Does the PGP public key at https://www.washingtonpost.com/anonymous-news-tips/

[Jay Sulzberger]

On Sun, 7 Aug 2022, Andrew Gallagher <andrewg at andrewg.com> wrote:

>
>> On 7 Aug 2022, at 17:28, Jay Sulzberger via Gnupg-users <gnupg-users at gnupg.org> wrote:
>>
>> Andrew, do the sks keyservers work today?
>>
>> I was able to find the key by going to
>>
>> https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/
>>
>> and putting
>>
>> EC6C2905F0F93C0373946CA10642427A5FF780BE
>>
>> into the search box.
>
> Do you mean SKS the software (i.e. github.com/sks-keyserver) or SKS
> the protocol/network? The answer in both cases is “yes”, but for
> different values of “yes”. 🤓

In the past two days, I have come to understand how little I know
about the design, the practical use, and the statistics of usage, of
gnupg.  I think that learning some more is worth the effort.

>
> What doesn’t work any more is the sks-keyservers.net pool, which had
> become a nightmare to manage. This has been taken by many to mean
> that the SKS network itself is down, but this is absolutely not the
> case.

Ah.

>
> sks-keyserver still works, but is IMO not suitable for use in
> production unless you are an expert willing to roll your own load
> balancing pool and recompile the code to update blacklists (there
> are still a few such brave souls left). This may change in the
> future — the software is maintained but hasn’t had a significant
> feature bump in some time.

Ah, oi.

>
> The SKS network also still works, and depending on your choice of
> metric is probably more stable today than it has ever been. The
> reasons are twofold: many operators have migrated from sks-keyserver
> to hockeypuck, and most of the rest have shut down. This means that
> although there are fewer keyservers now than five years ago, the
> ones that do exist (including keyserver.ubuntu.com) are generally
> much more reliable.

Ah, OK.

>
> Information about the SKS network can be found at https://spider.pgpkeys.eu
>
> A

Andrew, thank you much for this useful short introduction to these
obscure things!

oo--JS.