Hal Finney, Tom Jennings, Eric Hughes, and others are working on solutions to the "ease of use" problems I cited in my posting. Hal F. writes:
The best way to integrate PGP into other software is a tough question. There are so many different ways in which people read and send mail.
If you _do_ download your mail before reading it, you could get in the habit of downloading _all_ of your mail into a big file, then running a word processor or some more specialized program to read the messages, one at a time, and compose replies. Then, when you were done, you could upload and send the replies.
If you worked in this mode, which probably few people do, you could integrate PGP by running it on the downloaded mail file before running
This is a major drag, destroying the feedback loop of reading mail and responding to it immediately. And, as Hal alludes to, it requires extra stuff, like PERL scripts, which complicate matters.
on the Mac. However, as a Unix/PC program, it ends up using a character window for I/O, which you type into just like you would on a PC. This is unacceptable for Macs, so nobody has released one of these. Still, compared to what Tim has to do, it would be an improvement. I think people should release their executables which work like this as an interim crutch version until the real Mac version is available.
Here's hoping. Several people claim to be working on a real Mac port. (I thought the idea someone had of doing it inside a HyperCard stack was a good one..HyperCard supports a CLI and so could run PGP, and HyperCard newsreaders exist, so in perhaps the two could be united.) Zimmerman's PGP has spurred people to think about the many practical issues of P-K crypto...authentication systems, keyrings, user interfaces, and so on. This alone is a major step forward. --Tim -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: awaiting Macintosh version.