Slightly OT

Excuse me for butting in here, I've been out of the loop for a while on PGP. Didn't the U. professor sell PGP to someone (Netscape I think?) and there was a lot of concern about PGP being patented and no longer being secure anymore? The news broke out right about when my life took a turn for the worse and I didn't have the time then to track the PGP news.

When you refer to GPG, I guess you're meaning the project at gnupg.com? I would guess so since a search turns up the gnupg.com site at the top, but they don't seem to refer to themselves as GPG.

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Thanks for your patience.
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Comment on Slightly OT

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Re: Slightly OT by b10m (Vicar) on Jan 05, 2004 at 17:33 UTC
AFAIK, the PGP(.com) program is indeed commercial and they have patented their "IDEA". I also heard that the FBI (or whatever three-letter US department) tried to persuade the company to build in a backdoor, which PGP claims not to have done. With GPG I indeed mean GnuPG, the Open Source variant of PGP (and based on OpenPGP). And their website is (how original) http://www.gnupg.org/. On that site, they say: GnuPG is a complete and free replacement for PGP. Because it does not use the patented IDEA algorithm, it can be used without any restrictions. GnuPG is a RFC2440 (OpenPGP) compliant application. -- b10m	[reply]

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Re: Slightly OT
by b10m (Vicar) on Jan 05, 2004 at 17:33 UTC

AFAIK, the PGP(.com) program is indeed commercial and they have patented their "IDEA". I also heard that the FBI (or whatever three-letter US department) tried to persuade the company to build in a backdoor, which PGP claims not to have done.

With GPG I indeed mean GnuPG, the Open Source variant of PGP (and based on OpenPGP). And their website is (how original) http://www.gnupg.org/. On that site, they say:

GnuPG is a complete and free replacement for PGP. Because it does not use the patented IDEA algorithm, it can be used without any restrictions. GnuPG is a RFC2440 (OpenPGP) compliant application.

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b10m

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