shrinking availability of PGP

[pfarrell@cs.gmu.edu (Pat Farrell)]

 On 14 Jan, Hal wrote:
>
>PGP is gradually disappearing from U.S. sites where it used to be
>available.  Recently it got taken off the EFF area on Compuserve.
>We can't afford to see encryption and remailers be slowly strangled.
>
I agree that this would be terrible. Do you have any grounding
for this generalized statement? I can understand CI$ backing
off, as they were the only organization in the US making a
profit from PGP. And they have the resources and assetts that
could be a target if PKP wanted a test case.

I just had archie look arround, and to me the number of places
was about the same. For some reason, archie doesn't find it in
two places I know it is: soda.berkeley.edu and phil.utmb.edu
Archie did report that it is on wuarchive.

I'm affraid that the legal cloud will remain over PGP for
quite some time, and that the flawed PEM implementations will
become the standard. Until there is someone with real assetts
using PGP, PKP's lawyers will not bother to expose their
patent to the possibility of being invalidated. I also don't
expect to see those of us who are assett free changing from
PGP to RIPEM/PEM just because it is free of the cloud.
This cloud will make folks who are nervous about the changes
that netwroks, communications, and encryption will bring more
cautious. I expect that PGP will continue to move from site to
site. Which is why archie and gopher are so important to
all of us.

Pat

Pat Farrell,      Grad Student                       pfarrell@cs.gmu.edu
Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
PGP key available via finger or request           #include standard.disclaimer