PGP

Pretty Good Privacy - the encryption system the NSA has problems with.

We need a primer, a list of packages, and maybe some suggestions on what it's good for. I'd like to know. I'm leery of the reputed learning curve, but it's getting near time where no one else but me is going to look after my ability to communicate in private. So, PGP, what the hell is it and how do you use it?

 

Step 1: discover that "PGP" is owned by Symantec and that, piracy aside, you might rather be looking for the un-owned version, OpenPGP, which is available in a Free Software Foundation implementation called GNU Privacy Guard, also known as GnuPG or GPG.

Step 2: give up imagining you'll learn it all for yourself because even if you did you're probably the only one , so try and find something easy to implement. Wonder if the browser add-on Mailvelope can do everything for you without a false sense of security...

Just use Gnu privacy guard (GPG), which has a Mac version.

Also a windows version, Gpg4Win, though the website appears to be, uh, not active on the Chinese web. (So, the wikipedia version.)

At some point I'll install it.