Question about history of hash and cipher collections

[David Shaw]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 12:57:42PM -0500, vedaal at hush.com wrote:
> David Shaw dshaw at jabberwocky.com
> wrote on Tue Jan 15 18:09:49 CET 2008 :
> 
> >GPG does use 3DES as the default cipher for encryption.  That 
> >behavior
> >is required by OpenPGP.
> 
> 
> does it?
> 
> this is what i get when i try a symmetrical encryption using the 
> defaults:
> 
> c:\gnupg>gpg -c -a c:\jat.txt
> gpg: using cipher CAST5
> gpg: writing to `c:\jat.txt.asc'

It uses 3DES for symmetric encryption to a recipient as required.
Straight symmetric encryption you're allowed to use anything.

David