Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)
54 points by GaryBluto 2 days ago | 12 comments
BeetleB 2 hours ago
> In 2013, an article on "Zimmermann's Law" quoted Phil Zimmermann as saying "The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier"
replydylan604 43 minutes ago
The biggest issue of using PGP was using PGP. You were pretty nerdy to be on the internet back then, but even then using PGP was beyond what the majority of people wanted to do. Exchanging keys was problematic. Writing text in one app, encrypting in another app, copying encrypted back to an email was just tiresome.
replyI'm still glad that it existed as its mere existence seems to have pushed things in the right direction as far as protecting everyone's ability to use encryption if they chose. It just never became the panacea it was envisioned to be.
__MatrixMan__ 15 minutes ago
There were (are? it's been a while) many PGP users on the various darkweb markets. It was great fun teaching people to use it and actually having a community to use it with.
replyIt was pretty awkward to later emerge as the PGP expert at work. I was at that time a bit shy about explaining how I got so comfortable with it.
But PGP is useful if both sender and receiver agree to use PGP.
Anecdotally: this works until you add a third person who responds to the thread in plain text, with everything threaded beneath. Or when you do that by accident.
Applied cryptographers will tell you to use Signal or any other E2EE chat.
Elaborate
https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem
Recommendations: https://soatok.blog/2024/11/15/what-to-use-instead-of-pgp/
We don't need to keep elaborating or re-litigating the same discussion. The PGP idea of "one tool to rule them all" is a terrible cryptography design, and the world is better off the sooner we stop trying to make it work.