What email encryption is actually in use?

David Howe DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk
Wed Oct 2 01:35:54 PDT 2002


at Tuesday, October 01, 2002 6:10 PM, James A. Donald
<jamesd at echeque.com> was seen to say:
> Not so.  It turns out the command line is now different in PGP
> 6.5.8.  It is now pgp -sta to clearsign, instead of pgp -sa.
> (Needless to say the t option does not appear in pgp -h
*nods*
its in the 6.5 Command Line Guide, but as "identifies the input file as
a text file"
The CLG is the best reference for this though - as it explictly lists
sta as the correct option in section
Ch2>Common PGP Functions>Signing Messages>Sign a plaintext ASCII file.
I could email you a copy of the PDF of that (its about 500K) if you
wish.

> The clearsigning now seems to work a lot better than I recall
> the clearsigning working in pgp 2.6.2.  They now do some
> canonicalization, or perhaps they guess lots of variants until
> one checks out.
its canonicalization - again according to the CLG (CH3>Sending ASCII
text files to different machine environments)

> Perhaps they hid the clear signing because it used not to work,
> but having fixed it they failed to unhide it?
its just an evolution. IIRC the command line tool was based at least
partially on the unix version of pgp, which always had different command
line switches. It would be nice if behaviour was more backwards
compatable, but they *did* document it in the official M that you should
RTF :)





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