Symantec To Acquire PGP and GuardianEdge

An anonymous reader noticed the news that Symantec has bought PGP and Guardian Edge for $370 million. They plan to standardize their encryption stuff on PGP keys.

Comments

suckitude

[SoupGuru]

Let the soul sucking begin!

Re:suckitude

[Virak]

GnuPG is what you're looking for.

Re:suckitude

[Em Emalb]

Not off-topic at all.

Symantec will more than likely manage to screw this up just like they screw everything else up. Seriously, once upon a time their virus stuff was good. Now, you've gotta jump through hoops to remove it, their enterprise-level customer service is garbage, so I can only imagine how bad their home user support must be, and at some point their code base for the AV stuff grew so bloated you could run a Toyota (poorly) off it.

What's wrong with pointing out that they're simply gonna screw it up?

Re:suckitude

[Locklin]

It *is* uniform if you pick one of the available GUI's and standardize on it.

Not bad

[Mikkeles]

It's Pretty Good Proprietory!

Re:Not bad

[mlts]

If I want top notch security and not trusting some firm (possibly a CA that is offshore and is hostile to anything the country I reside in anyway), I will be using a PGP/gpg web of trust. I will either get a copy of the public key of someone face to face printed physically with a fingerprint (and will download and verify the public key and has from a keyserver), or I will agree on a passphrase that is used only once, and that is to send and receive a copy of the public key.

I also don't like keeping my public key that would be needed for S/MIME on an online machine. My secure private key resides on a machine that isn't Internet connected, it will reside on a smart card, or it will be on a smart card and used on an offline machine, so an attack would have to be done on a physical/local level in order to compromise my private key material. I do use S/MIME and a client key, but that is mainly a stopgap, better than nothing measure, compared to actual end to end manual encryption of data with gpg or PGP.

PGP WOTs were in use a lot in the early to mid 1990s by cypherpunks, but for the most part, convenience won over security and it is extremely rare for someone to use a public key of someone to send mail. A good WOT is far better than a CA. I have more trust in a public key claimed to be someone that is 3-4 links out from me on my PGP/gpg keyring than I do a key that is signed by a CA and told "hey, trust us." Of course, creating a WOT is a lot harder than just letting a CA do the work, but like Phil Zimmermann said, it is better to pack your own parachute when security is critical.

Another use for PGP over S/MIME is signing of files. A signed E-mail is difficult to forward and keep the integrity intact. However, if I have a file and a PGP/gpg signature of it (or just a PGP signed file), I can forward it, archive the two files, back them up to whatever backup media, and all it takes is a validation in the future to ensure that the file and the signature were not tampered with, assuming I have the public key in my keyring, and that hasn't been tampered with. Of course, I can use facilities like the file signing capabilities built into Acrobat, Word, or other software, but again, I have to use a third party CA, or pay for a special signing key, as opposed to a secure WOT. Plus, some files (archives and such) can't be signed internally, so having a separate .sig file is needed.

S/MIME is decent, built into most dedicated E-mail clients, and is better than nothing. However, if you want reliable E-mail security, you are best off using a PGP/gpg WOT.

Open Source Alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

GPG is out there { http://www.gnupg.org/ } and we should use it.

Privacy is a human right. Democracy can't work if it's citizens are controlled like slaves in the roman empire.

Freedom is ours to take! Long live the RPG!

Re:Open Source Alternative

[wealthychef]

Freedom is ours to take! Long live the RPG!

Rocket propelled grenades?

Re:Open Source Alternative

[jack2000]

And the sniper rifle. I've always been a stay out of harms way type of player:)

Re:Open Source Alternative

[Chris Mattern]

"...that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of BOOM HEADSHOT!"

Re:Scary

[dgatwood]

Just another enterprise company that Symantec will acquire, make a half-hearted attempt to integrate it into their company, then systematically lay off all the workers, outsource product development to India, release a nearly completely nonfunctional successor to it, and eventually cancel it outright after the support contract revenue dries up. I've seen this worthless company pull this stunt too many times to expect anything different.

Note to CEOs: getting acquired by Symantec is corporate suicide. If you care at all about your employees or your product, the correct answer is not "no", but rather "hell f**king no". Just saying.

Re:Lol

[CondeZer0]

> PGP was bloatware before. Now that the most talented producer of bloatware in the world (Symantec) bought it, the PGP software will might soon win the bloatware of the year award.

If Adobe bought Symantec I suspect the massive concentration of bloat would cause the creation of a super massive black hole that would eat instantaneously eat up the whole solar system.

What is this, aquire and merger week?

[frambris]

Everybody seems to buy eachother this week. By the end of the year the Internet is run by three companies: MicroApple (software), HP (hardware) and Ciscoogle (Internet)

Re:What is this, aquire and merger week?

[bipbop]

What do you mean? MicroApple has always been at war with Oceania!

Encrypt file containers, partitions with TrueCrypt

[Futurepower(R)]

TrueCrypt is reliable, reputable, fast, free, open source, and works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

The TrueCrypt documentation is very good, but not perfect.

TrueCrypt can encrypt a file that contains other files (a drive letter) or encrypt an entire partition, even the boot partition.

No one I know has any connection with TrueCrypt. We are just happy users.

Acronym change

[Limburgher]

Now, it's Pretty Good Privacy. Soon, it will be Poof Gone Permanently.

Re:Oh. My. God.

[Amouth]

I work for a giant TLA. ... We're headed straight to hell, aren't we?

humm I believe you have already arrived

Re:Pretty *Bogus* Privacy

[calmofthestorm]

Regardless, I would assume the NSA has its fingers everywhere. Backdoors are not trivial to catch in the source code, like the famous if (uid = 0) test on an obscure flag combination on an obscure call.

Don't get me wrong, I'll trust OSS a lot more if the code can be read by anyone,but what good is the potential if no one actually does it?

The beauty is the I don't do anything the NSA cares about, I just like my privacy. Anyone powerful enough to get my personal data has bigger fish to fry.

This is fantastic!

[JonJ]

I've always wanted encryption-software from people who can't write a fucking uninstaller properly.

Re:Encrypt file containers, partitions with TrueCr

[X0563511]

Truecrypt is not the same thing as PGP/GPG. Truecrypt is great, mind you, but it is not public key cryptography and signing, with web-of-trust. It's just data encryption and hiding.