Recent Discussions

PGP Encryption

16th April 1999      Nicky & Rovick Group @del2.vsnl.net.in

In the Digest of 14th April, Udhay Shankar N had responded
to a posting of Brajesh Dhandhania regarding Mailing list
management software. Udhay had at the end of the posting
mentioned "finger [email protected]  for PGP public key". Can
Udhay or anyone else tell us more what this means?

Is this connected with PGP, USA encryption? I was very
interested to download their public encryption software
since I had read that this was the best such software in
the public domain. I was also aware of the controversy and
PGP's stand regarding widespread availability of
non-breakable encryption technology from USA's security
angle.

Since I am no expert, the PGP site easily detected that I
am a non-USA user and denied the request. I was directed to
their various international sites but could not find any
place to download the software from. (PGP uses non-US
servers to get around restrictions in USA).

Has anyone successfully downloaded and used PGP's software?
Any feedback on how to go about this as well as user
comments would be welcome.

Another angle: is email encryption legal in India? While
strongly supporting privacy, I really don't think that my
need is pressing enough to break the law.

In case anyone wants to know why we want to encrypt our
emails, let me give one quick example. My company is
India's #1 designer of plastic injection moulds. With most
customers we sign a confidentiality agreement. Very often,
we send the completed designs as email attachments. Though
none of our customers has yet raised any privacy issues,
this will probably occur in the future. (I agree this is a
commercial use and PGP publicly available encryption
software is only for personal use but this is only a quick
example).

Best wishes to all

Vikram Kumar
Rovick Mouldtech Ltd., Noida
[email protected]
For more information about us, please visit our website at
http://www.freeyellow.com/members/rovick

16th April 1999      Udhay Shankar N @pobox.com

finger is a UNIX utility that is used, among other things, for a user to
make some information available about himself. I have made my PGP public
key available through finger. You can also get it here:

http://www.arachnis.com/udhay/pubkey.txt

As to what a public key is, this may be of help:

http://www.arachnis.com/udhay/articles/art-crypto.html


>Since I am no expert, the PGP site easily detected that I
>am a non-USA user and denied the request. I was directed to
>their various international sites but could not find any
>place to download the software from. (PGP uses non-US
>servers to get around restrictions in USA).

You can download the latest international version of PGP, which is 6.0.2i,
from http://www.pgpi.com which is the international site.

>Another angle: is email encryption legal in India? While
>strongly supporting privacy, I really don't think that my
>need is pressing enough to break the law.

It is quite legal, as of now. 

HTH

Udhay

~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*
Udhay Shankar N, Bangalore, India 
http://www.pobox.com/~udhay
finger for public key