question about expired key

[Atom 'Smasher']

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On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, Sohail Mamdani wrote:

> While creating a new key with GNUPG, I choose to have it expire on
> August 19, 5 pm (this was obviously a while ago, well before August
> 19). I even included a comment that states that this key would expire
> on the aforementioned date. I then uploaded the public key to a
> keyserver.
>
> Problem is, it's been well past Aug 19 and I still don't have any
> indication that this key has expired. A search on the MIT public key
> server shows the key itself, but does not indicate that this key has
> expired.
>
> Any ideas? I created this key as a test to learn more about GNUPG and
> didn't mean to use it on a regular basis...
>
> If anyone wants to check it out, the key in question is for the email
> address sohailm at gmail.com.
===============

an expired key doesn't go away, but trying to encrypt to it will result in 
an error message:
 	gpg: NOTE: signature key 0x1EC804F2 expired Thu Aug 19 17:02:13 2004 EDT
 	gpg: 0x1EC804F2: skipped: unusable public key
 	gpg: [stdin]: encryption failed: unusable public key



 	...atom

  _________________________________________
  PGP key - http://atom.smasher.org/pgp.txt
  762A 3B98 A3C3 96C9 C6B7 582A B88D 52E4 D9F5 7808
  -------------------------------------------------

 	"Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.
 	 You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but
 	 sooner or later they were bound to get you."
 		-- George Orwell, "1984"
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Comment: What is this gibberish?
Comment: http://atom.smasher.org/links/#digital_signatures

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MRTDlXku6DiHEm3NUwaDYMK3tD11Et2KjTxlx2tvH7vdLAzgOnTBSOBRfzuMd+Nf
sP+xgxUyh5j0/bxEX6/L6b7l3FwYwKFIw6+i2cncjj5YBvUY8Bi1d3CbyGDI5LM=
=kCrQ
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