Re: PGP inconvenient? Re: Access to Vigay.com

In message <4fa56b6420invalid-email-address@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Paul Vigay <invalid-email-address@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In a dim and distant universe <4fa56283f0dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Dave Symes <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> enlightened us thusly:
I really can't believe the trouble you folks go to, to conceal a bit
of writing. Is it your view, that what you say and write is so
important in the scheme of things, that it is sacred to your clique
and must never suffer the glance of other eyes....

No. The writing itself is unimportant - indeed, I PGP the most trivial
emails and indeed completely random ones sometimes. It's the principle
of the matter - I don't want anyone eavesdropping and I wish to make
it impossible for automated monitoring of emails.

Privacy is a basic human right, and I'm just contributing to keeping
it that way.


I'm not sure you have thought this one through to its logical
consequences Paul. In other threads you've spoken out against spam as
much as you are now promoting routine use of PGP. If PGP encrypytion of
email became routine for most people what would happen to all those
spammers and all those hackers? They would start PGP encoding spam and
viruses and sending them out. Unfortunately none of the ISPs scanners
would be able to detect whether it was spam or a virus until the end
user decrypts it. This will involve everyone in having to decrypt large
amounts of hostile or unwanted emails using their private keys searching
for the few emails that they really wanted to receive.

At the moment mail arriving at my University account is screened
centrally and all known viruses are removed before delivery to my
account and all messages are scored with a spam score allowing me to
filter them into a separate folder. I get about 10 times as many
messages as wanted messages but at least whilst they arrive in plain
text format I can arrange for them to be pre-processed.

If we ever adopted your silly advice to use PGP on routine email all
that pre-processing would be rendered useless and I'd have to spend far
more of my time quarantining messages with potential viruses or
identifying and deleting spam

No thanks. I'll continue to use PGP on those rare occasions when it is
useful and hope it never does become routine to use secure encryption of
spam.

Mike
--
M.R. Clark PhD, Reader in Therapeutic and Molecular Immunology
Cambridge University, Department of Pathology
Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1QP
Tel +44 (0)1223 333705 Web http://www.path.cam.ac.uk/~mrc7/
.

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