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Great episode about PGP


G+_Thomas Fraley
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Great episode about PGP. 

 

I do have a few question. 

 

1. Why hasn't any one incorporated PGP into their OS (come on Apple)

2. Setting up PGP on desktops sounds good but doesn't that limit what you can do and possibly lock you out on mobile devices.

3. What type of effect does PGP have on email forwarding. i.e. domain.com to gmail or even gmail to domain.com if the first has encryption will it be passed on to the second encrypted or will it error out?

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PGP is only for email so it will not affect anything on your computer.if you used whole disk encryption its just like file vault it decrypts when you login. i don't think email servers are smart enough to see the encryption it will just see a regular email.

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Totally but something that can be used cross-platform including Mobile would make it more accessible. Having PGP only on my desktop is very limiting. Yes their are a few 3rd party mobile pgp apps but they not plugins but full blown email clients.

 

All apple has to do is support PGP in their email clients. I'm not saying for them to build their own. The same way the support other protocols in mail like imap and pop.

 

I'm not saying for them to create the public and private keys but have options for us to put them in.

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I totally understand what your saying. Look at skype everyone thought it was secure and it's note. However Apple messages is.. 

 

Even if company tried to do man in the middle they wouldn't have your private key so they would not be able to decrypt it. 

 

Isn't this the whole point. I'm not saying for them to do the encryption/decryption but give us client side options to do it with PGP

 

PGP is also only as good as both sides using it so for it to become common practice / standard would mean things would be more secure for everyone.

 

I want all my email encrypted not just the ones I send to my geek friends. I want my emails to my mother, sister etc.. with out having to walk them trough setting up PGP and having to use some software they never have just to received an email from my securely. 

 

even if apple picks this and runs main stream. No one said you need to use it. But it would shed more light and protect more people if it did. And you can always use more secure means with your geeky friends...

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Nick true but it's only as good as it is standardized, If the receiver doesn't have it whats the point? PGP needs to be adopted by everyone. Half my emails are done on the road not having a mobile version defeats the purpose.

 

Does Ubuntu have it built in or is it Thunderbird / plugin?

 

Easy workaround is to use thunderbird everywhere but your still limited on mobile devices. 

 

The idea here is for everyone to adopt OpenPGP as a standard this way email traffic becomes more secure everywhere.

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Isn't Thunderbird the default email client for ubuntu? So basically I could say the same thing for OSX. Run thunderbird and install plugin.

 

Main difference is Thunderbird is Ubuntu's default email client.  However I do think it was built into kmail and a few others.. 

 

Have not messed with ubuntu mail clients in a long time. Please correct me if i'm wrong usually use webmail on ubuntu machines lately

 

Again the more attention we can give this the more hope for getting it main stream and the more secure everyone will be. Not just techie/geeky people like us.

 

New version of OSX is coming out would totally be cool if they were to add this. Apple has a large hand in the market especially with the not so tech savy. People on linux etc.. can figure out how to make it more secure but my Mother or sister on the other hand need a simpler way. Like I've stated only secure if both ends have it.

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  • 4 years later...

Thomas Fraley, I know I'm late to this, but I thought you'd appreciate it anyway. You mentioned that someone like Apple should make PGP standard.

 

I had to comment because I was on the build team in the early OS X days (10.0 - 10.2) and one day Phil Zimmermann came in to talk about PGP and encryption in general at a company "town hall" event. He said that he asked to come in because he thought that if anyone could make PGP easy to use it would be Apple and he was hoping that a few engineers in the room would run with it.

 

I had the good fortune of talking with him afterwards and got to meet with him a few times after that. Nice guy.

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