Hi Martin
Actually, GPG was released years ago as a rival product to PGP. Some
disaffected programmers got together to form a rival group when PGP fell into
the hands of the commercial people.
I've never personally used it, but it is nice to a see it's still alive and
kicking.
Gordon
On 29 Aug 2011, at 14:24, Martin McCormick wrote:
The GNU version is called gpg and is still free.
What you can do is to encrypt whole files which could be
anything from a text file of a recipe for beer to the VM file
for your entire machine. gpg wouldn't care, it's all just bytes
as far as it is concerned. Use a strong key or at least maybe a
whole line of text, spaces and all, and that would keep somebody
busy for more days than they probably have on Earth.
They won't know the length of your key nor anything else
about it so unless the combination to the safe for Fort Knox or
the launch codes to start atomic war are there, nobody is going
to be interested much in it.
I heard, once, that the NSA and CIA, the American
agencies for domestic and international intelligence have said
that so much ordinary traffic is now encrypted that they must
use extraordinary measures to crack things they are interested
in. They have supercomputers and, I am sure, can eventually
crack any pgp-based encryption, but even most governments around the
world don't have those resources.
Be smart, of course, and don't tempt fate, but I would
trust a pgp encrypted file on Dropbox or painted on the outside of
the building, here, but what worries me about all this cloud
stuff is human errors and what I call "suit wars."
Human errors don't need much explanation, but what I
mean by "suit wars" is deliberate reduction or stoppage of
service due to business squabbles that are not the fault of the
end user. Somebody cries foul. The switch goes Off. There are
not always warnings.
I think of a proverb I once read that goes,
"Trust in God, but tie up your camel."
Martin
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