JSaraske's PGP Newsletter #10

Welcome to Newsletter #10, believe it or not. I considered ending the Newsletter, and I'm sure many (most? all?) considered it dead. But I decided to at least bring things up to date. Whether there will be any future Newsletters remains to be seen.

PGP has changed hands again. NAI has sold off the standalone PGP desktop-based product line to PGP Corporation. NAI retains rights to use PGP technology embedded in other products.

There has been a regrettable lack of recent activity regarding PGP. Not to say NO activity, but two factors have effectively stifled third-party innovations: (1) US export controls on encryption have been relaxed and (2) source code for recent PGP releases is no longer freely available.

The effect of relaxation of US export restrictions on encryption is that the same official versions of PGP that are offered in the US are also offered in Europe and other international markets. In addition to the commercial versions of PGP, a freeware version continues to be available, but its features are limited.

There are new releases of the official PGP product from PGP Corporation. But PGP Corporation no longer freely releases PGP source code. Source code is available to paid customers of PGP, subject to non-disclosure agreements, but users are prohibited from using this source code as a base for customized versions. Contrast this to earlier times when the international version (PGPi) was at least tolerated, if not actively encouraged.

A truly unfortunate consequence of the new policy is the end of the CKT development line. The last CKT release was PGP 6.5.8ckt, build 08, released in May 2002.

Although there are no new PGPi versions, there is still a PGPi website. The site still has [some of] the old PGPi versions available for download. Links are also maintained to official PGP freeware versions, currently 8.1, but recent emphasis is on the GPG OpenSource package. GPG is available for several platforms (including Unix/Linux/BSD, Mac, and Windows), and offers partial interoperability with PGP. At least for Windows, GPG is nowhere near as mature or complete as PGP.

As for myself, I continue to use and recommend PGP 6.5.8ckt, build 08. It works very well with any version of Windows up to and including XP. (There are a couple of minor caveats with XP; read the release notes for details.) It probably works under Windows 2003 Server as well, but I haven't tested this.

So far, I have not tested official PGP 8.x. If I do so, I'll report on it. If I find any interesting developments regarding PGP or GPG, I'll write a new Newsletter. Otherwise, this may be the last. In any event, I'll try to maintain the links to encryption and privacy related sites, so stop by occasionally.

Cryptically yours.....

-------------------- Jim Saraske --------------------

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