On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 09:52 -0700, Josh Coates wrote:
> speaking as someone who thinks personal encryption is kind of silly:
> 
> "don't forget to bring your tinfoil hats to the meeting."
> 
> :-p
> 
> [alright, i'm being a bit of a troll here, but hey, it's my honest
> opinion...]

I'll bite.  PGP signing is not about encryption.  It's about ensuring
the authenticity of an e-mail.  Utah has already passed laws allowing a
digital signature to have the same legal status as a pen and paper
signature.  In the business world, this is *very* important and
critical.  I believe it's also critical to sign anything that you
publish on the internet where guarrantying authenticity is critical.
Source code, binaries, etc.  Another issue is that anyone can forge any
e-mail address.  Viruses regularly do this.  If you make it a habit to
always sign your e-mails than it is trivial to filter out viruses and
spammers that use your e-mail address to spread their bad things.

Michael


> 
> Josh Coates
> http://www.jcoates.org
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gary Thornock
> Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2004 9:31 AM
> To: stuporglue; BYU Unix Users Group
> Subject: RE: [uug] PGP and Thursday Meeting
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: stuporglue [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> >> I consider this a problem with webmail, not GPG. I would never
> >> trust my secret key to anyone else, no matter how free their
> >> service. If I'm not the only admin on the box, I neither install
> >> my GPG private key nore my SSH private key.
> >
> >
> > So I take it it's possible to move my GPG to whichever computers I
> > want, Right? (Sometimes I have crashes, or delete OSX, and there'd
> > be no point to having a key, if when I switched to annother
> > computer/OS, I had to switch keys).
> >
> > Michael
> 
> Sure, it's easy to copy your key to whatever computer you want.
> Some people keep their keys on those little USB thumb drives so they
> always have them handy.  I make sure mine are on a backup CD (locked
> away in a safe place, of course) so I have them available in case I
> have to replace a hard drive or something.  The thing you *don't* do
> is put your private key where someone else can get it.
> 
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