Starting with PGP
I decided that today might be an interesting day to start digging into PGP and making it available for folks to send email to me encrypted. So I did a Google search and then hit on the MIT PGP page and got the code seemingly working fine from within Outlook 98. Not too bad. The only problem is the issues of how to get/accumulate public keys from other folks, and how to distribute my public key.
Interestingly, the easiest thing they could have said is to run PGPkeys... that did everything I need. I generated a key pair of the right length, with my own passphrase, and then sent it to the PGP public key server. Very clean, very nice - but also very non-obvious. Had they put one little phrase on the web site, or in the downloaded docs, it would have saved me quite a bit of time.
Anyway... now I have the PGP stuff ready to roll and it's clear how to get public keys for other folks from the servers. Nice. Don't quite know that I'll need to use it, but it's nice to have learned a little bit more about this today.