[Swansea Hackspace] Am I the only PGP nerd at Swansea Hackspace? If not, let's sign each other's key!

[Brian J Hoskins]

Hello Alan,

I don't get the impression that I have any real chance of persuading you
to change your mind about PGP, and that's OK, but here is why PGP is
"exciting" to me:

----------
PGP enables people to claim their right to private correspondence when
using email.
----------

That's basically it.

Now, the fact that I claim my right to private correspondence says
nothing at all about my wider motives, contrary to the common argument
against privacy which goes something like this:

"If you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to worry about"

...which of course implies that if I want to keep my correspondence
private then I must be up to no good.  A total distortion of the general
principals in my view.

But the same people who make those arguments are quite happy to put
their snail-mail letters in a sealed envelope before posting them off to
the recipient.
One reason is to keep the letter physically safe while on-route, I
accept that, but the other reason is that nobody wants someone else (the
post man, the neighbour who gets the letter by mistake, etc) being a
snoop with their letter while it's en-route.

Is someone else likely to do such a thing? Probably not.  Is it a huge
issue if they do? Not usually.  Are you going to take the precaution
anyway? Sure!

It's the same thing with PGP.

For me personally, I believe in the principals behind PGP even though in
practice it hasn't worked because the general public haven't adopted it.

keybase.io is quite an interesting attempt to bring such technology into
the public domain, although it doesn't fix the issue for emails (unless
you use the PGP key with it).

Anyway, that's my reason for maintaining a public/private keypair.

Cheers,

Brian.








On 29/01/18 20:57, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Jan 2018 17:10:45 +0000
> Brian J Hoskins <brian at hoskins.eu> wrote:
> 
>> Does anyone else at Swansea Hackspace hold dear the general liberal
>> principals behind private communication? Do you use PGP?
> 
> I never understood why people got so excited about PGP. Most of the
> interesting information in communications is about where messages are
> sent not the content.
> 
> If I was trying to overthrow our evil overlords I'd be meeting on a
> large multi-user environment where it's hard to work out who said what to
> whom and communicating via a non intended mechanism within that
> environment. For example I suspect viterbi encoded encrypted bitstreams
> driving crouch/stand on a large minecraft server ought to be fairly safe
> 8)
> 
> I'd also be appearing at random other times sending gibberish so nobody
> can try and correlate pairs of users 8)
> 
> For bonus points use a crypto system that given different valid keys
> gives different valid output. Something Phil Karn suggested decades ago -
> so that one key decodes to something embarassing but not dire, and the
> other key to the real stuff.
> 
>> If so, let's sign each other's keys and expand the web of trust[1]!
> 
> 'Build a detailed mineable relationship data set'
> 
> Alan
> 

-- 
+--------------------------------------------+
| Brian J Hoskins BSc MIET                   |
| Electronics Engineer & Computer Programmer |
+------+-------------------------------------+
| WEB: | brianhoskins.uk                     |
| GIT: | github.com/bh4017                   |
| PGP: | keybase.io/bjh                      |
+------+-------------------------------------+