Doesn't having some kind of central record of keys go against the principle of PGP?
The only "principle" of which I'm aware (and particularly interested in supporting) is that of having widely fielded, useful and strong privacy and authentication tools that work properly and transparently. That means, among a great many other things, flexible protocols and tools that support remote key distribution services. As much as people want to believe that privacy can be reduced to some kind of romantic struggle between the evil forces of Centralization (PEM?) and the civilizing forces of Anarchy (PGP?), the world most of us live in is a lot more complex than that. More seriously, the problem that Perry brought up is that it's hard to deploy any kind of scaleable key distribution infrastructure that works with PGP (as it currently exists - and yes, I realize there are work-arounds for some specific situations). That, as well as other shortcomings (like its fixed trust/certification model) that work against its serious use, make it doubtful that PGP 2.x has much long-term future as anything other than a plaything for nerds like us. Hopefully, PGP and other good tools will evolve to work well on a larger scale before Microsoft has a chance to give everyone what _it_ thinks the world needs. (I'm not trying to attack anyone here, by the way - part of the problem is that we're just now learning what the privacy problems of the real world even _are_. Experimental tools like PGP are important as much for providing experience and exposing problems and limitations as they are for their immediate function. Indeed, the fact that PGP and PEM are as useful as they are may actually work _against_ the spread of really large-scale crypto tools; the people who they are aimed at stay happy while the rest of the world never finds out what it's missing.) -matt