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PGP Is 15 Years Old
An anonymous reader writes "PGP Corporation salutes the 15th anniversary of PGP encryption technology. Developed and released in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann, Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 set the standard for safe, accessible technology to protect and share online information."
While your points are on-target, it is easy to forget how much the U.S. government locked down encryption prior to Phil's efforts. We take for granted being able to make purchases over a 128-bit encrypted connection with SSL-enabled webbrowsers. Secure global e-commerce is a direct result of political change brought around by Phil Zimmerman.
So even though use of PGP / GPG have not penetrated the mainstream, there were other beneficial aspects of its existence.
I think you're confusing a few things.
Web of Trust (WoT) is a PKI model. Certificate Authorities (CA) is a competing PKI model, and the one apparently you prefer. Have you taken a look at the CA list of trust in your browser lately? I for one prefer WoT, although more work on the part of the user to maintain, the trust model is based on me, not "Staat de Nederlanden" or any other company I've never heard of. Not to mention the stolen Microsoft certificates of a few years ago. There is nothing to stop us from moving to a WoT model for our browser PKI, just as there is nothing stopping us from using the CA model for email, it's just how it's been implemented for us thus far, and which we choose to use.
MIME vs Inline are competing ways of using PKI in email, it appears you prefer MIME which does appear to be the merging standard.
PGPfone does still run under Windows and the source is available. Zfone (also by Phil Zimmerman, is a new secure VoIP program. Gizmo and Skype also have encryption (though they're closed source).
Um, it was illegal to EXPORT not use. Get your fud straight.
That not withstanding he [and people like him] went through hell to free up crypto projects for the rest of us. I, myself, give out a crypto library that slips through relaxed regulations on free software.
Kudos to Phil, his supporters, and PGP as a whole. [except Jon Callas, he's a jerk and I still hate him]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Jeez, will this fairy tail never end? Phil NEVER released PGP. Crap, I was there and I remember it. Phil had to be browbeaten and bribed to give up the software (for which he had already been paid to develop).
There were two people who were hauled up in front of the Federal Grand Jury. Phil was one. Kelly Goen was the other. It was Kelly who paid Phil, who researched the law (so that the release could be done legally) and who had been pushing for developing public key cryptography for years before he ever met Phil. And it was Kelly who had the guts to do the actual release. Phil thought he was completely safe at the time (and legally speaking he probably was, not that innocence has ever stopped the Feds before).
If you want to search, you might be able to find the original Jim Warren articles in Microtimes around, who Kelly kept in touch with during the actual release. Jim thought Kelly was paranoid as hell until the FBI showed up on his door, and he wrote at least one article about it.
For your amusement, Kelly went around the San Francisco Bay area with an old acoustic coupler modem to various pay phones and would upload it onto a different server. Then he'd call Jim to tell him where it was at, in case something happened to him. He was under the impression that the single best thing the NSA could do was to knock him off before he put it on those servers. Looking back at it now, he was quite right.
And no, this isn't being posted by Kelly. Just someone else who was there at the time.
So please, get your facts straight and give Kelly some credit while he's still alive. Thanks.
The free trial is also hard to find, likely intentionally so.
http://www.pgp.com/downloads/desktoptrial2.php
It's fully functional for 30 days, then falls back to the functionality of the old PGP Freeware product, i.e. you can encrypt and decrypt files, windows, and the clipboard, and you can create, import, and manage keys.
On the other hand, everybody seems to accept as "signed" the pdf letters I produce, which include a photographed copy of my signature. I have given up.
Actually with modern PDF you can digitally sign a document, much like with PGP
I don't know enough to say who's right, but here's Phil Zimmermann's acount of PGP history. Also check out Adam Back's PGP timeline, which he warns is probably inaccurate. Microtimes columnist's recollections of PGP history.
Yes, yes there are.
Twinkle (Linux) supports both SRTP and ZRTP.
Minisip and Minisplat (both Linux) presently support SRTP and are working toward ZRTP support.
Eyebeam (Windows) supports SRTP
ZFone (Windows, Linux, MacOSX) uses ZRTP and can work with any SIP-based software (because it intercepts and encrypts the stream).
OpenWengo (Windows, Linux) is in the process of implementing SRTP, with some automated key exchange, and later ZRTP is planned.
So really, the answer is: yes, yes there are implementations.