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Easy encryption and decryption of directories with GPG
Authored by: foobar104 on May 21, '03 12:46:09PM

I'm a little confused. Why would one concoct a less-than-fully documented workaround to use GPG for this when one could just as easily use user-friendly, fully documented PGP 8? The freeware version works very well, and if you want to use it commercially the commercial version is reasonably priced.



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Easy encryption and decryption of directories with GPG
Authored by: bluehz on May 21, '03 01:37:07PM

One good argument for using GPG at least in my case arises from a paranoia, but I feel in the case of security a paranoia is justified. Stems from this... years ago when Zimmerman (the originator of PGP) and the Federal Govt were were locked in heated battle over PGP, there was a lot of talk at the time of putting back doors into PGP. No one really knows if this ever happened, and I suspect not... BUT... I prefer to take the high road and use the open source, fully code inspectable, version GPG. Another reason - is personal... Network Associates IMHO are d*@%ks! They possesed PGP code and refused to update it for Mac OS X, yet they continued development of Win versions. They bookshelved the code for over a year trying to find a buyer for the code who would hopefully continue development and create OS X version of PGP. They refused to release BACK into the public domain what was oiginally free software. Instead they preferred to horde the code and prevent OS X developers from developing an OS X version unless they purchased the code.

... those are of course my own personal opionions.



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Easy encryption and decryption of directories with GPG
Authored by: calroth on May 22, '03 04:57:46AM

Network Associates doesn't own PGP any longer. It's not worth carrying that particular grudge over to the new company.

The source code to PGP is available, but you have to jump through hoops to get it, and you're not allowed to use it for anything but verifying that, when built, it's exactly the same as the standard PGP binary.



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Easy encryption and decryption of directories with GPG
Authored by: bitwiseshiftleft on May 22, '03 04:22:42AM

PGP doesn't encrypt folders. If you try it, you get another folder with a bunch of pgp files in it. That's a PITA to work with, especially for a backup. Furthermore, you might not want the files' names to be known. So basically you'd want to stuff it, then PGP it. This is much more of a pain than my .bashrc addition (see below), although as I mentioned, you'd have to make some small modifications to preserve metadata (easy with hfspax, although hfspax itself is a poorly-documented kludge).



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