I have been using PGP for awhile now and really enjoy using it. However, only one of my friends actually bothers to use it. I was wondering if there were other people who might want to exchange emails and keys and start writing each other. Any takers?

That is the probelm with PGP (and in my case GPG), you can't get people to USE it. Therefore, I switched to tutanota recently, which I can get people to use. In general, I simply don't answer to unencrypted emails anymore if it contains even the slightest information I don't want "everybody" to see.

Visitor message posted. You don't allow private messages, apparently. You can email me through my profile.

I use startmail, which makes pgp encryption of emails transparent. It's also based outside the US, so the NSA can't force them to turn anything over. You can also send encrypted emails to non-pgp/non-startmail users, by having an agreed-upon secret question and answer between the sender and receiver. It's not ideal, but it works if it's necessary.

tarken, in addition to the various encrypted E-mail providers, such as hushmail, there are "add-on's" for E-Mail programs some people already use, such as Enigmail for Thunderbird.

I have had some problems getting friends to use different E-Mail providers, just to use encryption. But when I mentioned to some friends, the "add-on's" or other seamless encryption capabilities for E-Mail programs they already use, e.g. piping E-Mail through external programs in KMail, they told some friends, and their friends told some friends, and soon there were a bunch of folks exchanging encrypted E-Mail.

Depending on who you talk to, you might hear that there is only about one encryption method that is considered "cryptographically secure", and AFAIK, no widely known facility implements that digitally, yet.

Also, there is, I'll just call it a "rumor", that the NSA has a "back door" into MS-Windoze; so if a friend is reading E-Mail with Thunderbird on Windoze, the NSA could read it after it's de-crypted on Windoze, without even having to doing any cryptanalysis on the encrypted message, or for that matter just plain decoding it on one of there 24 super-computers, since they've almost certainly already done all the cryptanalysis on a variety of different encryption mechanisms.

Then too, depending on who you talk to, you might hear that places such as Google do all sorts of categorizing of info. in private non-encrypted E-Mails, for "marketing" purposes. So amongst my friends, were not really expecting the NSA not to be able read our encrypted E-Mail, we just think of it more as having the tiniest bit of fun with places trying to target trends by ranking keywords from our E-Mail, if we didn't encrypt it.

I am game !
Haven't used GPG much, it would be interesting to check it out further.

As Sgosnell says, you (all) can email me thru my profile.

Sign me up!

A 10 on the creepiness factor, IMO.

"writing each other" about what?
What on earth, besides LQ and Linux (and yakking about those hardly 'deserves' encryption) is there to "write each other" about?

Maybe a Linux User Group in Portland?
I'd bet a tank of gas that someone at one of those meetings would fit the bill.
Take your gpg public key with you to a meeting and/or organize and old fashioned key-signing party.
That Oregon or Maine?

If that's Portland, Oregon, you could run into Linus himself.

I'm a little puzzled by the term "PGP Penpal."

On my Mac, I use MacGPG. Message-signing is always enabled. All of my "important" e-mail contacts also sign their messages, and I have their public keys on file. For some of them, the default is to encrypt every message, because e.g. it's nobody's business but ours what I may e-mail to my wife.

And it all "just works," just like https secure web sites. Signatures are checked automagically. Encryption and decryption is handled transparently.

Linux KMail easily does the same thing, as do mail apps on both iOS and Android phones.

Encryption is the rule, not the exception.

Guess I did not think it was creepy to see if people wanted to chat about technology or just have pen-pals to learn about people and what not. Seems like years ago, that was quite common.

Anyways, I see a couple people on here who might be interested. I will message you guys.

I'm not sure what might be considered creepy about this... o_o

I am not sure how to message on here. It is probably right in front of my face. Also, I dont recall ever not allowing messages, but I did see that it was unchecked. I checked it, so maybe you can message me now? Or tell me how to do it? :-D

For most people, encryption is the exception, not the rule. It's limited by the availability of public keys. Only an extremely small percentage of the population has posted public gpg/pgp keys. Without a public key, it's not possible to encrypt email to a recipient if you use pgp/gpg. It's possible on something like startmail, but it's unfortunately not common. It might be the norm for some people, but certainly not for most. I wish that wasn't the case, but it is.

I don't see a private messaging system on here like most vB boards. strange.

Some privliveges are base upon post count.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...lq-4175513936/

Truly "public" servers can be accessed by anyone, that's more or less part of the purpose. Naturally it's physically possible to create a server that lists people by nicknames known to people that they wish to have contact them. But some list E-Mail addresses.

For years bills which tried to make "spam" legal were introduced into Congress in the U.S., and defeated. Then something "my$terious" happened and "spam" was made legal in the U.S. That doesn't mean I have to like "spam". So I generally avoid making my E-Mail address available to anyone on the Internet.

Then too, there isn't necessarily any guarantee that public servers are immune to behavioral "cracks".