advice please

[Bob Henson]

On 28/12/2015 10:22 pm, Jay Sulzberger wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 28 Dec 2015, Steve Butler <sbutler at fchn.com> wrote:
> 
>> I see the attached when I do the search in Software Center on Ubuntu 15.10.
>>
>>
>> Stephen M. Butler, PMP, PSM
> 
> Well, I see gnupg in the list, I am not sure whether it is gnupg2 or not.
> 
> gpg is hard to set up.  Even after it is set up to do what you
> want, your correspondent must also have a working gpg/PGP system,
> else you will not be able to communicate using gpg as your
> encrypt/decrypt system.  The Free Software Forces have, so far,
> failed to produce an email crypto system which one billion people
> could use.  We have a good central armature for such a system,
> namely gpg, but the stuff around gpg is in practice very
> difficult to use.
> 

I'm not that technical - but I can tell you that basic signing and
encryption with GnuPG (what else would anyone want it for?) isn't hard
to use at all, even for an ancient old geezer like me. The thing to do
is to forget all about command lines and run it from Enigmail within
Thunderbird (easiest and best) or the appropriate extension/s within
Claws Mail. Most other Linux e-mail clients will do it too - but most
other Linux e-mail clients are very poor, in my experience.

If, as you imply above, you are looking for a more universal system of
encryption, then PGP/OpenPGP certainly isn't the one to use - it is
intended to be a "person to person" system used between people known to
one another and whose keys can be countersigned with absolute certainty.
There is already a system, albeit far from perfect, which lends itself
to large scale use and that is the X.509 certificate system - already
widely used.


Regards,

Bob