Re: pgp (more about)

[Gordon Smith]

Travis

This should be on Techno-chat, where the original thread started life.

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Re: pgp (more about)

[Travis Siegel]

I forgot to mention, the page where this is talked about (well, some  
of it anyhow) is at Phil Zimmerman's site itself, located at:

http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/findpgp/index.html
hth
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pgp (more about)

[Travis Siegel]

It would seem my previous message was only part of the story.
I've done some digging since sending the last message, and while the  
post was accurate (as far as it goes) it wasn't the whole story.

Pgp was indeed released as freeware initially.
It then (after some legal rangling took place) appears that Phil  
Zimmerman setup his own company for distribution of pgp.  His company  
apparently went through a couple phases, including one stint of the  
pgp product being produced by MIT.  Then NAI, which for a time  
stopped releasing source to the product.
This apparently made a lot of folks unhappy, since they wanted source  
to make themselves secure in the knowledge that there were no  
backdoors in the pgp code.  Finally, it seems the decision was made  
to go ahead and release source again, but shortly afterwords, the  
company shut down their pgp operations.  It's at that point that Phil  
Zimmerman took control again, developed it for his own company, and  
until 2010, distributed both binary and source versions of the product.


In 2010, Symantec bought www.pgp.net, and the pgp company too.   
There's no mention on the site where Phil swrites about all this  
whether or not he's still involved with the product, but I'd have to  
guess he is is some way.
Whether or not the symantec version of the product reverts to a  
freeware version after the trial period expires or not I can't say,  
and I'm in no mood to fill out an account signup form, then make the  
request on symantec's site to find out, but if anyone else decides to  
do so, please let us know how it works out.
You can still download the 2.63 international version at the  
following url:

http://www.pgpi.org/cgi/download.cgi?filename=pgp263is.tar.gz
This will download the source directly, with no links to be clicked  
on to start the download, other than the server you wish to download  
from. (I suggest using the main site from norway, though others  
probably work just fine)
This will give you the entire source code of the 2.63 release, which  
(from my extremely short digging session) leads me to believe is the  
last version before it was picked up by commercial interests, and  
turned into the full blown products we see today from symantec and  
others.
There are binaries on the site as well, but I don't know if the mac  
binaries are for osx, or classic mac versions, I didn't try them  
since I much prefer to compile from source when available, which, in  
this case, they were. :))
I need to fire up my intel-based mini to do the compile, or translate  
the assembly language calls into ppc ones so they'll work on this g4  
mini I'm using at the moment, to get a clean compile, but for the  
moment, I'm assuming an intel-based mac under osx will have no issues  
compiling the source if the make freebsd command is used on the src  
folder after extraction.
I understand there are osx versions of pgp available both from  
symantec, and from www.pgp.com before it got taken over by Symantec,  
though I've made no effort to locate these binaries, since I'm more  
interested in the version I have already. :)
There isn't any issue with the rsa algorithms used in the pgp  
program, since that patent passed into  the public domain in 2000,  
but depending on who you ask, the idea algorithm is either clear to  
use (as of may 2011) or not available (in the us) until Jan of 2012),  
so you may or may not want to use that one, but compiling seems to be  
a straightforward process with the 2.63I source version linked to above.
It's a terminal app though, so I'd wager most here wouldn't be  
interested in that as a whole, but for those that are, compiling on  
intel-based macs shouldn't present any major obsticles.
This probably confused more than it helped, but I hope it did some  
good overall.


So, to summarize.
pgp is a Symantec product (at the moment), if you want the latest and  
greatest version.
However, older versions can be had for free online, and can be  
compiled to produce an executable that should work for you regardless  
of your operating system.

hth.

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