Relevance of PGP?

[jabr-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org (John Abreau)]

As far as I'm concerned, using S/MIME means handing off control of
who I trust to an unknown mix of government and corporate entities
who have no vested interest in actually protecting my privacy.For the
corporate entities involved, their only vested interest is short-term profit.

And when I say "PGP" by itself, I mean it as shorthand for the family
of compatible implementations that includes GnuPG, and is based
on a distributed Web-of-Trust model, not a centralized model like SSL.



On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 8:12 AM, Edward Ned Harvey <blu-Z8efaSeK1ezqlBn2x/YWAg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I am very surprised to hear people using the term "PGP" as if it were
> synonymous with "Email signing/encryption." ?As far as I'm concerned, S/MIME
> has already won the war on email signing/encryption. ?Go get a free
> certificate from startssl.com, and voila. ?(See here:
> http://tinyurl.com/6xegsux and http://tinyurl.com/685jpn8 ) ? There is no
> need to do a key exchange with anyone - The browser already has a list of
> trusted SSL CA's, and anyone receiving your mail is automatically able to
> verify the integrity. ?Every mail client supports it, it's way more
> intuitive and simple to use than PGP.
>
> But anyway, I make a habit of signing most of my mail (there's a checkbox to
> make that automatic, so I actually don't do anything at all.) ?And then
> whenever I want to email passwords or some other sensitive info with
> somebody, it's a breeze to simply click the "encrypt" button.
>
> The days of saying "Don't email passwords" and "Email is insecure" are not
> over. ?But you can certainly solve it on an as-needed basis.
>
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-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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