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Symantec buys PGP for $300m and GuardianEdge for $70m
- CWuestefeld 17y agoThe proposed deals allow Symantec to offer full-disk, email and mobile encryption products alongside its traditional line of security suites. ... Symantec plans to standardise on the PGP key management platform in order to deliver centralised policy and key management I'd really love to see a user-friendly way of offering email encryption. The rising tide of privacy encroachment worries me, and the technology to (mostly) evade this exists -- but can't be effective unless a critical mass of people use it.
- JoachimSchipper 17y agoI wouldn't be too confident that a government that cracks down on privacy won't crack down on encryption, if it ever becomes widely used.
- CWuestefeld 17y agoThe current legal basis for monitoring email in the USA is not that the gov't has a legitimate interest in seeing it, but that it's old data left sitting around, so the owner doesn't have a rational expectation of privacy. If those old messages were still left around, but the bodies were unreadable, the government wouldn't have any basis to demand that they be decrypted, since they've not asserted any authority to it (short of a warrant). To do so would be one heck of a long jump.
- juhgfghjklkjhg 17y agoIt wont need to; There will be an unchangeable default admin password of "password" Updating to the next version will automatically decrypt all your data. The say the disk is encrypted but it turns out that it just XORs 'symantec' with every byte.
- tptacek 17y agoPGP's email encryption, at least on the Mac where we work, is a total pain to use and maintain. We use GPG and S/MIME much more effectively.
- eru 17y agoPlease look into the security guarantees offered by PGP and Off-the-record messaging. In most cases you probably want what OTR offers, namely plausible deniability instead of proof of authorship.
- sweis 17y agoThis paper discusses some usability challenges of PGP and end-user encryption in general: "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" http://www.gaudior.net/alma/johnny.pdf http://www.gaudior.net/alma/johnny.pdf
- flogic 16y agoAs someone who is not a security expert, it's hard discern which of the UI problems are specific to that app and which are general to all possible public key solutions.
- raquo 17y agoThis week is just some mad acquisition party.
- tptacek 17y agoSymantec is where products go to get put out to farm; it's just a few steps removed from Computer Associates. I use and recommend PGP WDE for the Mac, and I'm not happy about this announcement.
- wmf 17y agoMaybe this explains why PGP CTO Jon Callas got a new job last week. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/22/jon_callas_joins_apple/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/22/jon_callas_joins_app...
- iuguy 16y agoI hate PGP. You can't upgrade. Every time you upgrade you pray you'll be able to boot and inevitably stuff breaks. Symantec buying this is the only possible way it could get even worse.