Old article is old May 2018 specifically
Has anything changed? PGP is literally thirty years old now, and I'm not aware of any significant changes to either the protocol or to the support landscape.
PGP Is Dead? (2018)
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Re: PGP Is Dead? (2018)
#12"Let's ditch open protocol X that has worked well for decades, in favour or closed protocol Y. Because of some transient issue with open protocol X, it's now time for open protocol X to die"
Heard that before?
It's as if if your doctor told you it's now time for you to die because you caught a cold.
Re: PGP Is Dead? (2018)
#13Old article is old May 2018 specifically
Has anything changed? PGP is literally thirty years old now, and I'm not aware of any significant changes to either the protocol or to the support landscape.
> PGP is literally thirty years old now, and I'm not aware of any significant changes
sounds like a good thing to me
Re: PGP Is Dead? (2018)
#14Well Thunderbird just went to a 'roll-your-own' version of pgp, so seems it is an issue with the mail clients instead of pgp itself. And I expect Apple and Outlook use their own thing. Plus this seems specific to html mail.
So sending mail via mutt as text should still work fine with gnugp.
Also use proprietary Signal ? Really ? Not me!
Re: PGP Is Dead? (2018)
#15PGP is also a disaster in non-email scenarios. Many times I've had to implement systems that receive pgp encrypted files and then decrypt them and load them somewhere else. To this day there are no good libraries for this. There's either GPGMe, or shelling out to the gpg command line tool. Both options are terrible.
Re: PGP Is Dead? (2018)
#16> But the biggest problem with PGP is how difficult it is for people to use simply. "It’s a real pain," says Green. "There’s key management – you have to use it in your existing email client, and then you have to download keys, and then there’s this whole third issue of making sure they’re the right keys." How is this PGP's fault? The computing world has had 24 years to catch up with the standard, and frankly it does…
> you have to use it in your existing email client, and then you have to download keys, and then there’s this whole third issue of making sure they’re the right keys.
If you use Thunderbird as your email client, then it will download the right keys for you automatically.[0]
Actually it's two clicks to use the WKD support to download the key (assuming your correspondent's email provider supports that, as ProtonMail does[1]) or the keys are already downloaded if they are included as an attachment or as a header (which is the case if your correspondent is using a client that supports Autocrypt[2]).
As with other E2E encrypted systems, you should check these keys(' fingerprints) out of band, otherwise your security only follows the TOFU model, but this is still a huge improvement over non-PGP email and doesn't require any special understanding of cryptography.
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how...
Re: PGP Is Dead? (2018)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has anything changed? PGP is literally thirty years old now, and I'm not aware of any significant changes to either the protocol or to the support landscape.
> PGP is literally thirty years old now, and I'm not aware of any significant changes sounds like a good thing to me
That's a bad thing. PGP has some really awful usability problems which have never been addressed. The paper "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" described some of these issues in 1999, and a series of followups ("Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt", "Why Johnny Still, Still Can't Encrypt"...) have come out over the years confirming that it still hasn't improved.
Re: PGP Is Dead? (2018)
#18What an obvious attack piece. Throwing PGP under the bus for some failures at a higher level. Give me a break.
Re: PGP Is Dead? (2018)
#19"Let's ditch open protocol X that has worked well for decades, in favour or closed protocol Y. Because of some transient issue with open protocol X, it's now time for open protocol X to die" Heard that before? It's as if if your doctor told you it's now time for you to die because you caught a cold.
>Let's ditch open protocol X that has worked well for decades
To be fair, I really can't put PGP in the category of "open protocol X that has worked well for decades"[1]. I'd welcome a closed protocol that actually works over an "open" one that's been functionally broken for years.
[1] https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html
Re: PGP Is Dead? (2018)
#20Be interested in various easy alternatives for encrypted messaging that non tech people will use. I've never had much luck with getting other people to use PGP, so many clients I have dealt with in the past have been all too quick to send sensitive information in plain text emails. The problem is, this info is often not super critical but not something you'd share with people, and generally the attitude is "No ones going to hack this, why would they? it will be fine ". Then people become super sloppy, they send this kind of info into support desk systems, "group" emails, etc. Mostly these days I try to force sensitive information exchanges to phone calls / 7z with passwords exchanged on a call. Hard to get people to care about this.