Nice note, Greg, thank you.
I remember the call to arms of PGP, get the whole world encrypting
email. And who can forget Gilmore's Free S/WAN goal, to secure 5% of
Internet traffic by the end of 1996? These proclamations were hugely
inspirational for me.
These efforts helped advance practical cryptography on the net, placed
the core ideas of cypherpunkism in the minds of a lot of people
architecting apps on the net today. At the same time, many of these
pioneering efforts have had a lot less success than their originators
had hoped. It's important to examine why, to learn.
Personally, I think the problem is some combination of the technical
problems being harder than we'd hoped (secure key distribution in
particular), and not enough attention paid to user experience design.
That, and people are simply slow to change what they do.
>I note that way back when, someone did an analysis of the connectivity of
>PGP keys (it might have been Mike Reiter of AT&T Pathserver, but it might
>not too)
Neal McBurnett, http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/pgpstat/
He still updates the web page, but the last data is almost 3 years
old. It'd be interesting for someone to rerun the analysis now, see
how the community has fragmented.
My own personal shame - I'm still using a 768 bit RSA key I published
5 years ago and intended to expire 3 years ago. I have other keys and
people occasionally send me mail encrypted with them, but I can't
decrypt them because I've lost the keys or passphrases.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
. . . . . . . . http://www.media.mit.edu/~nelson/
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