The Official PGP User’s Guide
After reading “The Code Book” by Simon Singh I had to read more about Philip Zimmermann and Pretty Good Privacy. Once again opened my trusty Goggle search and located among others “The Official PGP User’s Guide” by Philip R. Zimmermann. Apparently the book is no longer being published. I was lucky enough to get a used copy from a bookseller that I found through www.amazon.com in Florida.
The book is quite thin (only 120+ pages) and it is a User’s Guide. Not sure when was the last time that I purchased a hard copy of a manual.
The book brought back memories from the 80’s when I wrote a few preliminary users’ guides for different products that I developed. Reading the book one gets the flavor of the Unix man pages. Not sure if too many readers would share with me that feeling ;o)
The book is truthful to its title. It shows how to use the command line. The manual does not cover a GUI because the original product was intended to be used from command prompts on MS DOS and Unix machines among others.
As a computer scientist and software developer I was able to appreciate the way the product is intended to be used. A lot of though went into it. A thing that called my attention was the decision to prevent the program from running if it was not able to detect a soft copy of the user’s manual. The reason Phil configured the application this way was to reduce the number of support calls due to simple questions that are covered in the manual. Something to consider!
For me and probably for most readers the best parts were the ones that dealt with privacy and how the US government wants to avoid it. Apparently the US government wants to play big brother on all Naïve Americans. For some reason the incompetent career politicians that Naïve Americans elect year after year, feel they are above the rest of us. Believe it or not but our current vice president while a senator tried a bill to enforce encryption at a level that the US government could read every single encrypted message weather it was personal, business or criminal.
The other interesting point was the struggle between individuals and companies regarding patents. Something needs to be done about patents in our country. The current patent system leaves a lot to be desired.
Overall the user’s guide is not something I would recommend purchasing. If you wish to get a flavor of it, there are some PGP User’s Guides floating on the Internet.
What I do recommend is the idea of considering at the personal and business levels to implement policies for the use of encryption. You never know who is reading your confidential messages and documents. If interested visit the Phil Zimmermann’s web site: www.philzimmermann.com Keep in mind that the US government is probably able to read any and all of your encrypted data. They will not admit it one way or the other but for some reason the current Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for encryption is not authorized by the government for use in secret communications and documents. In other words, it is good enough for typical Naïve Americans but not for government stuff ;o)
