Flutterby™! : Explaining

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Explaining

2013-08-18 17:50:19.465765+00 by meuon 1 comments

Been using PGP/GPG at work, and am letting GPG Tools sign my work email by default. I'm having to explain what and why I am using it a lot, even though most of my email is to/from IT professionals and most are in other countries. After explaining and linking to the relevant websites I have a single line that I think explains it well:

"I love my country. I trust most people. Stupid people in powerful positions scare me."

Just got a big "ME TOO!" from an IT Admin whom normally speaks French, but whose English is pretty good and it made me smile. Then he sent me his public key from using: GPG4Win.org.

I've also started a process with StartSSL, and am: https://meuon.startssl.com. Am going through steps for the Stage 2 and hopefully "Notary" status. I'm intrigued by their concepts of a digital identify and using it for signing certs, OpenID and more...

The good things about the Snowden fiasco is more people are thinking about things we should have been taking seriously for many years. Including me.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment hubris ]

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#Comment Re: made: 2013-08-19 17:20:10.19774+00 by: Dan Lyke

Three things, really mostly 'cause I need to do them:

  1. I need to figure out what my key situation is. I know that the 199x key you found for me on some repo is long gone (as is the passphrase for it, though I might be able to recreate it in a pinch). I also expect that they key I used as an intermediate step, and even exchanged email with you using, is also gone. This also suggests that I need to take some steps on both building reminder processes so that I replace expiring keys, and moving keys appropriately between machines.
  2. Key exchange is a weird problem. If I do this, I'll be calling you to exchange fingerprints by voice, because frankly I no longer trust that my emailed keys will arrive unmolested.
  3. Gonna have to look at StartSSL. I know there was a peer-based certificate validation plugin that I was looking at for a while that went beyond the very flawed CA model. I also need to figure out how to SSL my various sites.