making it easy to find keys

Atom 'Smasher' atom-gpg at suspicious.org
Wed Dec 3 16:55:29 CET 2003


aside from key-servers, i've noticed that quite a few people have their
keys available from their own web site and commonly referenced by a link
on a web site, email signature, or email headers.

in the absence of standards (that i'm aware of) i'm wondering if there's
any consensus, or at least any good reasons for or against, presenting the
public key information in particular formats....

assuming that a public key is armored, should the file suffix be ".txt" or
".asc"? i've seen both used, and i think i've seen a few people use a
".pgp" or ".gpg" suffix.

should the file name be pgp? gpg? pgp-key? gpg-key? open-pgp-key? i can't
even count how many different file-names i've seen people use.

as non-standard as that is, there seems to be even less consistency among
people who reference their keys in their SMTP headers (like i've done).
after the "X-", i don't know if i've seen any two people use the same
format...

i know, there's no "right way" or "wrong way" to present this information
to the world, and any variation on this theme (within reason) should work
fine, but i'm sure there are some good reasons out there for doing or not
doing things in a particular way. lacking a standard, i'd at least like to
hear some of those good reasons people have....

thanks....


	...atom

 _______________________________________________
 PGP key - http://smasher.suspicious.org/pgp.txt
 3EBE 2810 30AE 601D 54B2 4A90 9C28 0BBF 3D7D 41E3
 -------------------------------------------------

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