces is familial -- it's the same product from NAI (sold from their McAffee division) that prevents Zimmermann and Veridis from calling their software PGP, even though NAI now labels their product E-Business Server. And though many companies have homegrown cryptographic solutions, Zimmermann says he knows of no other packaged software offering the high-volume encryption that the products from NAI or Veridis do.
And, he emphasizes, what they do is very similar. He says of the Veridis command-line product compared to NAI's, "It's drop-in compatible, identical in operation ... you could run the same perl scripts, the same command-line arguments."
If you want to buy Veridis' encryption software licensed for electronic commerce (not one-person use), hold onto your wallet: the price jumps about 50 times, to a shade under $5000, which Zimmermann describes as a bargain -- at least compared to the competition.
(Prices on the McAfee website show a one-year subscription-based license for E-Business Server starting at $6,875; $14,375 buys a perpetual license, with no included support.)
Both sides of that fence. And of competing in this case with a product that originated from his own crypto software (and his own company, PGP Inc.), Zimmermann says "I just don't really think of that as my product any more. It's in the hands of NAI, all the engineers have been fired. I just don't feel psychologically connected to that product." To look and not to sell. Especially when it comes to cryptographic software, code openness is considered not just a virtue but a near necessity. Peer-review and independent auditing, after all, are about the only ways you can tell that software isn't shuttling credit card numbers to the wrong person.The business model of selling high-priced crypto software at thousands of dollars per processor doesn't mesh well with gratis software, though. To that end, Zimmermann says the FileCrypt code will be soon be available for download and inspection under terms which he says will be similar to those under which users can download the code for PGP Corporation's version of the PGP-based desktop software. (PGP Corporation's terms are available though their source code page).
The reason command line tools are very useful is for cron jobs. I dont know how many times on a windows machine I wish that there was an command line tool to do something.
GUI is nice and all, but a command line one would work much better with procmail filters..
As well as just about every other kind of script I would assume...
Interesting for sure, but is this a hype piece?
It doesn't look like a normal submission to me. Proper grammer, objective opinion instead of random flames, and bulleted titles to visually seperate paragraphs instead of the shitty formatting job Slashdot forced me to get used to.
Me suspects there is more than meets the eye here...
Insurance companies and health care organizations are increasingly relying on PGP in its various forms to met requirements for confidentiality and security of data imposed by the HIPAA legislation. Zimmermann's latest work has a potentially huge market this year, and potentially next year too, if there are more delays with implementing the "enforcement" aspects of the law.
I find with any GUI program, if there is no command line control, it becomes half as useful. Scripting and automation are what make computers beautiful.
The command line is much quicker too. Don't want to type out a million options and flags? Then make an alias... one word is all it takes to run enormous computations.
In the case of PGP, the only GUI integration I need is in e-mail, and thankfully Evolution provides it. The rest of its use is on the command line, making encrytped tar archives, and saving other information.
GPG can be called from the command line too!
[dan@dimension dan]$ gpg --help
gpg (GnuPG) 1.0.7
Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to
redistribute it
under certain conditions. See the file COPYING for details.
Home: ~/.gnupg
Supported algorithms:
Cipher: 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192,
AES256, TWOFISH
Pubkey: RSA, RSA-E, RSA-S, ELG-E, DSA, ELG
Hash: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160
Syntax: gpg [options] [files]
sign, check, encrypt or decrypt
default operation depends on the input data
Commands:
(...)
And it doesn't cost $100...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
PGP is great. It's the strongest freely available crypto for the geek masses out there. However, it's still pretty much for the geek masses, or at least people who can get their minds around the difference between signing and encrypting and which key is used when. My mom can't use PGP, even though with all the Homeland Security and Total Information Awareness stuff going on, she'd like to just have 100% of her email encrypted and not have to worry about her sense of humor going into her federal permanent record.
For some of us, there's the other problem - we use Pine or FringeMail 1.0003 or something for which the multiple-megabyte SMTP client plugins PGP GUI monster is just too unwieldy. Perhaps Phil Zimmerman sees that as a niche that got left behind as the giant GUI version evolved, and recognizes a need for the simple command line version.
Works for me; I'll always cut n' paste my ciphertext. I still use PGP 2.6.2. What's needed is a very simple cut n' paste Windows app that can generate or accept PGP-style blocks of ASCII.
I don't really understand why Phil is doing this. Perhaps some commercial customers feel more comfortable with a commercial package. However, GPG has had (German) government money funding its development and is thought to be quite good. The German Govt liked PGP as well, but it was complicated to licence. The old PGP commercial licence only permitted you to use the supplied binary, not to compile from source. The Germans supported the rewrite and AFAIK it is a standard there.
To me this seems like another of the recnt /. advertorials. An article about a product that isn't really newsworthy and there is a good Open Software and free equivalent.
Sad really isn't it!
See my journal, I write things there
That Slashdot chose to include the entire press release (since that is what this clear was) as part of the slashdot article. A pointer to a web page, perhaps --- the fact that Phil Zimmerman is behind a new commercial product that competes with original commercial version of PGP, perhaps. But the entire press release? Please! Why give them free advertising? (I'm assuming here that this wasn't a new way for the OSDN to raised revenues by getting an entire Slashdot article with arbitrary content from a marketing organization in exchange for $$$).
In any case, it's not really clear this story is all that interesting as news anyway, for the very simple reason that it is very doubtful that commercial versions of PGP will succeed, simply becuase for the naive user, PGP is Just Too Hard to use. The moment you have to explain certification chains to users, you've lost. The naive user (the ones who can't figure out how to set the time on their VCR's) simply won't be able to cope. And for the expert users, they'll just simply download GPG, or perhaps the old version of PGP 2.6.2. Why should they pay $$$ for a commercial command-line version?
Let's be honest here. No-one in their right mind would use the PGP command line since something much better - GnuPG - came along, and this has been a while ago (they aren't migrating, they've often completed migration).
What Phil's trying to do here is sell a piece of software for an extremely high price which competes directly - directly, not just on the same turf but on the actual same blade of grass - with now well-proven software which is entirely free (beer and speech).
This is not a smart business plan. Only chance Veridis has is fast talking, name leverage and selling good support - trouble is, GPG doesn't actually need support as such, the software doesn't need to be, and isn't, really all that complex. Documentation should be enough, because it works already. The source is even friendly enough to adapt and build around for your own purpses, unless you're a moron, and morons should really not be adminning boxes you wanted to use strong crypto on.
I can't see a single reason you'd want to actually use Filecrypt over gnupg, especially given the high price tag... anyone?
GPG is freeware, as is the old PGP 2.X. Zimmermann's new product and the NAI version are commercial software. When you pay the big bucks for these programs what you are really buying is support and hand-holding. Many companies still prefer to pay for the privilege of having another company they can go to when things go wrong, rather than relying on the user community.
One reason for this is psychological; Republicans like to pal around with Republicans, Democrats like to hang with Democrats, and companies like to do business with companies.
Some Slashdot readers complained that FileCrypt appears to compete with GPG, which is free. Let me make it clear that my intention was not to compete with GPG, but to compete with McAfee E-business Server, for which NAI charges over $14000 per copy. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that GPG users should switch to FileCrypt. In fact, I think GPG is a nice product. But some companies prefer to do busines with companies selling commercial products. That's why NAI makes millions of dollars selling their product. There's no reason why I shouldn't try to compete in that market. And, unlike the NAI product, FileCrypt can also be licensed at a far cheaper price for users who want it on their (command-line) desktop instead of a server.