Rip van Seaberg writes:
Anyone care to speculate irresponsibly about what PGP is up to, what with dropping the 2.6 command line in favor of a handful of plugins? Did they get paid to integrate PGP support in Eudora and Communicator and make integration unavailable to competing tools? Are they hoping to sell piles of US$12k+ SDKs? Is there any other plausible reason they would want to break every tool and script that shells to PGP?
Since the introduction of PGP in 1991 there have been changes in the way people use computers. Instead of typing clumsy command lines like "pgp -s -a -e -t -f" to perform operations, computer users today use a "mouse", a small device about the size of a pack of cards which is connected to the computer by a long "tail" (hence the name). By moving the mouse they are able to move an indicator on the screen called a "cursor". They point the cursor at "icons", small pictures which represent the operations they want to perform. Clicking buttons on the mouse allows them to manipulate data in a much more intuitive way. Old command line programs were accessible only to a small fraction of potential computer users. The new mouse based graphical computers open the world of computing to a much wider base of users. PGP plugins allows mail to be encrypted or decrypted with a single click of a mouse button. This is a far cry from the clumsy command lines of the past. Tune in next week to find out how your trusty floppy disks may soon be replaced by Compact Disk Read Only Memory devices.