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List:       gnupg-users
Subject:    Re: HOWTO on interfacing with gnupg/pgp?
From:       Johan Wevers <johanw () vulcan ! xs4all ! nl>
Date:       2001-06-20 16:26:16
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You, Lionel Elie Mamane, wrote:

> Hmm.. No. If many are using IDEA on a personal, non commercial basis
> (thus not paying a license), it will become a "de facto" standard and
> a company that wants encrypted communications with everyone that
> wishes it will have to support IDEA. Thus pay for it.

I've used pgp 2.x once in a company, but noone paid any license fees. Noone
even knew that would be required in some countries.

> But by using IDEA to communicate with other persons using PGP 2.x, you are
> not giving them compelling reasons to switch to an OpenPGP implementation,
> thus maintaining a population that supports
> *only* IDEA.

The advantage of pgp 2 is that it is fixed, no changes are made anymore and,
except from attacks that require access to a computer that is supposed to be
trusted, still very secure. And it exists for many platforms. For me, pgp 5
was no acceptable replacement when it came out (and considering the weak
keygen on Linux I think I was proven right in my decision not to "upgrade").
For pgp 6, I could not even get the commandline version compiled on Linux,
and the distributed executables are libc6 only. :-(

GnuPG is becomming a good replacement for pgp 2, but has some
incompatibility problems between versions. I still have some tests to do
with conventional encryption file formats to start converting my encrypted
archives. Pitty that GnuPG can't decrypt conventionally encrypted pgp 2
files.

-- 
ir. J.C.A. Wevers         //  Physics and science fiction site:
johanw@vulcan.xs4all.nl   //  http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/index.html
PGP/GPG public keys at http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/pgpkeys.html

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