From: Graham Toal <gtoal@an-teallach.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 93 14:01:48 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: PGP automation
Message-ID: <4476@an-teallach.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


In article <9310281940.AA28085@beethoven> holland@cs.colostate.edu writes:
 > Right now, it is a complete pain in the ass for me to encrypt or sign
 > messages using PGP.  The reason is because I have my email account on
 > one of CSU's unix machines, so I have to do my posting there, while
 > my PGP stuff lives on my PC in my apartment.  Usually, I check my mail
 > and read news by calling CSUNet over my modem, but if I want to encrypt,
 > decrypt, sign or check the signature of a message, I have to zmodem the
 > message to my machine, log off, decrypt or check the message while
 > offline (or at least shelled into DOS), type up a reply, manually encrypt
 > it and finally get back into my term program and zmodem the reply back
 > up to CSUNet and mail it.  I don't really want to run PGP on CSUNet, since
 > I don't trust their machines like I trust mine, but I am thinking about
 > doing that and generating a key which I would be wiling to use for less
 > secure stuff.  Anyone here have any other suggestions on making encryption
 > less of a pain?

This may seem a little excessive, but the only sensible way to use
pgp in environments like yours or prz's (heh heh) is to set yourself
up with your own site at home, either with a dialup SLIP/PPP feed or
a plain and cheap uucp feed.  Both of those options are becoming much
cheaper than they used to be, and you can run suitable software on all
sorts of computers - whatever you're using to dial in to your timeshare
service at the moment would probably do, as long as its not just a dumb
terminal.  DOS, a free unix or linux, Amiga, Atari - they can all handle
at least uucp if not tcp/ip too.  If you don't have suitable hardware,
you can surelu find a 286 dos box with an old 20Mb drive and plain text-
only display secondhand somewhere for $200 or less...  that'll run UUPC
or even KA9Q.

If you care about privacy in your email, you *have* to run it all the
way into your own machine.

G