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This post is not a complaint about GPG, it’s a complaint about the people who use GPG to contact Moxie. > There just seems to be something particular about peo

This post is not a complaint about GPG, it’s a complaint about the people who use GPG to contact Moxie. > There just seems to be something particular about people who try GPG and conclude that it’s a realistic path to introducing private communication in their lives for casual correspondence with strangers. Moxie’s objection is that people who initiate with GPG are more often a waste of his time than people who do not. I think Moxie is right, and remains right today, about this point. I would consider it impolite/rude to use GPG to email someone with whom I have no existing relationship, unless explicitly directed to do so for professional use. When PGP was young I would attach a signature, but over time I found that this cheapened my conversations and set a tone I didn’t consider acceptable to use with others. If someone blind emailed me with a GPG encrypted message, I would delete it without attempting to decrypt it and block the sender, because clearly they have no clue what they’re doing, and I don’t have time for that. So, then, I remain in agreement with the (2015) Moxie that posted this.

JasonFruit 6y ago
Can you really tell it's rude without looking at the content of the message? It might be odd, and it's likely to be unnecessary and, yes, rude; but I can imagine situations where I might be contacted unexpectedly with a GPG-encrypted message for a good reason.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  I can too, but that’s already factored into my choices.
brazzy 6y ago
> This post is not a complaint about GPG, Yes, it is. Read beyond the first section. > it’s a complaint about the people who use GPG to contact Moxie. Even that part is in fact a veiled complaint about GPG: it basically says that GPG's design and implementation are so crufty that it acts like some kind of negative personality filter: the only people who use it volountarily are somehow unpleasant to correspond with (he never actually specifies in what way).
vaylian 6y ago
> because clearly they have no clue what they’re doing I don't understand your perspective. The whole public-key/private-key approach exists so that it is possible to establish secure communications without first meeting offline to exchange a symmetric key. You have released your public key. This signals to others that you want your communication to be end-to-end encrypted. You also published your e-mail address to allow other people to contact you. The cost for encryption is low, once you know how to use the software. So why not take advantage of it?

JasonFruit 6y ago

Can you really tell it's rude without looking at the content of the message? It might be odd, and it's likely to be unnecessary and, yes, rude; but I can imagine situations where I might be contacted unexpectedly with a GPG-encrypted message for a good reason.

floatingatoll 6y ago
I can too, but that’s already factored into my choices.

brazzy 6y ago

> This post is not a complaint about GPG, Yes, it is. Read beyond the first section. > it’s a complaint about the people who use GPG to contact Moxie. Even that part is in fact a veiled complaint about GPG: it basically says that GPG's design and implementation are so crufty that it acts like some kind of negative personality filter: the only people who use it volountarily are somehow unpleasant to correspond with (he never actually specifies in what way).

vaylian 6y ago

> because clearly they have no clue what they’re doing I don't understand your perspective. The whole public-key/private-key approach exists so that it is possible to establish secure communications without first meeting offline to exchange a symmetric key. You have released your public key. This signals to others that you want your communication to be end-to-end encrypted. You also published your e-mail address to allow other people to contact you. The cost for encryption is low, once you know how to use the software. So why not take advantage of it?