« Don't Read This | Main | Project planning and life »
May 06, 2004
Encryption and convenience
Matt and I fiddled with gpg to authenticate and even encrypt messages. The p is for "pain." Maybe the last g is for "groin."
Part of the problem lies in that encryption cannot work if you cannot read the doc. And the doc really needs to assume you know nothing about it until you know, after which point you needn't read anything other than the man page or the code.
Of course the doc goes along as if you understood the underlying technology, which maybe you did when you read about it in a textbook, but you certainly cannot remember that now. One could get paranoid thinking about how easy it is to preven people from using encryption and authentication.
Posted by Mark at May 6, 2004 11:31 PM