[ANNOUNCE] PGP 5.0 Freeware is available from MIT

17 Dec 2003

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To: The PGP Community
From: Jeffrey I. Schiller <jis@mit.edu>
Subject: PGP 5.0 Freeware is available from MIT

I am pleased to announce the availability of PGP 5.0 Freeware from the
MIT Web Site. PGP 5.0 Freeware is available for non-commercial use under
license from MIT, PGP Inc. It uses the RSAREF toolkit licensed from RSA
Data Security.

This new version is a long awaited major upgrade and improvement to PGP
2.6.2. It has a native Windows '95, Windows NT and Macintosh interface.
It supports additional ciphers, as well as new key types and message
formats. Internally it is much improved as well.

This release marks a major transition to a new public key infrastructure
based on the Diffie-Hellman (DH) public key algorithm for privacy and
the Digital Signature Standard (DSS) for digital signatures. The RSA
algorithm is still supported and this version will work with the old RSA
keys you may already have. However all new keys generated by this
version will be DH/DSS keys. Many of the internal performance
improvements are only available when used exclusively with DH/DSS keys
(this is because using RSA keys requires PGP 5.0 to be backward
compatible with PGP 2.6.2 which requires PGP 5.0 to use less efficient
message formats).

This version also includes automated keyserver support. It can
automatically fetch PGP keys from the MIT keyserver (and other
keyservers) as well as offer to upload any newly created keys.

It also comes with plug-ins for Eudora and other major mail utilities.

At the moment it is only available for Windows '95, NT and MacOS. A Unix
(Linux) version is in the works but isn't ready yet, but we hope to have
it ready within a week or two.

Source code for this version was distributed at last weekend's
cypherpunks meeting in hard copy form. Source will eventually be made
available electronically, but isn't ready yet.

You can find the Freeware PGP at either the PGP Home Page at:

  http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html

or directly at:

  http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp-form.html

Note: We anticipate a significant amount of traffic while people
throughout the U.S. and Canada download PGP. Please be patient with the
server (and with us)!