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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."
It's too bad after 15 years, probably > one percent of internet users have even used it, or any of its OpenPGP standard derivatives (GnuPG) for example. Sort of like the NSA telephone spying fiasco this year in the U.S, you know the various bureacracies are watching all the packets they can. If you want privacy, now is the time to take control of your own. Encrypt your emails and files, IPSEC, SSH, HTTPS wherever possible, and demand it where it is not yet available for you.
Don't forget that ssh, https, et. al., came years after PGP. What PGP did was to break the legal water for everything else. Nobody had ever heard of public key cryptography, let alone the fact that the government was trying to ban it, before PGP came out. Once it was out, suddenly it was an issue.
And after the battles to preserve it were over, the way was quite safe for the networking protocols to hit, and expand, in the mainstream.
So, while I agree with you that it is too bad that it isn't more widespread, PGP has had far greater impact than just being used to encrypt people's files.
When signing, in fact, the exact opposite happens.
Public and private isn't too bad, it's just that no one ever, EVER bothers to learn them. I mean, come on, if people can learn words like "clutch", "gearshift", "ignition", and so on, why can't they understand that the PUBLIC key is what you send to everyone, and the PRIVATE key is what you don't even share with your lover?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!