GnuPG, Winblows, Speed, Key Management

[Brian Minton]

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On Wed, Dec 27, 2000 at 01:49:23PM +0100, Toni Mueller wrote:
> - Problem #1: There appears to be no good Winblows interface for it,
>   or at least no good way to hook it into Outlook, IE, Netscape there,
>   what have you.

I think that is being worked on.  for instance, there was some discussion
about WinPT (I think that is right)

> - Problem #2: It's dog slow. I have still less than 300 keys in my
>   keyring (expecting to double that soon), and often find myself
>   interrupting gpg to read the message instead of waiting to verify
>   the signature. Similar things hold for signing or encrypting a
>   message.

I have more experience with pgp for linux, so this is not completely relevant,
but the pgp I have is much slower than gpg.  like it will take about 75
seconds to extract a key, all the while running at full cpu usage...

> - Problem #3: I have adjusted gpg to fetch keys on demand from a
>   keyserver. My experience is that these key servers apparently
>   don't synchronize their data sets in a reasonable time frame
>   (weeks!), so I end up fetching keys from varying servers. This
>   is __very__ inconvenient, and of course unsuitable to the casual
>   Winblows user. How do I go about this?

I have encountered this problem too, but it is the same with pgp for windows,
as far as I have seen.  Theoretically, the keyservers should be more in sync
with each other, but in my experience, certserver.pgp.com is the most
troublesome.  most of the other ones (pgp.mit.edu, wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net, etc.)
seem to be better about it.

> - Problem #4: What to do in the face of massive distribution and
>   promotion of Sphinx which is also _not_ interoperable with any
>   kind of PGP?

pardon my ignorance, but I've never heard of Sphinx, what is it?

- -- 
Brian Minton
minton@csc.smsu.edu
Caution: in case of rapture, this computer will be unoccupied!
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