In order to fully protect RSADSI's intellectual property rights in public-key technology, PGP 2.6 will be designed so that the messages it creates after September 1, 1994 will be unreadable by earlier versions of PGP that infringe patents licensed exclusively to Public Key Partners by MIT and Stanford University. PGP 2.6 will continue to be able to read messages generated by those earlier versions.
Are we ever going to be told the details of the deals previously alluded to regarding keyservers and PGP 2.5 (and now presumably also PGP 2.6)? I grow more and more curious. If users inside the USA take to using PGP 2.6 then users outside the USA will, by fair means or foul, have to obtain PGP 2.6 (or at least enough technical data to enable them to independently implement the relevant algorithms). Failing that, they will have to live with the inability to read messages from PGP 2.6 users inside the USA. Sigh. I wonder whether anybody is deliberately fostering a split between USA and non-USA users of PGP. --apb (Alan Barrett)