Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tlikonen 3456 days ago
PGP (now GnuPG) is used more these days than in BBS (Fidonet) years, particularly in the open source community. Software releases and packages in GNU/Linux distributions are signed by the developers. All the time. It happens automatically without end-user noticing. Is this not one definition of "working well?" Lot's of people are passively using it without knowing.

But for messaging it's indeed very marginal. In open source projects' techical mailing lists and version control systems there is pretty much message or commit signing but that's a marginal group who does that.

1 comments

I'd believe PGP is in wider use today than Fidonet is, but not much wider.

I have to laugh that Snapchat has apparently solved the identity exchange problem and PGP is still stuck with these ridiculously baroque implementations.

>I have to laugh that Snapchat has apparently solved the identity exchange problem and PGP is still stuck with these ridiculously baroque implementations.

Er, how? Admittedly I've only used it a few times, but the only thing that sticks out along those lines is the Snapcode system. How is that any different than scanning a QR code in OpenKeychain?

The part where it works and millions of people use it.