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Background
- Philip Zimmerman developed
PGP in the early 1990s and was procecuted (though not very successfully)
by the government for violating US encryption export controls
- PGP was eventually bought and sold several times, and deals were
made with patent owners for encryption algorithms
In Practice...
- The GNU Privacy Guard (GPG)
offers very good functionality and is mostly compatible with PGP.
- Their FAQ includes a
section that goes through usage scenarios in some detail
- The MIT PGP site
gives away PGP freeware
- In Europe, the PGPi project
has an international version which is compatible with PGP. They also
have links to numerous other products and information
- PGP (unlike GPG) has many commercial or semi-commercial spin-offs.
Sometimes you need to spend money (and can't get source code) to
interoperate with PGP.
- Today, the PGP corporation is
the home of the commercial PGP with products for Win and Mac.
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